Changing Tetris History: New Database Uncovers Hidden Records!

this is a record-setting Tetris game but how would you know just by watching it you'd either have to have watched every other Tetris game out there which would take forever or you could just pull up a list of stats on all those games to easily see which record it broke effectively doing the same thing in no time at all this is why statistics are so vital to enjoying and appreciating almost any type of competition we don't need to watch all of NBA history to know that this simple basket by LeBron James breaks the all-time scoring record because we can just pull up the all-time scoring list but it's easy to take for granted that we have all these statistics available while computers automatically collect and display many major statistics nowadays someone still had to write all the programs that made this possible along with manually Gathering and entering all the data from before when the computer programs were set up this is often not an easy process for example in Major League Baseball in the United States the only reason that almost all the historical data from before 1984 is publicly available is because a group of dedicated volunteers on retrosheet.org painstakingly transcribed it into a computer legible digital format from a hodgepodge of sources including different teams private record books newspaper clippings and in some cases even from game scorecards filled out by fans in attendance I grew up a baseball fan and loved watching players slowly build up their career stat pages on baseballreference.com and comparing them to the greatest baseball players of all not realizing for the longest time that this was possible due to baseball reference getting a huge portion of their data from the geyser retro sheet but one thing that I never imagined was that I would eventually be involved in the creation of a very similar project for the pro class of Tetris scene which had never had a comprehensive database of Statistics before it took nearly 18 months to complete by far the biggest thing I've ever done for this Channel and our team ended up uncovering a huge amount of new all-time records hidden in Tetris history so I want to tell you the story of how this project happened all the twists and turns it took to get here and the incredible potential of what it could mean for the Tetra scene in the future we'll get to take a look at just how much better classic Tetris players got over the recent Years be able to statistically compare some of the biggest Legends of the scene head to head for the very first time and at the very end show how you can do it yourself let's get started [Music] I first got introduced to the pro classic Tetris scene almost by accident when I stumbled across it in my YouTube recommendations back in 2016. it was so simple yet mesmerizing at the same time competitors playing on the 1989 NES version of Tetris trying to stack for as many four-line clears as possible AKA tetrises to score higher than their opponent before their game ended initially I got sucked in by the Curiosity over the fact that Pro classic Tetris players were even a thing but eventually I ended up getting fully immersed in the community due to the incredibly strong culture of good sportsmanship and all the amazing people I've gotten to know through attending events around five years ago I started making YouTube videos about classic Tetris on this channel and I couldn't have lucked out better on the timing as the competitive scene was on the verge of an explosion in the player base and a complete Renaissance of unprecedented Innovation and strategies and techniques to push the boundaries of what was possible in a more than 30 year old game so I've been fortunate to cover a lot of the achievements and records as they happen and of course statistics are a crucial part of showing the context behind them but for a long time the options of what I could show were limited now it wasn't like there were no statistics available there were some projects over the years that have been developed and maintained through considerable efforts but they tended to have a very specific area of focus on what they tracked for example a sheet that kept track of info about every player that had maxed out the game's score counter by getting over 1 million points or a sheet that had kept track of the progression of various World Records like fewest amount of lines anybody had needed to max out the score or a sheet that kept track of which players had the highest lifetime prize earnings in Pro tournaments but one day I came across a question that no existing sheet could answer [Music] at the beginning of 2022 there was a lot of debate in the scene over whether games and competition were getting too long and some sort of line cap was going to be needed because a new rolling technique was allowing people to play further and further past level 29 the point at which the game reaches its fastest speed this sounded like a good video topic so I got to work on a script and figured the question could be answered with Statistics my hypothesis was that a recent slew of extremely long record-setting games were vastly over representing people's perception of how long games were really lasting on average because they were probably statistical outliers alright time to fire up a spreadsheet and give it a whirl except this was a fundamentally different type of question from most of the other video topics I had made before for example a world record progression of the most lines on level 29 wasn't useful for answering this because I wasn't trying to look at record-setting games to test my hypothesis I would need to look at every game combined I would need something like baseball reference the closest thing classic Tetris had to baseball reference at the time was the master match database that contains the results of all matches ever played in any event now this sheet was an incredible Labor of Love by Chris Forrest the guy who started it and eventually became a collab operative project that got passed on to another Community member pumpy heart to oversee further optimization it's what makes the ELO rankings in the