I recently had somebody tell me while I was streaming a game of Nullpomino, "nice hold piece abuse". I did notice I use the hold queue a lot, and one day I decided to measure exactly how much by watching a replay of my highest-ranked game of Grade Mania 3 and counting using a counter. In a single game, I used the hold queue a grand total of 289 times (248 in the main game, 41 in the roll) — that's about once every 2.77 pieces. In comparison, the guy in this video used it a total of 119 times plus 28 times in the roll, for a total of 147 — only half as much as me. How often do you use it yourself, in games that have one? Have you ever noticed that you use it a lot or very seldom?
I try to make sure I have a good piece in the hold queue, yet at the same time I won't allow the stack to be bad. So I use the hold queue a lot.
There is no such thing as Hold abuse, especially in a game with a randomiser like TGM's. You want to use Hold as much as possible to keep the stack in a nice shape and also reorder the Next piece lineup. People with good stacking in the first place will generally use Hold less.
Wow, I really need to retrain myself to think that way. I've used the hold feature maybe ten times on my way to S3-S4, and half those just to replenish my I piece. At least I use it to fill wells before they become mistakes. To be fair, I've played fewer than 100 games of TGM3.
Generally the rule of thumb that I observe myself following is: Use the hold queue when your hold piece is more convenient than the next piece for your current stack. If you do initial holds in TGM3, then the hold queue basically functions as an extension of the next queue that you can activate at will by holding that button down before the piece spawns. With that sort of paradigm about the hold queue, you can end up using it 3 or 4 times in a row before the actual next piece becomes more convenient.
Literally every 300+ shirase game that I have played, has been a no hold. Even when I do use it, I fuck up quite a bit. As someone who had never played a Tetris game with Hold and 3+ preview before, TGM3 is a very new experience for me.
Shirase is probably not the best place to learn the hold feature anyway. You have to be muscle memory fast, and there's enough lag in TGM3 that you just don't have any room for error.
As near as I can tell the intended purpose of hold is to re-arrange your next piece queue. When used for that purpose, no matter how often, it's definitely not abuse. Hold can also be used to stall or correct mistakes made with the current piece. Some people may consider this abuse.
Try finding and looking at some of KevinDDR's early videos - there's a reason that "kevhold" became a term. Using hold can definitely be abused in TGM3 in the same way that movement-reset in SRS can be abused, just not to quite the same extent. Holding the majority of pieces buys you a lot more thinking time if you do it halfway through the lock delay, and the hold button can also give you a do-over if you temporarily need some extra time to figure out where you want to put something. Obviously for higher level players it stops being a thing when you're no longer pushed for speed, and when torikans start to be a big deal, but it's still occasionally useful as a "oh crap give me a sec..." panic button rather than using it purely because you prefer your held piece in the sequence. As for how often to hold, I think it depends entirely on the mode. For games like Ti Master or multiplayer, where stack form is incredibly important, I'd agree with what c_t said on using it quite frequently (so long as it's during ARE where possible to minimise the impact on speed). For games like Shirase or 40 line runs then personally I feel my best runs are ones where I hardly ever use hold except when there's a huge situational benefit from it. That's not so much a conscious decision as much as when I'm entirely "in the zone" or whatever I just don't feel like I need to use it as much, and I feel it derails my concentration a little bit when I have to think about it.
Sequence hold is a mechanic where pressing the hold button doesn't swap the active piece with the held piece, but rather the next piece. Think of it as forced IHS (initial hold). You can't abuse it to stall the game.
Does that exist? It would be a nice idea if it weren't for the fact, that not even having a hold button remains the better solution.
The better solution to what? To prevent the non-existent 'problem' of hold 'abuse' while making the highest grades of Master and Shirase mode (not to mention Easy and Sakura mode) almost impossible to attain? There's no rule saying when you can or can't use hold (other than the one actually enforced by the game), and TGM3 would be a crippled, worse game without the button.
Well, that's pretty much the point I was making... It's a great solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Either you have the hold button, or you don't.
