How to Get Better at Connect Four

You know the rules. You beat everyone at home. Then you play someone who actually studies the game and you lose six in a row without ever seeing where it went wrong.

The usual response is to play more games. That is how people stay at the same rating for a year.

Games give you a result. They do not give you feedback. You lost, and nobody tells you which of your twenty moves lost it. So you keep making the same move, keep losing, and call it experience.

Here is what to do instead.

Four Skills, Not One

"Getting better at Connect Four" is not one thing. It is four separate skills that fail in four distinct ways. Read the symptoms and find yours.

Almost nobody is weak at all four. Most players are strong at two, passable at one and completely blind in the fourth, and the blind one is setting their rating. Fix that one. Training the skill you already have is the most comfortable way to waste a month.

Step 0: Stop Losing to Things You Can Already See

Before any of the real training, install this. Three questions, in this order, before every single move:

1. Can I win right now? Scan all seven columns for a drop that makes four.
2. Can they win on their next move? Same scan, their colour. If yes, block it.
3. Does my disc open a winning square for them? Whatever column you are about to play, look at the square directly above where your disc lands. If that square completes four for your opponent, the move loses on the spot.

Question 3 is the one nobody runs. It is also where most games below club level are decided. Here is what it looks like.

Nothing looks urgent. Yellow has no four available anywhere on the board, and Red has no win either. Feels like a free move.

It is not. Yellow has three discs in a row on row 2 across columns 3, 4 and 5. That line completes at column 2 row 2, and at column 6 row 2. Both of those squares are currently out of reach, because columns 2 and 6 are empty and the next disc in each lands on row 1.

So if Red plays column 2, Red's disc fills row 1 and lifts Yellow straight into row 2. Yellow drops, four in a row, game over. Column 6 is exactly the same. Five columns are fine. Two lose immediately, and neither of them looks any different from the others until you run question 3.

Run it on every move, including the boring ones. Do it for two weeks until it is automatic and a chunk of your losses disappear without you learning a single new idea.

This is not a beginner-only habit, by the way. It is the same pruning rule a perfect solver applies at every node of a million-node search: delete every square sitting under an opponent winning square, then think about what is left. You can do the deleting part in three seconds.

Step 1: Learn One Opening, Not Seven

Connect Four is solved. Column 4 is the only first move that wins with perfect play. Everything else gives the second player at least a draw.

So as first player, open column 4. Every time. That is the whole opening decision, and it is worth more than any amount of memorised theory.

What you actually need to study is the next two or three moves, and only in the lines you keep meeting. Pick the replies your opponents actually play, learn what you are trying to build against each, and stop there. Depth 3 you can explain beats depth 8 you recited.

Memorising lines you cannot explain is the single most popular form of fake training. The moment your opponent leaves the book you are worse off than if you had never opened it, because you have no idea what the position was supposed to be doing.

Start with the openings database for the map, then the column 4 opening for the one you will actually play. If you are usually the second player, the P2 strategy guide is the more useful read, because your job there is different: you are playing for the draw and you need to know what that looks like.

Step 2: Puzzles, 15 Minutes a Day

Puzzles are the rep work. They are how a shape stops being something you calculate and becomes something you see.

The puzzle trainer serves win-in-1 through win-in-4 plus avoid-loss positions, rated 1 to 4 stars, and it tracks a separate puzzle rating from your game rating so the number is honest about what you are actually training.

Two rules make the difference between practice and clicking:

Do not guess. A guessed answer teaches you nothing and a lucky guess teaches you something false. Give yourself 60 seconds. If you cannot see it, spend another 30 working out what you are missing, then look.

Read the solution properly. The answer is the least valuable part. The valuable part is why the other five columns fail. If you cannot say that out loud, you have not finished the puzzle.

Fifteen minutes is enough. Fifteen minutes every day beats two hours on Sunday, because you are building recall, and recall is built by frequency. Most puzzles at the sharper end are double threat shapes, so that is the pattern you will internalise first, and it is the right one.

