Direct playable link: https://qntm.org/files/hatetris/hatetris.html
> Yes, you will get a lot of S pieces. But it doesn't give you solely S pieces - if that were the case, then it would be possible to make lines forever, which is much too easy.
The same people also proved (earlier) that with 3-ominos its a win for the player.
Incidentally, if you’re into cool maths that isn’t part of any major research line, Eureka is a great read.
The proof that Tris is a win for the player was published in Eureka 51 (1991) by Adam Chalcraft. Richard and Adam definitely know one another and I would be unsurprised to learn that they talked to one another about this stuff, but the actual writeups in Eureka were by different people.
(Quite possibly a substantial amount of the thinking was done collectively at meetings of the "Puzzles and Games Ring", a sort of sub-organization of the Archimedeans (the student mathematical society at the University of Cambridge, which publishes Eureka).