scene possible and it can tell you an incredible amount of information about matches such as each player's full match history what time of day and week they most often play how they've done in all the major events but as far as what actually happened in any of these games all I can tell you is who won and who lost not really helpful for what I needed there were some individual events here and there that independently kept track of a few more stats but they wouldn't be that helpful either since I wanted a way to look at a definitive group of the best players in the world since it was really only them at the time that could play past level 29 anyways so what about the classic Tetris World Championship well if you go to their website the only data that is displayed from events is the scores that players got in games that they lost this is the minimum data needed to create a final ranking of how each player did in the tournament and resolve tiebreakers among players who were eliminated in the same round unfortunately again not very helpful since just tracking the score doesn't tell me the number of lines cleared which measures how long the games actually lasted and most importantly it doesn't give me any info about winning games you know the games where players played at their best also it only happens once a year not really frequent enough to track the progression of players getting better at the new rolling technique but fortunately another tournament existed that was basically perfect [Music] funnily enough this other tournament only came about because someone else also thought The World Championships weren't frequent enough as Once Upon a Time the World Championships were the only regular event in the scene after attending the 2017 World Championships one of the spectators Friday which didn't want to have to wait an entire year to see the world's best players face off again so she figured out a way to host classic Tetris matches online and called the resulting tournament classic Tetris monthly it featured up to 16 qualifying players facing off in a single elimination bracket originally it started out as a low stakes tournament just for fun but it vastly expanded the reach of the competitive scene giving players from different countries and continents an easy way to compete without breaking the bank to travel to an event it quickly became the de facto online monthly World Championships and after a year of running it Friday which handed over the reins to another Community member van dweller who oversaw its expansion over the years into becoming an essential part of creating this seen as it exists today being a trendsetter in establishing the gold standard of how online tournaments are run and providing several thousand dollars every month in prize money from generous donors to become the primary way many top players earn income from the game the last part was crucial because it incentivized all the top players to keep playing month after month providing a perfect consistent snapshot of the Pinnacle of the scene year round so what data was available to me about classic Tetris monthly well there was a historical data sheet for the tournament created by Louis Scooby but unfortunately same as the World Championships it only tracked losing scores in order to create bracket rankings and since Louis was basically the only person who worked on it there wasn't any info passed when he stopped maintaining it at the end of 2020 meaning it wouldn't cover the time period I needed anyways alright so the sheet I wanted didn't exist but maybe I could do it myself flip up something real quick so I made a spreadsheet tracking a few things about all 114 games played in the January 2022 tournament such as if they were using the new rolling play style whether the game made it to level 29 and how many lines the player got beyond that and just for good measure to have a sample size of more than one tournament I tracked all 108 games from the previous month December 2021 as well and the results were that I found just 36 percent of games in December had even made it to level 29 at all along with just 30 percent of games in January and in the games that did get past level 29 there seems to be an exponential curve in the amount of lines players achieved a bit differently shaped between the two months which was odd but nonetheless it was clear that the vast majority of games weren't even lasting more than 10 lines on this speed which was basically nothing alright hypothesis proven even for the world's top players the average game barely goes past level 29 at all and only around a third of games even make it to level 29 anyways we all need a line cap wrap it up punch out the video we're done here except I didn't actually get the video done by the time then next month's tournament the February 2022 event had already happened so I figured okay well I should probably track this one too what's the harm it'll likely just add even more confirmation to my hypothesis except in February 2022 a whopping 61 of games made it to level 29. basically double the previous months and while the games passed level 29 still showed an exponential curve it was now showing the minority of games lasting less than 10 lines a not so insignificant portion of games were lasting 40 50 even 60 lines uh okay uh we might actually need a line cap in the future time for a rewrite and to gather some more data [Music] over the next couple months I would actually end up rewriting the script four more times as they kept logging data from each new tournament and slowly adding additional things to track eventually in August after Gathering 10 months of data I finally finished the video with a verdict on the hypothesis the biggest thing causing games to get longer was not people playing past level 29 but rather the much higher rate people were getting to level 29 in the first place along with people continuing to play after they had already won if you just didn't allow players to do that the chances of seeing one of these outlier games is exponentially smaller and it basically solves the time problem as long as organizers budget time instead around the rate at which people are getting