The Story of the Tetris World Championship’s Oldest Player

this is the story of the oldest person to qualify for the classic tetris world championships in probably one of the most memorable moments in the competitive scenes history so for a little context the tournament is normally held in portland oregon but this year due to you know 2020 it's being held online right now they're in the middle of the qualifying phase where players will try to post the highest scores possible to determine their seating in the bracket and the cool thing is that unlike in years past where was all done in person and only a handful of players ever got recorded this year everyone's streaming their individual qualifying sessions to twitch so fans have enjoyed being able to hop on the stream of their favorite player and cheer them on as they try to get a max out or as many max outs as possible which is the highest score you could get on an unmodified version of nes tetris but the really cool thing is that this has also given the community an opportunity to take a look at some of the relatively unknown players who don't normally get a spotlight and one of those unknown players was anna d who was brand new to the scene she had never competed in any classic tetris tournament before having a lifetime record of o and o and was scheduled to qualify tuesday morning and when she started her stream and began playing something unusual was immediately apparent she built for tetris's using the left well a strategy that had been dismissed by the community as suboptimal ten years ago actually notice that uh harry bill's on the left side which is interesting i find that to be you know when you leave your instead of unacceptable to say that i just i would not do that so why is the left well a disadvantage because the line piece spins with a bias towards the right by the time you reach the speed of level 19 a line piece can get over a nine row high right well but only a six row high left well and that's with perfect timing on the delayed auto shift if you're even just a little bit off the barrier for a line piece clearing the left well can easily be as low as five or even four a razor thin margin for getting tetrises virtually every top player in the scene uses a write well but despite playing with this significant handicap anyone watching anna's stream quickly noticed that she was good like really good she would consistently start at level 18 in transition to level 19 in the mid 500 thousands well on pace to max out the score before level 29 which is so fast that usually ends the game at one point she even transitioned with 638 thousand any of the top players in the world would be thrilled to have such a score at that point in the game but the left well left her so little room for error that she would continually get put in insanely difficult situations to get out of just a few levels after transitioning she showed impressive resilience in almost escaping several hairy situations but she always seemed to top out shortly afterwards but then one game she didn't after transitioning to level 19 with 602 000 she continued to get tetris at a furious rate and by midway through level 24 she had a staggering 817 000 with four and a half levels to go until level 29. this was well beyond a max outpace and to put into perspective anna said later that she previously hadn't watched any of the world championship matches before tuning into a single live stream this summer and that she didn't even know there was a significant difference between the ride and left wells because no one had told her otherwise she was effectively just about as much in the dark on strategy as players in the first world championships had been in 2010 before there was widespread knowledge on all the best practices and only three people competing at the time had maxed out ever for most years of the tournaments no more than a single person had maxed out in qualifying and for the past two years after the recent explosion of players the number had still been no more than seven and here anna was on the verge of getting a max out herself unfortunately that mist drop did things in and max out wasn't in the cards but she finished with 850 000 almost 200 000 points above the cutoff score from any other year oh my gosh mike they think they can qualify me the reason my first games are terrible news of her score immediately began circulating around the community nobody had expected an unknown player to put up such a strong performance especially with a left well but there were hints that she might not have been completely in the dark on strategy and that she might have a mentor at several points throughout her qualifier her uncle walked around behind her who she said would be qualifying himself the very next day and as i excitedly tuned in the next day to see what her uncle would do i was not prepared for what i was about to see hey huh how about that folks we're gonna see that every day that's why i was telling alexia i should get more points when i clear those tetrises higher up this is uncle mike he is a fearless man when it comes to playing tetris he would stack to the sky and somehow get out of things over and over even though he was only flipping the pieces in one direction which often resulted in air-tight last-minute rotations oh seeing it almost tried to flip it again did you see that as the viewers poured in the scope of the competitive scene began to dawn on anna and mike i never realized how much of a thing this was i have no i still have no idea how big a thing it is although uh as i said uh back in the old days uh when there were only a few posted scores better than mine uh and now obviously a lot more people play all i know is my dad called me on the phone once if you i think it was 2018 to tell me that it was on espn and i was really surprised huh oh my gosh the winner of this gets three thousand dollars i'm not i'm not in it for the money i'm not even in it for the fame i'm really just in it to uh keep my old hands from succumbing to arthritis before their time so the average age of competitors in the scene has skewed younger and younger over the years with the absolute upper limit being players in their early 40s at 59 mike was by far the oldest player to ever have seriously attempted to compete there is a competition named classic tetris gangs and one of them is geezers you could join oh thank tell them i'm so glad i got in this tournament see what happens when you network someone said jonas is 62. oh okay well i'll be watching the board for you jonas i'll be watching that leaderboard wait mike do you know who jonas is should i jonas is the really good guy the one we thought