Step 3: Climb the Engine Ladder

The engine has ten levels, and they are deliberately different opponents rather than the same opponent with a speed dial:

There are named bots sitting at the useful rungs if you prefer an opponent with a face: Martin at level 2, Elena at 4, Nelson at 6, Sophie at 8, Antonio at 10.

The method matters more than the level. Find the level where you win about one game in three. Stay there until you win two in three. Then move up one. That is it.

Players get this wrong in both directions. Grinding level 3 because winning is pleasant teaches you nothing you did not already know. Grinding level 10 because you want a real test also teaches you nothing, because you lose every game to a move you cannot understand yet. One in three is where the games are still decided by mistakes you are capable of spotting.

Level 10 has exactly one good use, and it is the next step.

Step 4: Play the Endgame to the Last Disc

The most instructive drill in Connect Four is the one everybody skips: take a dead-looking position against the engine and play it out to move 42.

Never resign to the engine. When the board is three quarters full and both sides have blocked everything, that is not the end of the game. That is the part where the game gets decided.

You cannot pass in Connect Four. Every disc you drop hands your opponent the square on top of it, and when you run out of squares you can safely fill, you are forced to open the one that loses. Two things to count while you play it out:

• Every empty square is a win for you, a win for them, or dead. Dead squares are the moves you can afford to make. Count them on both sides.
• A column with an even number of empty squares gives the turn back to whoever entered it. An odd column flips the turn to the other player. Choosing which column to burn first is the entire endgame.

The engine will punish every counting error, and it will do it the same way every time, which is exactly what makes it a teacher. The full method is in the endgame and zugzwang guide, and the arithmetic underneath it is the odd/even threat rule.

This is the skill that separates 1400 from 1700. It is also pure arithmetic, which means it is the most learnable thing on this list. No talent required.

Step 5: Review, or None of the Above Counts

If you do one thing from this article, do this one.

Every game you play on play4row can be run through the solver in review. You get an accuracy score for both players and a label on every single move: best, good, inaccuracy, mistake, blunder, plus forced when there was only one move that avoided losing immediately and critical when there was only one move that kept the game alive at all.

Most people open a review, scroll the move list, nod at their blunder and close it. That is not reviewing, that is confirming.

Do this instead:

1. Find the first mistake or blunder. Not the biggest one. The first one. Everything after it is downstream.
2. Cover the engine's answer. Look at the position and find the right move yourself. If you cannot, you have found a gap, and that gap is worth more than the answer.
3. Name which of the four skills failed. Pattern, calculation, parity, opening or clock. Be specific and be honest.
4. Write one line down. "Move 14, opened column 5 under his row-3 threat, skipped question 3."

After twenty games you will have twenty lines, and they will collapse into three recurring errors. That list is your real training plan. Everything in this article is a guess until you have it.

Review your wins too. A win with 78% accuracy contains more lessons than a loss, and it is the one you will never look at unless you make yourself.

What Not to Do

Playing twenty fast games back to back. You are rehearsing your current habits at speed. If you are training rather than grinding, play 10+5 or 15+10 and give yourself room to run question 3.

Reviewing only losses. Your worst habits show up in games you won. Those are the ones that will catch up with you.

Chasing the rating daily. Your rating is Glicko-2, starting at 1500, and it carries a confidence range that swings noticeably over a handful of games. A five-game sample tells you nothing. Look at the number monthly, and judge your week by whether the mistake list is getting shorter.

Studying theory instead of playing. The nine rules Allis used to solve the game are fascinating and they will not win you a single game next week. Theory is how you understand what happened. Reps are how you stop it happening.

A Week That Works

Roughly two and a half hours. Less than most players already spend losing quick games.

The reviews are not optional extras stapled to the games. They are the reason the games count.

Start Now

Pick the weak skill from the table at the top. Then go do the one drill attached to it.

If you are not sure which it is, do this: play one game against Nelson at level 6, review it, and find your first mistake. It will tell you immediately.

Then start the puzzle streak, because that is the habit everything else is built on.

Nobody gets better at Connect Four by playing more Connect Four. You get better by finding out what you got wrong, and that takes ten minutes after the game, not another game.