There are at least two movesets here that, in my view, deserve some serious attention from the MC community and are worthy of being quoted as guidance for future tournament use.
Really a pleasure to participate. I’ve been a student of MC since 1993, and this game ranks right up there with some of the greatest I’ve watched.
Hats off to Martini Enfield, and all the brilliant plays of this game.
Congrats to Martini Enfield. I didn’t think anybody would get past Bricker or Wargamer, but truly there wasn’t a poor play to be had by anyone. The RAIT was a masterwork, though. Well done, all.
Yep, that was a heck of a final move. Martini has my congratulations. I simply wasn’t quick enough on my followup after Wargamer’s big jump to Arsenal. It’s a hell of a use of the RAIT move, which itself is unknown to most players who haven’t studied both match history and the nuances of Rule 7.6 (especially subparagraphs c through f.)
This game reminded me of the 1933 Duels World Championship quarterfinal in Lisbon between Torrez and McPherson, which of course you can review in enormous detail in Horovitz’s 100 Great Matches Of the 1930s. McPherson also finished that one with a RAIT, though not from Arsenal. (He actually came back from Hampstead.) Granted, head-to-head play isn’t the same as a group match, but in a way that makes Martini’s finishing move all the more impressive, doesn’t it?
You know, at the risk of advancing a heretical opinion, those guys in the 1930s didn’t do squat.
Why? They had a tiny (comparatively) playing field. It’s easy, as McPherson did in the match you mention, to play a RAIT move from Hampstead. Hellishly difficult, you say? Not at all, for Swiss Cottage and St John’s Wood didn’t exist.
Emil Ostrovsky did a paper called Exponential and Logarithmic Complexities in Analysis of the Consequences of The Use of a Secondary Straddle-Shunt in Mornington Crescent Following the Opening of Pimlico. (Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computational Analysis March 1973, pp 61-79.) He provides a simple chart showing the complexity of MC strategy as a function of the year (based on the number and topology of existing stations) and reaches some surprising results. I know it’s simply “not done” to sneer at the classic matches of yesteryear, but seriously: it’s a different game now.
Brilliantly played, Martini Enfield and the others who managed to stay with the endplay. I have learned so much from this game. Our club has put a who meeting aside to study it, but I suspect we will need a good few meetings on it. Fantastic.
Look, I wouldn’t doubt for a minute that the masters of the pre-war period like McPherson, Varga and Swidzinsky, if you put them in a time machine, popped them out in 2008 and asked them to play an international match, would be overwhelmed. Even if you gave them a chance to study modern maps, there were no double token moves, no interzone holiday transfers (until 1964, anyway) and cab line jumps weren’t permitted.
But those great players were playing under the conditions of the day, and developed their skills in MC as it was then understood. If Swidzinsky had been born in 1971 instead of 1871, he’d have grown up learning MC as we now play it, developing his skills in the Polish Junior League, then the Continental Association, and so on, rather than against peasants.
And the players of those days had disadvantages, too. The participants the Beijing Games were all flown in on comfortable jets, housed in nice quarters, fed nutritionally balanced meals. Nobody today has to think through three matches after a fourteen-hour train ride, with the fact weighing on their mind that if they don’t win there’ll be no meal money. At the 1905 Bucharest Open, the great Persian champion Makhal Farakhani arrived only after three months’ arduous journey over most of Asia, having all his possession stolen by bandits in the Gobi Desert, and only after he arrived in Shanghai did he learn Bucharest was in the other direction. And don’t even start in with me on what the Negro League players went through.
Sure, it was a simpler game, but the genius of the players is evident, and given a chance in modern conditions, with modern training methods, they’d stack up.
I can only say it’s been an honour to have been part of this game with some of the greatest MC players I’ve had the pleasure to come across!
Sure, I got lucky- but had someone else played Westminster, then the next move would have been an easy Hansard Flank and Mornington Crescent would have been theirs…
It only goes to show how complex this game really is, and what great people are here on the boards to compete against!
Well, you have a point – I think their genius was shown by the analytical methods they created, the shortcuts that bear their names. (Who hasn’t delighted in playing a Swidzinsky Shuffle, after all?)
And I readily acknowledge the lack of creature comforts back in the day.
Still, the purely inescapable fact and mathematically provable fact is that today, MC is more complex. On the other hand, perhaps we couldn’t address that complexity so effectively today if we didn’t have their earlier work to build upon…
I think that’s why Bricker has such a knack for this; there are many similarities between Common Law precedents (as he is familiar with in his line of work and I am from my studies) and a high-level game of Mornington Crescent.
In fact, I’m increasingly of the opinion that there should be a Bachelor of Mornington Crescent degree offered at some Higher Education institutions; there are already degrees in Sports Science so why not one for perhaps the most intellectual game in the world?
Some prominent schools do offer seminar and lecture COURSES in MC, just not entire degree programs. I took the elective ECON 241, “Comparative Game Theory in Mornington Crescent,” as part of my undergrad program at Queen’s University, which is certainly a school of considerable stature. My instructor, Dr. Geren, was twice a semifinalist at the Cup of the Americas, in 1979 and 1981, and made the Canadian Olympic squad in 1984, though he didn’t medal. (He was up against Horning in the round of 32, so whaddya expect.) It was a hell of a course; I was on the edge of my seat in every class. My final paper, “Unresolvable equilibrium states in four-hand District Line midgame strategies,” got an A, and Professor Geren felt it was genuinely original work. I’d been a casual Crescenter before that, but that course was really what made me serious about the craft.
There was talk here in Ontario of colleges (here, “college” is an institution that grants two and three-year technical diplomas, sort of like a technical/community college. The schools that grant actual bachelor’s and graduate degrees are always called “universities”) having two-year MC diploma programs. This was, oh, 20 years ago or so. However, the idea didn’t get a lot of support from the Royal Canadian Mornington Crescent Association because the theory was that the stigma of being relegated to community colleges would prevent it from ever being a degree program at a university.
Interestingly, in retrospect, that was probably a bad move, because since then, some of the better colleges have been certified to grant university-level degrees in some areas; so maybe it would have worked out like the RCMCA wanted.