CTG Liga NTSC - Season 1 in 2026

Published: March 6, 2026 • Reading Time: 5 min

Table of Contents

Small Note: This is my first ever recap, so it is a bit shorter! I also will not get into the full explanation of how Tetris works in prior posts and instead link to this one.

Of course, I recommend reading my documentation about some technical aspects first:

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NTSC Mechanics: DAS vs. Rolling A technical breakdown of Classic NES Tetris movement mechanics and playstyles.
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What is the CTG Liga?

The CTG Liga is an online League organized by Classic Tetromino-Games Germany e.V. You can get a basic idea of what it is by visiting the official site: https://ctgev.de/pages/liga.html#info

The short (and translated into English) version is the following:

How did it go?

So the short version is: Anton/Tugi won.

Let’s talk about the past

The longer version is that this was quite a different start to the year than we—or at least I—expected. For example, there was a bit of a “scandal” at the end of last year due to some challenges to increase the prize pool (basically: fancy move = extra money for the prize pool). This wasn’t received too favorably by some people and, therefore, it was changed. In PAL II (the last season of 2025), we had a match with one of those challenges, which led to the players not performing as well as they normally do. On one hand, this is quite sad, but on the other, it’s also the kind of fun that I love Tetris for. Yes, it is a serious eSport, but it is also just supposed to be a fun time for everyone involved. It’s always a tough decision to make.

But to talk about the effect this had: in the last season, we had a huge prize pool of $102.20, whereas this season, nobody donated extra, so we only had a baseline prize pool of $50. This means that whereas Shuichi got $51.10 last season, Anton only got $27.50 this season! Let’s see how this will evolve over the future seasons; I definitely hope (and will make sure) that the next seasons will be a bit better in terms of prize money.

But how did the matches go?

Now about the matches. We of course had a ton of matches in Division 1, which I will focus on here. This season, they all have been streamed on YouTube as well, so I can actually link them here! In general, the streams featured 3 players with 3 matches, so Player A vs Player B, Player A vs Player C, and Player B vs Player C.

This season had a lot of DAS matches, which is why we started with them in January. As you read earlier, DAS is quite tough to play, especially on level 19. This hasn’t stopped anyone here from playing though! Shuichi and Eliwa (the reigning PAL champion and the Queen of Tetris) started the season showing us some amazing DAS action. And Eliwa actually managed to win—even sweep—the match in an amazing start to the year.

In terms of match highlights, there were a few moments that I distinctly remember. For example, Eliwa managed to get really far into level 29 in one of her matches. That is an achievement to be proud of, as level 29 is nearly unplayable with DAS. I also remember some of the great paces shown with over 600k transitions into level 19, which for DAS players is incredibly tough to achieve. Another highlight for me was when Eliwa, a DAS player, managed to win a game against Tugi, a high-level roller. It was really unexpected and pure hype. There were also some really high scores achieved in the last match, Eliwa vs Tugi, like how Tugi got those 1.2 million point games. Definitely something you don’t see too often!

We also had quite a few early top-outs, so I of course could not resist:

A meme describing how despite Division 1 being called the crème de la crème of German-speaking Tetris, there are still a lot of early topouts.
The Division 1 Reality Check.

Make sure to check out and post to r/CTGermany for more memes! I may even use some of them on stream.

The stuff we don’t like

There were a few low points as well, though. The worst ones to me are always when NestrisChamps doesn’t quite work as expected. For context, we have been using NestrisChamps at in-person events with very few issues, yet online there are oftentimes small bugs due to how AV captures behave. This is a pain point we are willing to take as the upsides—a cleaner image and more stats—are worth it to us.

VODs for Division 1

If you want to experience the event yourself, here are the links to the Matchdays. For future events, I highly recommend following our YouTube channel or our Twitch channel.

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