Did someone beat you in Tetris? It's not luck.

Let me guess: Some fan of Tetris sent you to this page when you complained about getting an unlucky sequence of Tetriminos. The fact is that the pieces you got aren't based on luck.

Older games would choose pieces purely at random, sometimes flooding the player with a run of the "snake" pieces (S and Z) that aren't useful in large groups. But since 2001, most Tetris brand games have used a randomizer that gives the player the same amount of all seven kinds of pieces. It does this by shuffling the seven pieces into a random order, dealing them all, and repeating the process. For example, you might get LSIJZOT, then ZSTILOJ, etc. Specifically, there can't be more than twelve pieces between two I pieces. This introduces a bit of chance into the short term, so that the player can't just memorize a sequence, while keeping the long term fair and balanced. You can read more about it on the "Random Generator" page on Hard Drop Wiki.

© 2007 Damian Yerrick. Some rights reserved: feel free to use, reproduce, distribute, perform, or display this document, verbatim or modified, provided that you preserve the copyright notice and this permission notice.