Use Hold on Purpose, Not as an Undo Button

Three good reasons to hold, and one very common bad one.

The hold slot is one use per piece. Spend it well.

The bad reason

"I do not like this piece." This is how most players use hold, and it is a trap. You hold an awkward S, take whatever is behind it, and now the S is stored, so the next time something awkward arrives, hold is unavailable and you are forced to place it badly anyway.

You have not solved the problem. You have deferred it and spent your escape option doing so.

The three good reasons

Storing an I for the well. The strongest use. Your well is two rows deep and an I arrives; using it now clears two rows instead of four. Hold it, build two more rows, then drop it. This is worth a large number of points across a run.

Genuinely no legal placement. Sometimes a piece really does fit nowhere without creating a hole. That is what hold is for. The distinction from the bad reason is honesty: "nowhere good" is different from "nowhere I fancy".

Completing a spin setup. You have built a T-spin notch and the T is one piece away in the queue, but the piece in front of it would ruin the setup. Hold the ruinous piece, use the T, place the other one after.

The swap cost

Remember that holding is a swap, not a discard. Whatever is in the slot comes out immediately. If you are holding an I for the well and something awkward arrives, using hold gives you the I, which is probably not what you wanted.

So the slot is partly a commitment: while an I is stored, hold is not available as an escape.

The practical rule

Before pressing hold, finish this sentence: "I am holding this because..." If the answer is one of the three above, do it. If the answer is "it looks annoying", place it instead. There is nearly always somewhere acceptable, and finding it is the skill.

Read next

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• Overhangs and Tucks: Placing Pieces Under ThingsA covered space is not lost space. Rotation kicks can reach under an overhang that sliding cannot.
• Surviving High GravityAbove level twelve the piece is at the bottom before you have read it. What changes is where the thinking happens.
• Six Mistakes Almost Every New Player MakesThe specific habits that end early runs, and what to do instead.
• The NES Version and Its Beautiful FlawsNo hold, no kicks, a randomiser that can starve you, and a scoring table that made it a competitive sport anyway.
• Wall Kicks: Why Your Piece Moved When You Rotated ItA blocked rotation tries a list of nudges before giving up. Knowing that list turns a quirk into a tool.