Baker Street!
::can’t look…::
You’re all in luck; due to construction efforts as of June 22 2007 announcement on the Underground website (for real) Dollis Hill traffic at this time of day is being redicrected back to Victoria and other lines.
Therefore, I can invoke Rule 6.12(b), Moves Permissable By Active Repair or Construction Efforts, and shift over a line on Bus Route 6. (This is only allowed on 24-hour bus routes or else I’d have used Route 98.)
My move is:
Embankment
Charing Cross.
Huzzah! 
I think we need a ruling…
Oh, lord, not another ruling, pur-lease. Tooting Bec.
Oh come on, matt_mcl… what’s a game of MC without rulings?!
Anyway, I think your Tooting Bec play is quite astonishing. The three previous valid plays were Baker Street, Embankment and Charing Cross. Take the initial letters and you get B-E-C. This means Tooting Bec is an example of a Triple Acronym Derivative Sequence. I have read about TADS in the literature, but I’ve never actually seen anyone achieve one in serious play. Not only am I duly impressed, I actually feel quite privileged to witness this. On the downside (for me and the rest of us at least!) it also means, if my analysis is correct, that you are at most five moves from MC.
Brilliant stuff. Really, brilliant.
Which allows me to invoke the Inverse Brompton Skiffle (but only linearly; footnote 7 on Page 425 of my Hobson’s (the Yellow edition) states that “on lines with a decreasing or turbulent Line Velocity, players using any variety of Brompton Skiffle may not transfer between lines, unless Platform Doors are invoked from the departing platform, or unless Block Crowding Factors rise above 0.3.”
And…
Camden Town!
And as this is now the next move on the same side of the table as the TADS, I’m allowed to use the Principle of Contagion to transfer to a triple-line station:
Westminster!
Can’t be long now.
And now…
Mornington Crescent!
Wha…but…you can’t…My God! I missed that entirely. It’s amazing how you train yourself to look for the complexities, but miss the glaring obvious ones. Damn. Next time.
Well, shit. I shouldn’t have played Embankment. Invoking 6.12 was clever in and of itself, but I pretty much gave that one away, didn’t I?
I’ll have to keep the notation on this one to learn from my mistake.
Congratulations, Sunspace. Well spotted and well timed.
Thank you! Since this is my first real experience playing the Noble Game, I must bow my head and acknowledge Providence, who has chosen to smile upon me. And I must acknowledge the other the sportsmanship and courtesy of the other players. I will be learning from you for a long time. And, of course, I must acknowledge my grandfather, without whose books I would never have gotten started. I only wish he had lived to see what the 21st century would make of Mornington Crescent. Trans-oceanic real-time play! What would Hobson have thought! Yet behind all the glitter, the ancient heart of the game lives on.
Can we play Château d’Eau now?
Congratulations, Sunspace! Very neat! Not an especially ingenious move (by tournament standards) but quick, incisive and successful - and you can’t really wish for more than that! Commiserations to matt_mcl who was so very, very close, and whose wonderful TADS demonstration made it all possible. He was gaining rapidly on MC with a sequence of excellent (and occasionally profound) plays that certainly gave us plenty to think about. In the end, he wasn’t able to press his Central Line dominance and strategic control of travel West without also opening some weaknesses around the Northern Line, as Sunspace was all too quick to perceive. Sterling play, nonetheless. Hard luck to Malacandra as well, who played many very clever strategic moves and added plenty of colour to the game, if never quite managing to develop a coherent strategy focused on achieving MC.
Don’t be silly. That’s not a real game.