to level 29. the biggest reason to really out of line cap was so games could continue to have a definitive climactic ending but now at this point I had data on over 1 000 games of the best players in the world there were now potentially some other things that I could do with the data I realized that there had been just one game that year that was zero points and zero lines and ended up making a video about it shortly afterwards on how it was possible that one of the top players managed to get a goose egg the key visual point being that this was a super rare one in a thousand occurrence and then in December I finally hit the Milestone of one year of data and I thought hey you know this isn't the full historical record but it is at least one full year it's kind of like one entire season maybe this data could be turned into a Tetris version of baseball reference just for 2022. I didn't know the first thing about web design but I figured the hardest part was just having the data to start with so I got on a call with Justin AKA fireworks the guy behind the classic Tetris monthly website to talk with him about the possibility of putting 2022 season stats up on the site I described some of the features that baseball reference like player Pages drop down menus and sortable leaderboards and fireworks told me in the nicest possible way that all of these features would be a lot of work and if I wanted this to actually happen my best chance would be to make a mock-up first and get people excited about it so I made a mock-up and released it on the classic Tetris monthly Discord server and it looked like this graphic design is important y'all I mean I feel like there's a few cool stats on leaderboards on here but overall aesthetically it looks like and for a few months that was kind of the end of it the data just statically sat there with that terrible looking front page and nobody did much with it but then at the beginning of May there was finally a discussion about transition scores on the Discord servers where the statistics were actually relevant and I was able to use them to add to the discussion then somebody asked me about comparing matches with and without same piece sets and I realized that I couldn't because it wasn't something I had thought to track so I put on a message asking for feedback on any more stats that would be useful to track along with saying that if anyone wanted to help out to please send me a DM and then someone did marfram who I got to meet at the 2021 Southern qualifier and have been one of the primary people creating the liquipedia pages for classic Tetris which archived all the historical brackets of the most important tournaments told me he'd be willing to help clean up the sheet and add stuff and from that point on everything changed marfam was a recent computer science graduate along with being a spreadsheet and data analyst Pro and immediately started rearranging the columns into a much more logical order and automating a ton of things so that only the bare minimum amount of info had to be added and that was good because a lot of additional things were now going to be tracked as Martin and I worked on catching the archive up to the present in 2023 and updating the previous months I did in 2022 hydron dude also volunteered to join the team and help polish up some months hydronu was actually the Catalyst behind the current Community leaderboard and his advice and expertise were incredibly helpful and now with all this momentum there was suddenly a feeling that we weren't just gonna stop with polishing up 2022 we were gonna try and do everything the whole history of classic Tetris monthly logging the entire history of classic Tetris monthly was going to be a gargantuan task not just with a sheer amount of games to go through but even finding recordings of all of them in the first place because a lot of them weren't actually on the classic Tetris monthly official YouTube channel and fighting every game was important because of course single season sports records aren't just measured by the performance of a few games you need every game from That season in order to measure the record but even if we couldn't find every last game finding as many complete months or years as possible would be ideal it's a big deal for the Retro sheet guys every time they get to Mark another season off as 100 complete in their latest update this summer they triumphantly announced that 1973 was now fully archived and they're still a bit frustrated that they're only missing two games from 1972. so to see what kind of work lay ahead I did a quick initial survey of what ctm months were known to be publicly available the first of the four major eras of ctm was the initial Friday witch era which lasted eight months from December 2017 to July 2018 an incredibly almost all of them were 100 preserved as highlighted vods on Friday which is Twitch page where they were originally streamed the only one missing was the last one in July where Friday which didn't highlight the VOD before it expired which honestly that's way better than what could have been Friday which had no idea at the time that these matches would still be of interest so long in the future the retroshi guys sure don't have any video archives of baseball at the very beginning they're stuck digging through the secondary sources for scraps the second major era is the initial van dweller era after Friday which retired which lasted five months from October 2018 to February 2019. again almost all of these are 100 preserved except for December where same deal van dweller just didn't highlight the twitch fod it is what it is I'm grateful he saved the rest and at the time I actually volunteered to edit the entire February VOD into videos for YouTube making it the first month to be fully uploaded to ctm's YouTube channel then came the classic Tetris World Championships partnership spanning a whopping 19 months from March 2019 to October 2020. the agreement was that van dweller would still run the tournament but it would now be streamed on the much larger classic Tetris official twitch page and uploaded afterwards exclusively to their very popular classic Tetris YouTube