Ha-Ha! Almost there: Pimlico!
Welcome to the game matt_mcl. I’m afraid I must appeal against your play of Victoria, and request an adjudication from Mangetout.
I submit that, given my echo play (Theydon Bois), which happened either side of a preceding silent vowel play, the frame is in the same state as if Navaho had been declared. This being so, a move to Victoria would constitute an act of drubbing, which of course is illegal except when accompanied by declaration of Cottam’s Convention. As no such declaration was made or conceded, I respectfully submit that ‘Victoria’ was not a legal play at this time.
Since it’s Tuesday, I’ll use Willsdon’s Ruse and play Marylebone.
And that’s exactly where my newbiness shows. I thought my Pimlico play to be so brilliant :smack: almost at the level of Ian the Third’s unprecedented third Lyllmlyn! And so… I must forfeit at least 3 Desiatinas…
Colour-change and back shunt to Green Park! 
What the holy hell are you all talking about?
I mean, this doesn’t make any sense at all.
Seriously. Sunspace, shunting into a primary color on an even month is the kind of mistake I’d expect a child to make. And I don’t want to hear a damn thing about the Gracie Exception because we all know it’s been disallowed since the Third Convocation of Escles.
So, unless you’re willing to claim you’re 2/5 Taiwanese, you may have just handed the game over to anyone born on February 29.
Line jump to Marble Arch.
Green isn’t a primary colour of pigment but is a primary colour of light. Given it is night in London at the time of play, colours must be defined by pigment not light. (Hobson’s Appendum, 2004, p. 245).
So that allows me to shunt Stepney Green!
Regent’s Park.
Not only that, but it is dark here in Toronto as well, so that allows me to declare the Trans-Atlantic Luminous Commonality. And ArizonaTeach’s outburst has failed to obscure the fact that line velocities are creeping up again, as the system winds down for the night, so I am quite happy to do a Bicolour Inversion and end up at Bethnal Green.
Dammit Sunspace! I will now have to rethink my stragtegy.
Mmmm…Old Street. Take that!
Oh no you didn’t. You’re seriously going to play under Cartel Rules. My God, back in my day, we didn’t have all these fancy variations. Why, I remember back in the Eastern Hemisphere Regionals (the real EHR, not the splinter group that was formed when Whimseley contested the ruling that typos on third-party map guides werem’t tourney-legal) when some joker tried to suggest instituting directional foci partitioned through metric conversions when tabulating secondary instrumentation standards. And I think we all know how that turned out.
That said, I will abide by what seems to be this overwhelming tide of simplifying the game and navigate towards Morden, which unless I miss my guess effectively opens us into a Grimstad Protocol. Diggit, I think you know what I’m trying to do here. I’ve pretty much dealt myself out of a win, but if you have my back here we can clench one for North America and erase that terrible insult that was done to us in the semi-finals.
I still think **Victoria ** was lawful, but no matter. Covent Garden will bring us nicely back to the status quo ante, especially considering L’Allier’s Exception for stations with distance indicators.
I believe the Grimstad Protocol allows me to follow Covent Garden with Chalk Farm but as I said I’m really new to the game. Advise?
Until Mangetout or someone of similar authoritative standing (agreeable to all parties) steps up with an adjudication concerning my protest over the earlier Victoria incident, I would personally suggest that play cannot proceed past that point and subsequent moves are void. Then again I could just politely rule myself out from the game and watch from the sidelines.
Arizona Teach, may I just say welcome to the game. Your posts woud seem to indicate not only a fervent devotion to the game but also an admirable level of expertise. Some of your comments have had me scurrying to the reference books! You also seem to share my love for some (though perhaps not all!) of the noble game’s finer details and less well-known manoeuvres. It’s very heartening to see such a high level of proficiency from your side of the pond.
Oh, that’s just being petulant. Look, I offered Covent Garden, which would set us all back to where we were regardless of whether or not the Victoria was legal. I mean, come on – if I wanted to press the point, I’d have played Mansion House and put half of us in Spoon with the Blue Plaque Special.
