Chadarnook said:
I do.
Arma, if I should call you that - do you arrange the puzzle in a specific way to ensure that you will be prepared for whatever piece gets thrown at you? I assume you arrange it so the I piece goes into the left side, since it rotates on it's axis in such a way that leaves a space of 1 cube from the left but 2 spaces from the right.
My attempts at googling FAQs have yielded nothing but those "Tetris 2/Tetris X" derivates (powerups, spaceships, whatever).
Well Chad, I see you go straight to the core, and that's the problem.
Correct stacking is something that is very hard to explain, and believe me, I've tried, in fact, I've written several essays on the subject.
The optimal way of stacking, in my opinion, is to make the well on either side - I don't care about right or left, that just depends on how the blocks fall and what comes natural. When I started playing, it was a saying among my co-players that the ones with the most natural talent were the ones who could build equally well with the well set on either side. The well should be 1x wide for about 5-6 y, and then 2x wide, so that you can chop off the field easily if it gets too high. This is the classic "newbie" strategy we teach.
As you improve you'll find it easy to switch sides for the well, or to put it in the middle if necessary. When you reach the higher levels it can actually work to your advantage to put the well in the middle because that way, if your speed is lacking, you won't need to bother with moving the cutoff block all the way to the edge.
You could try to look at my articles which are admittedly written for multiplayer Tetris, but some of it applies to regular Tetris as well.
http://hellfire.darktech.org/hellfire/main.html
Look for the articles written by spindizzy, that's me. Especially, probably,
http://hellfire.darktech.org/hellfire/pure.html
If you need something to watch I have a video for you:
http://www.wordforge.net/gallery/showimage.php?i=506&c=3&userid=317
a.