was from germany but he's actually from california no he's not that old no they said he's 38 or 39. i was going to say he doesn't yeah he didn't look at that apparently it's just a meme uh-huh sorry jonas yeah i've seen you play you're good kind of like anna they said two years ago a spanish commentator made up facts about jonas and then a news source actually published them oh okay that reminds me of the borat theme song oh yes oh tell tell the tell the fans about the borat theme song if they don't know what they really should know they're going you're going about to become culturally illiterate folks for those of you who have seen borat or at least know of it there's a song that they made up about kazakhstan in the movie and then there is a professional figure skating competition that actually played it as the kazakhstan national anthem that that is news worth knowing about i was curious in the chat if mike had been the one to get anna into tetris i don't think i introduced her she probably just walked in while i was playing oh that's true because it was at nana's house yeah i think it was great mike came home from the holidays i locked myself away in that back room because we didn't used to have a nest at mike's it was only at my grandparents house so every time he came home to visit he'd get so excited to play that my brother and i would be so excited to watch him we'd sit back there for hours watching him play tetris and mario and captain skyhawk i remember i would go to school and tell all my friends that you could beat mario and none of them ever knew what i was talking about because they didn't know what an nes was yeah see this is that cultural literacy anna cultural literacy afterwards i was wondering how they had even found out about the tournament to qualify in the first place how did you learn about this you don't just google tetris tournaments one day that's so scary i think that's what i did the other alternative is i remember looking for like tetris high scores and uh twin galaxies came up i i like the fact that they have a max out uh that lets you feel good about the game once you get to a certain point did you think they were real at first no no i thought that there was something like uh like world jumps and super mario brothers or or some kind of a gimmick because i didn't uh i didn't think anybody could because you know i was i was scoring five hundred thousand and all of a sudden there are people doubling that over the course of the two-hour stream anna and mike got a crash course from the viewers about a ton of the quirks of nes tetris including the answers to some questions they had wondered about for years is 29 when it gets even faster does it i don't know and no alexi knows but but no no apparently that's called the kill screen i can see why i think i've gotten five lines after that oh five wow yeah i i could see how one could get three lines and then four you get one more after after this i've wondered that they say it never goes any faster after that well there you go well as i say even if it does it's no no human being would know apparently there's one person who can play there huh world record is 124 lines oh after 29 okay by a person named eric a human person and i'm guessing he's a human person well ordinarily i would agree with you but you've offered some contradictory evidence and mike was incredibly receptive to all the advice he was given for his own games more than just a left well he had a tendency to put the well left right center wherever he felt like i am going to try and learn to do more with the right since everybody seems to think that's a good idea and i'm not the kind of person that can't learn and every so often the stream would turn into story time tell them your story but when you turned off the next box someone just asked how you would do with that off yeah i uh it seemed like the pace was normal and and i could uh see what the pieces were and where i wanted them to go but i just was uh was not able to get them where i wanted to on time and uh i was thinking of having a stroke i honestly thought i was having a stroke because uh you know it's uh and i didn't realize it was because i didn't see what was coming and i lost all the advanced planning time but you know it just shows that you you're doing all that subconsciously by the end of the stream mike and anna were already setting their sights on attending in person next year well now that anna's posted a a worthwhile score we're gonna do a crowd fund to see if we're not crowd funding no all right i'll take you to port one i can take you to portland i have a job now yeah a better one than i ever had so mike's personal goal for the stream was 500 000. so far his best score of the day had been 349 thousand it was all going to come down to his final game oh that's it folks but as mike and anna had said earlier on in the stream it wouldn't be all for long someone asked if we'd be interested in participating year-round in tournaments in tournaments oh yeah sure that's french for of course yes i think we're both interested it's a lot of fun what's not to like well we will be playing more online tetris now that i have a discord account and a twitch account so if you want to see mike and anna's future streams cause i know i do these are both of their twitch pages and that's not all there's also a film that mike was proud to be part of mike is an award-winning film director i was a final editing consultant i am in the credits and it's on uh it's on youtube just look for mike dersi on youtube and it should come up so if you want to check out mike's film i'll have a link to that in the description too overall throughout watching mike and anna's stream it's clear that tetris is a special passion that they've been able to share over the years she seems to play a lot better when i give her something to erase genuinely if he puts up a score then i oh my god i'm going to take it off and i find it really cool that the internet has made it possible for them to become part of a worldwide community that also shares that exact same passion anna has a shot at making the main bracket this year and mike of course is still in the running for the semi-pro one you can follow along all week with the online leaderboards which i'll also link below however it turns out i'll be looking forward to seeing what happens thanks for watching and i'll see you guys next time you

Channel: aGameScout

Views: 731,130

Keywords: agamescout, nes tetris, classic tetris, agamescout tetris, classic tetris world championship, uncle mike, oldest tetris player, oldest tetris

Id: 9CRYxZey5Mk

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020