channel on paper this was a win-win the best organizers in the closet tetrisine teaming up to get more eyes on the tournament and the players and some of the record-setting matches uploaded to the classic Tetris YouTube channel Remain the most viewed ever classic Tetris monthly matches to this day except ironically this would actually be the worst preserved era of classic Tetris monthly history because they didn't actually upload every match and a comment on one of the world record-setting matches they uploaded explains why due to a deep pipeline of video releases coming up we will only be automatically uploading semis and finals of ctm from there we will include any matches from the rest of the bracket we feel deserve your attention the brutal nature of classic Tetris tends to make a large chunk of the matches pretty unremarkable for instance after beating Joseph and scoring 1.2 million Ella lost to Richard 0-2 without managing to break 500k so we didn't upload it now as tough as this is from a historical perspective I can understand the logic at the time the cgwc organizers had a lot of live Regional Tetris events to upload in addition classic Tetris monthly and if you clog up your YouTube channel with too much stuff it Waters down the viewership you only want to upload the best and at the time nobody really cared about archiving everything a few bad early round matches getting lost in the frame was no big deal as part of why I find it so fortunate in retrospect that we have almost all the early Friday witch and Van Thriller stuff except the thing was it wasn't just a few early round matches that got lost as the classic Tetris YouTube channel got behind on the uploads of all the different Tetris events they started cutting material wherever they could some months for ctm they wouldn't upload any early round matches sometimes they'd upload only the finals September 2019 had just seven percent of its Games available as a result and some months where they were in the biggest crunch they would just upload the entire VOD unedited or they wouldn't upload anything at all either the most or least ideal outcome depending on the month fortunately in March 2020 they made a big push to start uploading everything and for a few months they kept it up but then fell behind again and whiffed on uploading anything in September or October but okay what about the fourth and final era by far the longest spanning 30 months to the present day this one has perhaps the most complicated history of all so the thing about the ctwc partnership era is that ctwc was uploading what had come to be called The Masters event the highest tiered tournament with the top 16 qualifying players but by that point classic Tetris monthly had for a long time been also hosting a ton of other lower tiered tournaments for players outside the top 16 and nothing was being done with the broadcasts of these events so the Roblox YouTuber remainings who also played classic Tetris and was a regular participant in the lower tiers offered to lend his YouTube uploading expertise and Resurrect The dormant classic Tetris monthly YouTube channel and started uploading some of the lower tiered tournaments there but in December 2020 suddenly the classic Tetris twitch page had a sponsored tournament with a major donor that needed to happen on the same day that classic touchers monthly Lee always held its Masters event and it became clear that the numerous events that ctwc constantly had scheduled was no longer going to work with ctm's schedule so classic Tetris monthly went independent again and remainings could actually upload the Masters event to their YouTube channel now except he didn't actually get around to uploading any of the videos after this point but crucially month after month he did save all of them to his hard drive pumpy hard to joined the ctm staff at this point and was highlighting some of the twitch pods but for a few months there were still quite a few gaps in what was publicly preserved finally at the end of the summer of 2021 pumpy heart would resurrect the ctm YouTube channel for good uploading the several month backlog from the beginning of when ctm went independent and getting a hold of all the vods remainings had saved to fill in the gaps meaning everything from these months got 100 preserved from that month forward every match every month would get diligently uploaded by pumpy heart he was quickly promoted to co-admin of classic Tetris monthly and took over coordinating much of the tournament's schedule and Logistics along with guiding a protege Dan vinky on how to maintain the YouTube channel once he eventually needed to step down the last event pumpy heart helped coordinate was in effect a big finale the first time the classic Tetris monthly Masters event would be held alive in Austin Texas dubbed the 2023 Lone Star Championship players from multiple countries traveled out to be involved and participate but due to time constraints some matches had to be held off stream for the first time in the event's history even then pumpy heart made sure those matches were recorded on a staff member's cell phone so although pumpy art was not co-admin the entire time I'm calling this the van dweller and pumpy heart era because pumpy heart is a true archivist through and through and a hero of this project he's the kind of person classic Tetris monthly had always needed in its corner but of course he hadn't been around for all of classic Tetris monthly so with the current state of things we had 85 percent of all games accounted for and that left 15 percent and seemingly lost how could we get data on these games please need to somehow find the original missing videos [Applause] the first and most obvious place to start would be the ctwc organizers who uploaded the vods to their Channel except here's the painful thing several years ago dog an eventual two-time world champion was wondering if he could go back and watch the first time he ever participated in classic Tetris monthly since that match never got uploaded so I actually reached out to the organizers at the time and one of them Adam Cornelius actually sent me some of the missing months in their entirety on