Double push

The double push is used to crash a compact group of petals. It involves splitting up a compact group by pushing one of its petals away, and then pushing it back in the direction it came from. A double push is generally considered a mild tempo loss, though there are circumstances when it is the best option, and others where it is required.

Double pushes attempted without proper awareness of the board can result in petals being locked behind blocks spawning in, or lost to color conflicts. Additionally, double pushes are very risky in Trash Attack, where garbage may spawn without warning in the path of the second push.

Avoiding double pushes

The key to avoiding double pushes is to consider that when you already have a compact link, it is likely possible to extend the chain from that link without much of an issue. Consider the following board:

A 3-chain can be taken here by pushing the right-most yellow right, resulting in this board:

and then moving it back to the left, crashing the yellows, followed by the green and red links. However, this would not work on the following board:

as the yellow petal would be consumed by the garbage spawner after pushing it to the right:

However, the yellow link can be extended by pushing the purple on the right over to the left:

Now there is a 4-chain starting from the purples on this board, and the chain still took only two moves to trigger.

Other pitfalls

Let's look at a similar board:

In this circumstance, a player may not see the yellow on the right. If a double push is attempted, then the petal intended to trigger the chain will crash with the yellow on the right instead, leaving the player with this board:

In this circumstance, the double push can be avoided by pushing the rightmost yellow to the left, allowing the chain to be triggered in one move instead. However, if the potentially conflicting petal is e.g. on the other side of the board, this is easy to miss when playing quickly. Care must be taken before attempting a double push.