Professional Tetris Players Explained

professional Tetris players have been making the news quite a lot over the past few months and a common reaction I've seen is huh our Pro Tetris players actually a thing and the answer is yes it is actually possible to earn income playing Tetris the rapidly growing scene is in many ways the Esports equivalent of Chess or speed cubing it's a deceptively simple game that mentally trains you to always be thinking several moves ahead of course most of the top Tetris players are so young that they're still in school so their primary job for now is being a student with Tetris being their side hustle or way to help pay for college but there is one player who legitimately managed to make Tetris his actual career Jonas newbower my real talent is business card throwing I like to think that Tetris had something to do with that how did this guy turn Tetris into his full-time job well he has a pretty incredible story but before I get into it in order for it to make sense I first need to break down the three categories of Tetris income so let's start with the most obvious one so yeah I mean this is what I've been showing you footage of so far in the video but how do pro tournaments work the main organization behind them is the classic Tetris World Championships or ctwc for short run by President Vince Clemente every year they host dozens of regional Tetris championships in partnership with local organizers all around the world from California to New York to Germany to Singapore in fact this is a list of every tournament scheduled for the 2024 season so far and some of the Regionals have a lot of fun bringing some local flare such as the Kansas City Regional being barbecue themed and the Texas regional having an authentic belt buckle for the winner but okay so how do you win and what do you earn for winning occasionally some tournaments have special rules but almost all of them start with a qualifying stage where players post the highest score they can on anys Tetris over a set period of time and if they max out the default score counter at over 1 million the number of Max outs are tallied up as a tight breaker for the best players so after all the scores are in the top qualifying players are placed into a bracket and then they compete one-on-one to get the highest score they advance to the next round by getting the higher score usually in two out of three or three out of five games eventually one player emerges Victorious as the regional champion and gets awarded free entry into the world championships and the biggest share of the prize pool to help pay for the trip out there the price pool is usually between $500 to $2,000 although sometimes it can be significantly higher last year in 2023 it was actually the Poland Regional that had the highest prize pool there were a record 86 participants and when the sponsor for the Winner's trip to the World Championships pulled out the Polish Retro Gaming Community crowdfunded a prize pool of over $33,900 which was enough to send the top four polish players to travel to America and compete in the world championships so what happens there well the world championships have traditionally been held in Portland Oregon during October although starting starting this year in 2024 they're moving to Los Angeles in June and naturally it's the biggest live Tetris event in the world tons of countries are represented and the prize pool in recent years has been over $220,000 and outside of the main World Championship ecosystem there's also many other tournaments such as the tetris World Cup of D which is for a specific play style or completely independent events such as the Lone Star Championship but of course unless a tournament is happening right next to where you live travel costs can add up even just attending a Regional Championship but fortunately there's another category of tournaments with basically no upfront cost the ones hosted online with the biggest one being classic Tetris monthly which is open to competitors all around the world the top 16 qualifying players make it into the Masters event which usually has a prize pull of $2 to $4,000 every single month but once a year the tournament expands to a much bigger bracket for the annual Mega Masters event the prize pool in 2024 was actually the biggest ever for a classic Tet tournaments at over $26,000 of which 10,000 went to the first place winner fractal and all of this is made possible by generous sponsors and contributors so by now you probably get the picture you can definitely earn money from Tetris tournaments but if you wanted to do Tetris full-time you'd probably have to diversify your income so what are the other two categories if a Tetris player has a proven track record of being a top player or Community member they can also earn income through just getting a direct sponsorship but what kind of sponsorship could a Tetris player possibly get you'd be surprised when gfuel launched a Tetris flavor back in 2021 they sponsored a player named opox in the world championships that year back in 2019 a player named saavar got sponsored to travel from Denmark all the way to the world championships by a local bar whose only request was that he wear their logo during the competition and most recently when blue scooty made headlines worldwide for being the first player to beat NES Tetris and cause the game to crash he received a sponsorship to help him get out to more Regional tournaments by complexly the company run by John and Hank Green that creates educational content for kids in schools such as crash course and sow and a sponsorship doesn't always have to come from one person or business back in 20122 when the World Championships were happening live for the first time in several years after the pandemic community members came together to sponsor over a dozen different players who otherwise might not have been able to make the trip sponsorships can be very valuable but they frequently aren't income in and of themselves and most often just help players attend and earn income from the live tournaments in fact it's the third category of income that is often the most important this is of course a very common way to make a living online nowadays but in Tetris it didn't start out that way it was kind of instead how the classic Tetris Community as it exists today got built in the first place the first player to regularly stream online was the 2014 World Champion Harry Hong who eventually broke the overall score world record live on Twitch in 2017 [Music] yes yes oh my God this in turn inspired other top Tetris players to begin streaming online and then during the pandemic twitch became the primary way that new players entered the scene and showed their skills and nearly all the biggest records and achievements in the game such as the first glitch colors or game crash or 10 million points have been accomplished while live streaming through Players pushing each other other and the game to new heights and YouTube has become one of the primary ways to teach new players one top player Eric IX very early on made a complete beginner's guide to the game and eventually ended up winning the World Championship himself in 2022 in the past year he's mostly retired from playing to focus on photography of live Tetris events and content creation around Tetris with his three most recent videos being his biggest hits yet and for those who are new to this