HOWTO play Tetris forever


Given a standard Tetris engine (which drops pieces in a pseudorandom order, has previews, and allows holding), this method will allow you to play Tetris forever. As always, the most fascinating thing about this is the specialized vocabulary used to describe the method:

Worst case bag distributions such as H?XX?X? and H?XXX?? deserve a special mention. The first piece 'H' denotes a piece which must be placed in Hold in order to follow the STZ loop procedure. Pieces from the LJO loop are denoted by '?', and the remaining pieces are denoted by 'X'. Using 3 previews and Hold, it is only possible to see the first 4 pieces of the bag before the second piece enters the screen. This means you only see H?XX, and only know the first piece of the LJO loop. Because H must be put in Hold, you are forced to make a decision without knowing the order of the rest of the LJO loop. If the O comes first, you can follow the procedure above without problems. The rest of the time you will run into complications like this:


Playing forever

(via Hacker News)