Have you ever seen a pro play Tetris at maximum overdrive? Probably not. Yeah, that’s usually normal at high level competitive Tetris play. Here’s a quick sample. Scary right?  Well, you too can start your competitive Tetris career and with our help, you can land yourselves a bit higher than the other beginners. Throughout the past few weeks, we went through many sessions to practice and sharpen our skills. With the guidance of Tommy and James’ Tetris platform, we were able to improve our skills. It took us a long time and we definitely sucked at the beginning, but we prevailed and were able to play competitive Tetris at a much better level compared to how we were before. Learning takes a lot of time and patience. It is not the skill that you have at the start that is important, but rather what you learn in the end that matters.

Learning requires time and patience to achieve your goal. At the beginning of our Tetris experience, I could only clear lines slowly and play Tetris normally. However, after practicing for awhile, I was able to consistently to the DT cannon, t-spin, and the all-clear. I was only able to achieve this through practice and patience. At the start of the project, we did a test run, and we could barely clear lines. The only thing I could do was a tetris (where you clear 4 lines using the i-piece), and even then, I wasn’t too good at doing that. The next thing we did was practice. After some time, I could survive for quite some time while clearing lines, so I decided to learn the DT cannon. At first it looked hard, but then I realized that the first 7 pieces are always confirmed, so setting up became easy. This is also where I learned how to t, s, z, l, and j-spin. They are easy to perform now. After that, Tommy taught me the all-clear. It is more complicated, and the there is a chance you won’t be able to complete because of the piece arrangement. However, I learn and now I can also perform that trick quite easily now. This is just goes to show how taking the time and patience can allow you to accomplish many great things, not just for tetris.

The skill you have at the beginning of a learning process is not relevant to the end result, but the effort you sink in is. When we started out to create a blog about Tetris, Alex knew absolutely nothing  about Tetris aside from the very basics that everyone knows about: it’s block stacking game, try to clear as many lines as you can with the pieces you have. However, I knew a few fundamentals of Tetris, such as the 7-bag rule, which is that in every set of 7 that you get, you are guaranteed to get each and every tetrimino, which is 7. I also knew of the term t-spin, which refers to rotating a t-piece into a place that it would never be able to fit into without rotating it.  However, even though I initially knew more about Tetris than Alex, it was clear that things were not the same once we were finished with our project. While I practiced Tetris during class time and sometimes on the weekend, Alex had been practicing during his own free time as well. By the end, I would be hard-pressed to say that I am still a better Tetris player than Alex. This shows that regardless what skill you have at the beginning of a learning process, it is the effort and hard work that you put into learning that has the most impact on how you perform and learn. Even though I knew more about Tetris than Alex in the beginning, he ended up surpassing me once we finished the project because he spent more time and effort into practicing than I did. This applies to much more than Tetris, as we could have been learning how to play an instrument and would have still ended up with this result. Hard work and effort has a large impact on the amount of information that you can learn during a learning process.

In this project, we were able to learn how to play Tetris. We started out as people who just began Tetris and did not know much about it. Through our hard work and patience, we were able to slowly improve. While we began as complete noobs and sucked, we were able to successfully overcome the skill curve and become better at Tetris. What we learned in this passion project can be applied universally.  Just work hard and stay persistent and then you will naturally be able to overcome skill barriers or other talent related barriers. Believe in yourself and never give up.