four-column Tetris strategy

How to get BIG Points in The New Tetris

The goal of Tetris is to get a high score by creating several unbroken horizontal rows with one tetramino. One way of achieving this is to keep a hole in one side of the playfield, four to eight blocks tall and one block wide. Another is to keep an organized field and partition the screen into four vertical strips:

|                   |
|                   |
|                   |
|_______            |
|  ___| |           |
|_|   | |           |
| |___| |      _    |
|_____|_|    _| |_  |
|   |   |   |  _| |_|
|___|___|   |_| |_  |
| |___  |   |  _| |_|
|_____|_|___|_|_____|
 A A A A B B C C D D

1. the "four-by-four square" column. L, J, Square, and Stick tetraminoes can fit in here when not fitting in column B. Creating and then destroying four-by-four-block squares of entire tetraminoes is the main scoring technique in The New Tetris; two are stacked in this column.
2. the scoring column. Use this to make three- and four-liners if you can.
3. the Z piece column, and
4. the S piece column. It's a heck of a lot easier to place these odd pieces when you have a column reserved for them.

The four columns may shift back and forth during a game, largely when T pieces appear.

Note that this exact strategy does not work well in a Tetris clone whose well is not 10 blocks wide (such as Tetripz or Tetrinet), or in a Tetris clone that uses pieces larger or smaller than four blocks. But RST points out that "tetrinet uses 12x22, and four-column works with some modifications with a width of nine (drop an L or reversed L for a three-line score depending on what side your S and Z are on, and I for a four-line score."

For a larger illustration of this, see http://www.mindlick.com/tetris/media/screenshots/tnewt_screenshots.htm