Overview
This guide is intended as a resource for those who have already achieved the GM grade in Tetris The Grand Master (TGM1), and who have already put a decent amount of work into time attack. There are many very useful guides for the journey to GM, and for improving shortly after. These include tgm.tips and the TGM Guide, both very excellent resources. This guide is primarily intended for TGM1 time attack, but some concepts are applicable to the other games in the Tetris: The Grand Master series. As this guide is for more advanced players, it contains several strategies that may actually be detrimental if implemented too early in a player's progression. A lot these tricks reduce consistency in exchange for time. This can give a boost of a couple of seconds that's badly needed at a high level, but is likely not a good tradeoff for less experienced players. While some sections are universal, others may be inadvisable. They may seem tempting, but I strongly advise against implementing Kashiwa Strats or Skillstops until you have a TGM1 PB under 10 minutes, and ideally even as low as the 9:30 range.
The Straightforward Part
Lock Faster
Just saying "lock faster" is obviously not all that helpful as advice, but the truth is that this is a massive part of time attack that has to be learned through practice and repetition. The faster you put your piece where you want it and then press down, the faster the run will be. In modes like T.A. Death, you can get away with anything and get very fast times as long as you can lock fast and survive to the end of the run. However, TGM1 time attack has a bit more to it than that.
Don't Clear Singles
In TGM1, the ARE is 30 frames for the entire game. When a line is cleared, this delay extends from 30 frames to 41. As a result of this, clearing an excessive amount of singles slows the run down quite a bit. When you clear 4 singles, you waste 33 frames over clearing that same material as a tetris. While it will never be reasonable to go an entire game with only tetrises, it is extremely important to reduce singles as much as possible and try to maximize tetrises. For reference, in the best recorded TGM1 run (8:49.90 by 777) just 15 out of the 282 cleared lines are singles. Fast locking alone won't get you very far if you make a mess of the stack and need to clear singles constantly.
Don't Level Stop
You should already know this if you read the other guides first, but in the TGM series the level won't advance past X99 (998 for the final level stop) without a line clear. Avoiding these level stops is absolutely critical for good time attack, as placing pieces without advancing the level is almost 100% pure timeloss. Even if the piece is locked instantly in the middle of the stack in 20g with no movements, it's a loss of at least half a second per piece, and this quickly adds up. This guide has an entire section on avoiding this.
Nifty Stacking
This isn't going to be an incredibly complex deep dive into the intricacies of stacking strategy. There's no guide you can read that could replace practice and experience when it comes to developing stacking technique. There are, however, some broad tips here that can improve stack stability, or save time in certain situations.
Reading the Randomizer
In the TGM randomizer, a history of the past 4 rolled pieces is kept. This history is used to reduce the odds of repeated pieces by rerolling (4 times in TGM1, 6 times in TAP and TI) to try and draw a piece that is not present in the history. Knowledge of this system and a sense for the contents of the history can allow you to make educated guesses about what pieces are coming soon, and stack accordingly. The most general form of this is to never build a piece dependency using that same piece, as it will be in the history for a long time. For the same reason, it is very bad to have two dependencies for the same piece, since it will probably take a while to roll another one after the first dependency is fixed.
This is a bad situation, you already had a T dependency and now you have another. Rolling two T pieces before needing to make a hole here is very unlikely. It's better to just accept one hole near the edge of the stack, rather than making such an unstable situation that will almost never resolve neatly.
Understanding the history can help you maximize your odds of your dependencies getting filled. Take this situation, for instance:
What's the best place to put the T piece? Well, it's actually impossible to know what placement is better just from this. The answer depends on the contents of the history:
Knowing that L is present in the history, the better T placement is the one that creates a J dependency instead of an L dependency. The same logic applies in reverse, or if both were in the history but L was more recent.
By making this placement that needs a J instead of an L, we are likely to roll the needed piece sooner rather than later.
Single Conversion
As stated above, reducing singles is extremely important. The ideal is always a tetris, but a triple or even a double is still preferable over taking a single. Take for instance, this stack:
The intuitive play (and the safest one, if simply trying to clear) is to take the single with the S to reopen the well, but you can do better. Depending on how aggressive you want to be, this can instead be converted to a double, a triple, or even a tetris.
All of these options save time over simply taking the single, and, if in low gravity, the conversion to a tetris is actually faster than not covering the well in the first place due to saving on piece drop time. That being said, it's important to be wary of asking the randomizer for too much. If you always go for the most aggressive option, you'll be spending a lot of your time stuck in the first few sections!
Here's a less intuitive situation:
This can be converted from a single to a double by ignoring the more traditional T overhang fix:
The same idea would also work with a Z.
Here's a more intuitive situation. As it stands now, filling the i dependency will clear a single. Placing the O piece on the right is the correct move to convert that to a triple, with no extra risk.
When doing these conversions, it's important to try to avoid situations where you make the better line clear, but still leave behind a situation that requires a single. While putting an O piece over the well can often be a good way to convert a single, there are some cases where it might not work too well. Take for instance, this series of events:
This didn't really help... we took the double instead of a single but the well still isn't open. Rather than O, it would've been better to try to wait for an L instead.
While maximizing tetrises is important, it’s also important not to over-commit and create a much bigger mess than you would have if you’d just taken the smaller line clear. Take this situation for example:
If you wanted to clear only tetrises, this is a pretty dangerous double i piece dependency. Instead of trying to fix the well on the right with an i piece, it's probably best to take a double using an O or an S. If the sequence doesn’t cooperate, even just taking a single with T, L, or J could be better than waiting for a second i piece if it keeps the stack in good condition.
In this situation, assuming 20g, there's not really a safe way of converting the single. While it's not impossible, and a sudden switch to a left well could maybe work, it's risky. It's probably best to just take the one single, rather than potentially completely ruining the stack trying to convert it to a better line clear. It's important to pick your battles.
wip: wall finesse, randomizer reading, level stop avoidance, then probably scary stuff on separate page (kashiwa strats, skillstops, etc)