Dropbox which I then shared back on the Discord server except an archival project like this didn't exist yet at the time so nobody thought to save the votes when I went back to go check the Dropbox link of course it turned out to be dead Ah that's totally on me we ended up reaching out again and this time in an initial check one of the organizers Vince couldn't find anything we were told it might be possible the vods exist on other hard drives they may have somewhere but there's no guarantee anything is still there as they may have been removed to save space long ago and understandably it's not their top priority to go digging for these right now as another world championships is right around the corner so it looks like we'd have to dig elsewhere and then I realized I actually did have one missing month on my hard drive in March 2019 one of the only months I actually qualified for the main tournament I faced off against the then world champion Joseph sayley in the first round and because it wasn't a very competitive match it didn't get uploaded but it was a meaningful match to me so I had saved the whole VOD and kept it around alright that at least got us one more month did anyone else happen to privately save months they participated in as a matter of fact at least one other person did Dan qz had made the finals and semi-finals in each of the first two months he participated and had recorded his desktop while the stream was going the whole time uploaded them to YouTube unlisted and forgotten about them until now one of them literally had just one view presumably Dan qz when he sent it to me so filling out those months added 182 additional games to the archive and bumped it up from 85 to 88 complete could we possibly go any further now so sources start to get even more obscure back around this time period I made recap videos of the Masters events and had actually done a recap of September 2020 one of the completely missing months I dug through my hard drive and found that I'd record it around 25 minutes of footage from that month of highlight moments and Random clips for matches for b-roll by skipping around the whole VOD on Twitch sadly I didn't just download the whole VOD at the time because I was concerned about hard drive space it wasn't much but it did provide at least some stats from that month and finally there was the most obscure and difficult source of all twitch Clips the problem with twitch Clips is one they're only a minute long maximum and two the UI for navigating them is terrible the titles are all random to whatever the user who clipped it titled it at the time so you can't research for anything specific if you don't know it's there and unfortunately you cannot sort all the clips by chronological order you have to sort through them by most viewed all time I would have to scroll through thousands of Clips out of order from every classic Tetris event ever broadcast there I spent a weekend doing this slowly cataloging clips from missing months and matching them up to games most of the clips simply weren't usable for stats they would just be of a random moment in the middle of a game but occasionally I would find some gems such as this game where eventual World runner-up fractal had a huge upset Victory against the then world champion Joseph sayley by playing on level 29 in an era where it was nearly impossible in the end an additional 60 games were salvaged this way finally bumping the archive up to 89 complete although he couldn't get everything in the end we now had enough complete months from every year to create a full statistical picture of the event's history with no stone left unturned now it was just a matter of logging all the stats after several months of work from the team and specifically a truly incredible amount of work from are from the archive finally got finished a few weeks ago and now finally here's the fun part let's take a look what everything looks like combined and explore some of the stats together sorting every game by Total Lines and total score this is what seven years of the best Tetris players in the world looks like all 6140 games ever recorded and preserved in the Masters event well you have this much data to examine some really cool patterns start to emerge for example in the bottom left you can actually see a ton of lines in the data points because again every player is trying to get as many tetrises as possible every line represents the score jump when a player gets a Tetris Tetris number one number two number three and number four slowly as the players have to burn singles doubles and triples the lines dissolve and Scatter eventually there's a huge amount of games that ended right at the first major speed change to level 19. preceded by a bit of a gap where people played safer in anticipation of the speed change further up there's an even bigger graveyard of games that ended right at the second and final speed change in the original game at level 29. back in 2019 no games would have gotten Beyond this point but now of course with rolling it's just where players kick into their highest gear and at the top right corner a third graveyard is starting to emerge where the new level 39 super kill screen has been patched in but here's what I find fascinating now getting to look across the entire spectrum of time what is the consistency of top players getting to level 29 look like these were the two months I initially tracked looking back to the beginning of the archive in all complete months available that had exactly 16 players this is what the percentages looked like through 2019 getting to level 29 was extraordinarily rare it only happened around 1 in every 30 games and then by 2021 it had risen quite a bit to be one in every three games but it still looked like it had tapered off and players were settling into a peak level of performance I had no idea at the time that we were right on the verge of a consistency explosion some months in recent years reached as high as three in four games getting to level 29 peaking at 78 in August 2023 that is the power of context my initial study at the beginning of 2022 would have been woefully uninformed had I put it out at the time