The Grimstad Protocol itself is no longer canonical within Tournament Play. It was included in the 6th edition of Hobson, but not the 7th (current) edition, and so it cannot be admitted as a legal play. Admittedly, the reason it didn’t appear in the current edition had nothing to do with any doubts or protests about its legitimacy, but was due to a simple printing error. We lost the sections devoted to Antrim Wedge Play and the Katz Dissension Rule at the same time, for the same reason (a bit of a blow for me personally, as I had become quite fond of the occasional Katz Dissension play).
However, all is not lost. While the Grimstad itself must await reinstatement in the next edition (whenever it sees the light of day), you can still achieve the CG > CF move you intended. You just have to go about it slightly differently. Considering that Bassingtons are still in force, and that we have had an odd number of circumflex plays crossing water or involving two-name stations (not counting parallel straddles or their equivalent when rendered on the geographically accurate map), the Denning Principle allows you to temporarily define Enclosed Outdoor Locales as ‘stable or continuous stuctures’ (and this includes ‘Garden’ and ‘Farm’, obviously). This being the case, you can obviously invoke a ply move that would get you from CG to CF via Pontoon Dock, thereby satisfying all the conditions for a Goosens Corollary play, permitting CG > CF in one move.
Hope this helps.
My friend matt_mcl - it’s nothing personal and I am honestly not being petulant in any way. I honestly feel that the point I raised requires an adjudication, and until we get one (that all parties can agree to as binding) then I feel it’s somewhat pointless to let play continue beyond that point. I don’t think your ‘Covent Garden’ fix is quite as straightforward as you would have us believe. I do understand that for all significant strategic purposes, it puts us back on track and renders my point irrelevant. But you never know what might come up later in the game. For example it could turn out to be very important how many tri-hued plays there have been, whether we’ve had an odd or even number of lateral hops, whether the Central Line plays form groups of three exclusive of BR stations… and so on. We just don’t know. Every move and play can turn out to be crucial at a later stage (which for me is one of the great beauties of the game). So I’m afraid I can’t agree with you on this occasion.
Fine. What if I withdrew Victoria and played Rotherhithe instead? This will of course enspoon most of the DLR, although line name exoneration leaves Baker Street, Waterloo, Hammersmith, and of course Victoria itself free.
I’m still right, though.
Ah, you can thank my grandfather. Emigrated here from Germany in the 50s, always talking about how he played for University, but, as Grandma said, couldn’t “waste time on that silly game” anymore. But when the World Championships came to America in 1979, this man, who really had nothing more than the shirt on his back and the sweat of his labors, scrimped and saved even more than he had to buy tickets for the two of us. He told Grandma we were going to the zoo, and I was so excited to see the new baby lions, but instead we went straight to the Crescent Hall they had just built especially for the Games. It was so hectic, but exhilerating. My grandfather clutching his program, pointing to various players, me on his shoulders looking at the huge map they had, hanging like a curtain, full of wondrous places that sounded so magical…Earl’s Court, Charing Cross, Queensway - they rolled off the tongue.
I tell you the moment it all crystalized for me was when Hans Steinger was playing in the quarter-finals. “Mansion House” he said, his voice hoarse, his eyes blinking away the perspiration (I still think they had the lights shining right in his face intentionally…they didn’t want a German to win ever since Reiter pushed for that judge disqualification in 72 - but that’s ancient history). Anyway, Adalberto from Italy, you could almost see a smile break out on his famous poker face. He thought Steinger made a mistake. So did the audience, judging by the murmurs and chuckles in the crowd. “A token on Warren Street,” he said.
But my grandfather, in a voice almost a whisper, said, “Yes, I see, it’s beautiful. Mornington Crescent in three.”
That’s how I remember Grandpa - a single tear in his old eyes, standing a little straighter, a little taller, saying those words - “Mornington Crescent in three.”
I don’t need to talk about what happened to Steinger that night, we all know the story. I know it’s ridiculous, but sometimes I feel that when Steinger was taken hostage and stabbed to death that night, my grandfather died a little bit, too. Of course, it was really cancer 12 years later, but…maybe…
I’m sorry…getting a little emotional here.