Classic Tetris World Championship

Classic Tetris World Championships

Tournament information
Sport	Tetris
Location	Portland, Oregon
Established	2010
Number of tournaments	One annually
Current champion
Jonas Neubauer

The Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) is a video game competition series, hosted by the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. The competition launched in 2010, during the filming of Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters to determine the world's greatest Tetris player.^[1] The first two years the competition was held in Los Angeles, California^[2] but has since moved to Portland, Oregon and has been held there annually since 2012.

The contestants play on actual Nintendo Entertainment Systems and CRT-Televisions. The final rounds are streamed online with live-edited screens and Head-up display to improve viewer experience. The tournament has been dominated by Jonas Neubauer, who has won six titles and only lost the final in 2014 to Harry Hong.

Competition

The competition takes place over two days, with the Qualifying Round on the first day and the Main Event on the second. Contestants are allowed to bring their own controller, but it must be an original, unmodified NES Controller.

Qualifying Round

Qualifying takes place on a fixed number of NES stations. Entrants play "Type A" Tetris, starting on level 9 or higher, and are ranked based on their final score. Once an entrant's game ends for any reason, his/her total must be recorded by a tournament scorekeeper in order to be valid. Entrants may make as many qualifying attempts as they wish, but must return to the back of the waiting line for each one. Additionally there is the option to pay small amout of money and rent a station for an hour.

The top 32 scorers are seeded into a tournament bracket for the Main Event.^[3]

Main Event

The Main Event is a single-elimination tournament consisting of five rounds of head-to-head matches, with seeds from opposite ends of the rankings pitted against each other in the first round (#1 vs. #32, #2 vs. #31, etc.).

For the first game of each match, the higher-seeded player chooses the starting level (9-18 for the first two rounds, 15 or higher for the last three). Both players begin to play at the same time on separate systems, and the game continues until one of the following occurs:

• Trailing player tops-out (leader wins)
• Leader tops-out; trailing player fails to match that score before topping-out (leader wins)
• Leader tops out; trailing player passes that score (trailing player wins)

The lower-seeded player chooses the starting level for the second game; if a third game is needed, the higher-seeded player chooses the level.

Two games are needed to win a match and advance in the first four rounds, while the finals are best three out of five.^[3]

Results

Cartridge

2013 CTWC Box and Cartridge.

The Classic Tetris World Championships competition is played on the original 8-bit Nintendo Tetris cartridge (not the Tengen version). Individuals that supported the event received a gold limited edition copy of the game. Each cartridge is a hand painted NES Tetris cartridge with a custom Classic Tetris World Championship label. The cartridge comes inside an NES style cardboard box. Around 12-26 gold carts are produced each year (CTWC Event Producer, email, June 29, 2015). In 2014, the boxes and cartridges were numbered 1-26.

Side events

Durring the expo there have been several tournaments on other systems over the years, for example: Tetris & Dr. Mario on SNES, Tetris Ultimate on the PlayStation 4 or Tetris: The Grand Master 2 on Arcade.

See also

• Nintendo World Championships
• Nintendo PowerFest '94
• Nintendo Campus Challenge

References

External links

• Official Classic Tetris World Championship Site
• Official Facebook Page
• Twitch website
• Portland Retro Gaming Expo