what about the score progression you know the ultimate thing that wins games as it turns out in the very first month of the tournament in 2017 the average score was just 194 000 and he peaked it over 1.1 million in August 2022. that's just so mind-blowing to me in a more than 30 year old game the top players got more than five times better at scoring and competition over just five years only after that point where the Masters event debuted the super kill screen did scores finally stabilize and get under control which was 100 the correct thing to do by the way but that is a topic for another video now let's take a look at some of the top players Head to Head undoubtedly the three most successful Tetris careers of anyone who ever played to the Masters event would belong to Koji nishio AKA corion Joseph saley AKA jdmfx and Michael Arteaga aka dog playing Tetris they are the top three in total monthly titles all time and each completely done dominated in their respective eras as can be seen by when they won their titles but how did they really stack up against each other since it seems like each of their peaks kind of happened at different times previously the main way to compare players historically was through the ELO charts a mathematical system developed originally for chess to determine the strength of players when only win loss data is available it does a really good approximation but the thing is it was needed in chess because there's not really such a thing as playing for score in Tetris of course there is it just wasn't tracked before but now we can actually compare their scores and one of the most crucial things that was tracks to contextualize both losing and winning scores was to Mark whether the game Ended as a natural top out on a genuine attempt to get the highest score possible or whether it was an intentional top out after the player had already won so Mar from and I developed something called Fair median score which is the median of a player's scores in all their natural top-out games plus intentional top outs above the media this is the best simple equation we could figure out to show at a glance what a play are typically scores in a tournament without being skewed by outlier games in either direction or early intentional top outs that shouldn't really be counted and so here's how Corian Joseph and dogs stack up over the years by Fair median score there's immediately some interesting things that pop out to me Joseph saley actually started out with an incredibly low median score of just 276 000 in his rookie year when it was a lot easier to get into the tournament he really hit his stride in 2020 when he won half of his six titles but by the time dog joined the party that year he was actually ahead of both Joseph and coryon rather than being in a state of decline Joseph and coryon would both end up having their best statistical years in 2021 but Joseph only won one title that year and Corey on 1-0 because the field had improved so dramatically these scores quantify exactly what the difference was between these players that was needed to stay at the top of the scene while Joseph and coryon could consistently score around 900 000 in their Prime dog has been steadily climbing above a 1.1 1 million median score for each of the past three years I could go on for hours with ways to analyze this data but the main question is what's the point of doing all of this to me it's about making moments exciting for players and audience members as they happen in ways never before possible usually there's a ton of energy and Fanfare around record-breaking moments that stems from the excellent casting by ctm's primary commentator van dweller and the excitement from the audience but one of the best uses of commentary I've ever seen is when the audience didn't actually know what was going on in the finals of the 2022 part of Texas regional championships which was live in front of a large crowd dog had defeated his opponent Doge but the Applause from the audience quickly dissipated as there didn't seem to be any point for dog to keep playing even when dogs set up a difficult Tetris pest level 29 there was barely a peep from the crowd Augusta for the tetris and gets the kill screen Tetris here on level 32 but the commentator Sharky just so happened to know that dog was approaching a world record score he's only a couple thousand points away from getting the highest scoring game in a live competition and he's setting up for the tetris he's holding up there it is wait can we see it can we see it are we gonna get a 1.4 are we gonna get a 1.4 four and he's not done yet he's still going but he's the right pieces can you get the right pieces in competition first ever never have been done Sharky was able to create excitement from the crowd in that moment because he knew it was a record-breaking Milestone and the mind-blowing thing to me about this database is the retroactive discovery of a ton of insane moments that could have had the same amount of hype for example one of the most important things in classic Tetris is your transition score it's the score you're able to get during the 130 lines before the transition to level 19 where it's easiest to stack high and crucial to be as efficient as possible for two years the highest transition record was 696 000 from sodium overdose in a quarterfinals match versus dog back in January 2021 and most of the focus at the time was not on how high sodium's transition score was but rather how big the lead was over dog who had a pretty low Pace that game 236 000 point lead and yeah someone saying does dog have long bars turned off but then just recently in April 2023 Cigna was facing off against Maestro and had the opportunity to break 700 000 if she could cash in two more tetrises before the transition she actually put several holes in her stack to try and not burn something you would normally never see at this stage of the game in competition and manage to get the first Tetris but eventually was up too high and didn't want to throw the game away so she settled for a double shaking her head and falling just short but just one round later shouldn't have had another opportunity versus nenu