A Timmins teen is ready to see how he stacks up against the best in the world.
Jake Beaulieu, 15, is competing in the Classis Tetris World Championships. The competition starts Oct. 31 and runs until mid-December. Going into it, he's seeded eighth out of the 64 players.
“A realistic expectation is to make it to the top 16. A realistic hope is to make it to the top eight, and my ultimate goal would be to win the tournament, obviously,” he said.
This is the first time the Grade 10 student at Timmins High and Vocational School is competing in the tournament.
He said he's been playing the classic Nintendo game for about three years, and has been competing for a year or two.
The tournament is played on the original Nintendo Entertainment System from the '80s.
Beaulieu admits the system is "way before his time."
"Around my house, we always sort of had old stuff lying around, we’re weren’t always upgrading to the new stuff immediately so I had a lot of stuff that my dad had as a kid. I was always sort of interested in it and I ended up finding Tetris,” he said.
Through the game and playing in tournaments — he just won the Canadian championship last weekend — he said he's made more connections with people and is having fun.
It's the simplicity of the game that drew him in.
"Anyone can pick up Tetris and know what to do, it’s pretty simple — you place the blocks down, you clear lines,” he said.
“But it’s so difficult to master and play at a high level that it’s really intriguing to see people that are so much better than you and it really drew me in ‘cause I thought I was good. When I was a kid playing at hockey practice, I thought I was some kind of super-genius for getting 80 lines and then there were people throwing down scores of over a million for breakfast, I just realized that I knew nothing and I felt like I had to learn everything."
For Tetris, shapes that can be rotated drop from the top of the screen for the player to place. When a line is full it's cleared from the screen. The more lines that are cleared at once, the more points you get. The game speeds up as points are accumulated.
"The best line clearer you can get is to get four at once with the long piece, so the goal is to stack as cleanly as possible on the left and keep getting four lines at once on the right. It’s difficult to keep that going forever, especially in a game that’s random. So the strategy to Tetris is just figuring out the best way to stack up your pieces to not have to take anything that’s not four lines,” he said.
If you're taking notes to better your game, stacking on the left and clearing on the right works for the NES game. For playing on a Gameboy, Beaulieu said it's the opposite — you want to stack on the right because of the direction the largest piece spins.
To prepare for the world championship, he said the key is not panicking.
“I think I can take anyone on a good day and I’m not scared, but I get nervous really easily. In a game like Tetris where you have to be constantly thinking if there’s anything else on your mind it just throws you off for the entire day. It’s really about being focused,” he said.
Typically for an in-person tournament, the players would be next to each other while playing.
For that, Beaulieu said it's "excruciating" to not look at his competitor's screen.
“I remember when I first started playing tournaments people would always call me out because half the time I wasn’t even looking at my own game, I was looking at theirs,” he recalled
While the world's will be virtual because of COVID-19, he'll likely still have a screen nearby showing his competitor's score and face.
“It’s about just as stressful knowing that they’re right next to me even if they’re not sitting there,” he said.
