Diving Final▶Play

Call your difficulty, then land the entry. The hardest dive is not the best dive.

How to play

Pick a dive, then tap twice: once on the takeoff mark and once at the instant the diver comes upright for the entry. Harder dives spin faster, so the entry window flashes past in less time — a three-somersault dive turns once in about four tenths of a second. Points are difficulty times execution times three, and a missed entry scores nothing at all, so the biggest dive is not automatically the best one. Six dives make a final; beat the rival's total and you advance to the next final against a better rival, lose and the run is over. Your score is every point you scored along the way.

Tips & strategy

Find your ceiling in the first final and then stay just under it. Every diver has one difficulty at which the entry still feels catchable and the next one up does not, and that boundary is worth more than any amount of trying hard. Open a final with a dive you are confident in, watch what the execution score comes back as, and move one step up only if you landed it cleanly twice.

The reason greed fails here is that a missed entry is not a low score, it is a zero. A three-somersault dive that lands is worth roughly half again what a two-somersault dive is worth, but if you miss it one time in three you have already given back more than the difficulty ever paid you. Consistency is multiplied by difficulty, not added to it.

The takeoff tap matters more than it looks. It has a generous window, so most players stop paying attention to it — but execution multiplies the two taps together, and a lazy takeoff quietly caps whatever the entry could have earned. Land the easy tap properly and the hard one is worth twice as much.

The one time to abandon all of this is the last dive of a final when you are behind. Then the question is not what scores most on average but what has any chance of closing the gap: if you need sixty points from one dive, the safe dive cannot produce them at any execution score, and the biggest dive you have is the correct call even though it usually fails. Equally, if you are comfortably ahead going into the final dive, drop to the easiest dive on the board — you are not trying to score, you are trying not to zero.