already at 689 000 shouldn't have just needed one more Tetris and got it to go up to 713 000 and was super pumped this was unbelievable out of the 4 304 games that a transitioned in Masters event history Sidney had just achieved two of the top 10 scores in a single hour including breaking the all-time record but because the data wasn't there to show it there was no Fanfare at all about it at the time so I want to take one final bit of inspiration from the Retro Chic guys to help solve this one thing that was foundational to the spirit of retrosheet from the very beginning is that it was a volunteer effort and all the data they collected would be available to anyone for free and we're doing the same thing here you can go right now to go.ctm.gg match stats and not see my old crappy mock-up but a new front page with live statistical leaderboards in all the major categories updated every month along with subpages where you can view a detailed statistical profile of every player's career history you can hover over any of the stats for an explanation of what they are and scroll down through every game they've played on record and also instantly click on any game that looks interesting to watch it and the best part is you can fully customize this yourself you can select any of the more than 200 players who played in ctm masters from the tetris Legends all the way to people like Burke T Kenny a former beard world champion who participated in exactly one match you can filter the games through more than half a dozen different parameters to narrow down any specific search you have have and my favorite feature is the matchups page where you can view any two players head to head to see how they've performed against each other in the past or if they've never played before how they would statistically stack up against each other in a potential Showdown I didn't fully understand what fireworks meant when he told me almost a year ago that recreating all the features of baseball reference would be a lot of work but now oh man I definitely do it was so much work to gather all these stats and build up all these features but I couldn't be happier with the results again for years I'd wanted a Tetris version of baseball reference to exist and now well it pretty much kind of does which brings me to one final big announcement this project would not have been possible without countless people over the years from all the people who originally ran and participated in the tournaments to the people who archived all the videos to the people who made the previous sheets in the past that inspired this one but the most crucial person by far in finally getting this project over the hump and finished at the end has been Mar from and as we worked more together we realized we really connected on a passion for data analysis and telling stories about it so as of quite recently I've brought him on as the first part-time hire to help me out regularly with every video on this channel he's already done a ton of awesome work prepping background research on upcoming scripts including many that make use of all the new data that's now available and so in order to be able to compensate him for his time and keep having him aboard I've finally launched a patreon page for this channel this was something I've held off doing for a long time because I wanted to do it for the right reason if you've watched this channel for a while you know I haven't uploaded videos as often as I would have liked to over the years and uploading more was not so much of a money issue as a Time issue it takes countless hours not just to edit these videos but also to stay up to date with everything happening in the first place I've always tried to push commentary and Analysis of the scene forwards by doing these big projects to analyze things in new ways that end up taking forever and although I've had many people generously help me out on specific things with individual videos in the past what I really needed to do was hire someone to help on a regular basis and while it took a long time to find the right person marfam was the perfect match but that it's not all I'd be able to do with additional funding I've used most of the revenue from this channel over the years for my fiance Oona and I to be able to attend the World Championships each year and attend many Regional events and I always document the experience of each one I'm currently a bit backed up on getting the videos out about each of them but the photo galleries I take are always up for the public very quickly most of the photos I used in this video were actually ones I took myself at Regional events and I love to be able to continue to do this and expand on it like it's a bucket list item for me now to go to the tetris Dash World Championships in Europe and document the experience of that event and patreon funding can help make that happen so I've split up the patreon into three tiers the first tier you get your name in the credits and detailed updates on the progress of each video the main video I'll be working on for the rest of September is my experience at the 2022 World Championships on the second tier you can actually vote frequently for what the next video will be if there's a video burner for a while like part two of the line cap video or a vlogumentary of a specific event I attended in the past or an entirely original idea about you you can vote to make it happen you also get behind the scenes features like the original scripts material that I cut out of videos or Vlogs or extra little odds and ends currently on that tier I've posted all the original Tetris remixes I've made as soundtracks for videos over the years and the third tier is there if you have the means and would like to sponsor a video so check out the links in the description to both the match stats database and the patreon page if you're interested thanks so much for watching and see you in the next video foreign

Channel: aGameScout

Views: 118,690

Keywords: agamescout, nes tetris, classic tetris, agamescout tetris, classic tetris world championship, ctwc

Id: qnhShaOdtFw

Length: 38min 45sec (2325 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2023