channel I actually followed a similar pipeline years ago I also tried my best to being a top Tetris player except unlike Eric I never ended up getting very good so I transitioned pretty early on to primarily focusing on making these videos in between time and my day job and other players found surprising success in other ways such as behind the scenes roles in tournaments one player shy found his true calling as a commentator and now in addition to being one of the most well-known Tetris casters also works full-time as a freelance voiceover artist another player van dweller found his true calling as an organizer and took over as administrator of classic Tetris monthly when the original founder had to step down he's currently focusing on running the tournament full-time during a sabatical from his day job so okay these are all ways that Tetris can be a surprisingly profitable hobby or a supportive role in your career but there's still a big leap to Tetris becoming your entire career how does that happen well maybe you need one more secret almost intangible thing back in the early 2000s Jonas newbower was living a relatively normal life with a relatively normal office job secretly though he was one of the best NES Tetris players in the world being one of only two people at the time to have gone a max out score on tape so in a world championship for the game was created in 2010 Jonas ended up getting an invite and managed to win the whole thing Jonas newow is your world champion he is the world champion a featur link documentary called Ecstasy of order was created about the tournament and was enough of a success that the producers decided to make this an annual thing the following year Jonas would manage to win again Jonas newow is your 2011 Tetris world champion incredibly Jonas would go on to win seven of the first eight World Championships but this wasn't anywhere near a job for him yet the prize pulls were still quite small at the time and the tournament was pretty Niche mainly followed by older Retro Game and enthusiasts who played the game as a kid and coverage by outside press was limited because there wasn't much new to write about with the same guy winning every year Jonas is your 2017 Champion the road was different but the outcome was the same ironically the moment everything blew up was when Jonas lost in shocking fashion a teenager Joseph saley had been inspired to start playing after coming across World Championship matches on YouTube and would win the world title in his very first year competing sweeping Jonas in the finals and we have a new Tetris world champion Joseph's youth topping Jonas's previous success combined to create the perfect headline and tons of news articles got written propelling the finals to reach over 19 million views on YouTube Joseph had been so overwhelmed with emotion in the moment that he had been unable to do an interview directly after receiving his trophy so Jonas took the stage instead and in the biggest Spotlight he had ever received for Tetris he took the opportunity to lift Joseph if Joseph can't speak for himself I'm going to say that the kid played with pure heart truly truly in honor to pass the torch to the new generation good game Joseph both Joseph and Jonas's twitch Pages exploded in popularity shortly after the tournament but while Joseph was still balancing grinding grades at school in preparation for college applications Jonas was in his 30s now and at just the right right moment in his life to be ready to try something new he took a leap of faith and transitions to streaming fulltime being behind a desk for 11 years I definitely prefer the chaos of doing all of this stuff with you guys Jonas quickly became known not just for his town at Tetris but as a speaker traveling around the world to different Tetris events as an ambassador for the Esports it was an honor commentating all your games and it just enforces this International component of Tetris that just touches my heart and a beautiful way although he wasn't able to win another world title he always spoke highly of his opponents after being eliminated such as in this interview after finishing in the top 16 of the 2020 World Championships before you ask me questions Huff great day dude what a bracket everything goes out to Huff we we'll keep this short this is this is my man's day I'm just so honored how big it's getting how many people take it so seriously and play with their heart I will be back for 2021 it's just too much fun especially if we can do this in person this would actually end up being his final tournament and unfortunately not because he retired tragedy struck at the beginning of 2021 when Jonas unexpectedly passed away from cardiac arhythmia at the age of just 39 although this was an enormous shock and huge loss for the scene his contributions over the years were not forgotten Jonas had often spoken about the responsibility that comes with being in the spotlight if you're a high visibility player it's it's on you to move the community in a positive direction and this quote has has been etched onto the back of all the new world championship trophies which were redesigned from a t to a j piece as the Jonas new bow Awards it feels like the secret fourth thing that gave Jonas a career in Tetris for what ended up being the rest of his life was Community he was a Pioneer in the tetris scene for directly incorporating his audience into his live streams from giving away all his best tips and tutorials to encourage new players to playing Community games with his audience to offering life advice to anyone who asked to this day I still have a t-shirt from one of the jackbox games I played on stream with his community in 2019 this sense of community also made it so that when people attended events while Tetris was the reason to get together what it really felt like was meeting old friends to be a relevant part of just a warm and wonderful community that is better than any monetary compensation that your boy can get and I think that kind of sums up why most of the top players got into Tetris specifically there are definitely more lucrative eports out there but people joined because they wanted to be part of the community Jonas built by example and one shout out I wanted to give at the end of this video is to someone who recently embodied that Spirit of building Community for years the tetris Community has needed a central website with basically all the information about the scene in one spot and well a Community member mafio put together a phenomenal site Nest tetris.com that does exactly that it's got info about the history of the game the players and links to all the biggest tournaments and communities along with ways you can play yourself I'm so appreciative of all the hard work he put into this and I will have it linked to the description and also coincidentally while I was working on this video another Community member fres created a 40-minute video entirely about Jonas newbower which was really wellmade so if you want to learn about his career in much more detail I'll also have it linked to the description thanks again to the patrons for this Channel with an extra special thanks to channel sponsors Scott Gray K9 watching Tetris and Gilbert Tay see you in the next video

Channel: aGameScout

Views: 73,003

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

Id: nuT3AJqSaNA

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2024