The Lockisseum |
Holland Park 2000: nights v PaulWay for sport |
A friendly game between two friendly people. Or so it would appear. District line is wild on Thursdays, and there WILL be no shunting below Level 9.
| Name Location |
Move | Comment |
| nights Neudorf |
I await your opening move with bated breath. | |
| PaulWay The Antipodes |
Croxley | Shunting below level 9 not allowed, and yet shunting above is... This promises to be interesting! |
| nights Neudorf |
Harlesden | Interesting indeed. Home at Lewisham, odd-numbered days only. |
| PaulWay The Antipodes |
Morden | Pegging down here to establish a wide area base. Sorry once again for the long interval between my moves - hopefully now that it's a bit quieter here I should be able to move more frequently. |
| nights Shropshire |
Perivale | Leaning centrally, to begin with at any rate. Not a problem for delayed moves - I consider it a little like postal MC. |
| PaulWay The Antipodes |
Parson's Green | Establishing my blue token holdings and aligning the snoods on the District Line. |
| nights Shropshire |
Hanger Lane | A minor adjustment, but one that should serve me well later on. And a Happy New Year to you. |
| PaulWay The Antipodes |
Hammersmith (District Line) | Blocking Acton Town and putting three brown tokens on Willesden Junction. |
| nights Neudorf |
Euston | Fascinating... |
| PaulWay The Antipodes |
Euston | You don't think you're going to get away with it as easy as that, do you? Full-speed shunt (level 14) to throw you up to Mill Hill East and throwing a Suspect Package up to Camden Town to stop you rebounding... |
| nights Neudorf |
Mill Hill East | Well, shit. |
| PaulWay The Antipodes |
Liverpool Street | That's sort of how I feel too. Of course, in order to get my LV up to shunt you that hard I have to basically completely shoot past MC anyway. Combine that with the helical stress and it's going to be a very interesting little tussle around Camden Town, KCSP and Euston. I'm going to peg here for diagonal use later. |
| nights Neudorf |
Mudchute | Rerouting via Richmond, for reasons that will shortly become clear, and charging podume stacks in zones 4 and 5. |
| PaulWay The Antipodes |
Tower Hill | Rounding the milk-bottle on the Circle Line and reducing the helical stress to 0.2 Brians. |
| nights Neudorf |
Southfields | To 0.2, you say? Food for thought. Adding two boxes, but they're invisible. |
| PaulWay The Antipodes |
Embankment | Putting a sky-blue-pink podume on Bank en passant to slow myself down and try to drag the snoods back into alignment. Now we start closing in, eh? :-) |
| nights Neudorf |
Buckhurst Hill | It would seem so, yes. Paying the extra cost to ensure a smooth dispersal of reduction above and below the line. |
| PaulWay The Antipodes |
Old Street | Smooth reduction dispersal both above *and* below the line - not only extremely careful, but almost exacting. This can only mean that your token stacks are 'just so', balanced perfectly to make the neatest manoeuvre to MC since, IMO, Black took the IMCS cup in 1994 with zero tokens outstanding. Which also appeals to my sense of aesthetics. It would be crude at this point to just throw a token bomb down the Central Line, or to scatter the token stacks around Stratford and Woodford. With helical stress relatively low, warping the outer zones is going to take too much effort. After all the effort I've gone to to align the snoods on the Central Line, I'm not about to disturb them now. And, cleverly, there's that peg on Bank that I would be loath to haul up - leaving it there also gives you a leg up onto the Central Line. I like your setup here - it's elegant. And yet you're on the outskirts, in zone 5, and your token stacks, while very cleverly arranged, aren't large. In this situation I can increase the zone ticket bias to 15% and let you choose which of your token stacks you're going to upset to pay to come any closer to MC. Meanwhile I'm going to capitalise on my Liverpool Street peg and move diagonally to Old Street, allowing me to declare MC in 1. Your choice... :-) |
| Dr. Lock WeirdPro Comment'ry |
Wow!! | |
| nights Neudorf |
Chancery Lane | Wow is about my feeling on the subject. I've been giving
this some thought, and I've decided on the following course
of
action. Breaking north to the Metropolitain or possibly the Jubilee, as I first considered, would cause something of an aftershock in that quadrant, which isn't exactly what I'm looking for. Any kind of doubling or redoubling manoeuvre would only exacerbate an already delicate situation, and given the late stage of play I'm not keen on doing anything to upset the balance by shunting. Therefore, my move is Chancery Lane, with the following provisos: a) IMCS rules prevent me from saying it explicitly, but there is now a brown bag of something at Bayswater. b) I also cash in all of my blue and blue- related podumes to lower LV to almost nil. c) The Cornwall Variation is now void. d) I choose to upset token stack number 7, at Bromley-by-Bow, with everything that implies. MC in 1? I'd be surprised, old chum. |
| Tuj Room 42 |
Ah, deft stuff all round. Point c's a pivotal one there, nights, and it took a very good move to find the way to make it so. Always nice to see a sharp match turn into a high-powered mud-sling! | |
| PaulWay The Antipodes |
Sorry, I'm not sure I understand that move. You've cashed in your blues to lower LV, and yet you've gone through seven zones - requiring high LV? Voiding the Cornwall Variation is a clever idea here, but as well as preventing same-line shuffling (which was going to be necessary for a straight-in MC I admit) it also means that Bank is now brown and left-handed, which prevents you from getting to Chancery Lane with the Bromley-by-Bow stack upset as you said. Thoughts? |
|
| nights Neudorf |
Perhaps I didn't explain myself clearly enough. By upsetting the stack at Bromley-by-Bow, I intended to create a ripple in LV running west to east, which as it gathered speed would have enable me to "surf" to Chancery Lane, bypassing Bank entirely. I'll be the first to admit that it's not the most stylish of moves, but preventing your MC was my goal, and in that I seem to have succeeded for the moment. Now, are we going to have a move from you, or am I going to win by default? |
|
| PaulWay The Antipodes |
Tottenham Court Road | Yes, I think I see now. Sorry I haven't played sooner, it's all been a bit busy here and I didn't want to play without giving it a bit of thought. OK, I'm taking a step back into a defensive posture, but with all those tokens scattered down the Central Line it's time to pick some up. Engaging the Mortenstern Addenda and applying left-hand running. Remember that voiding the Cornwall Variation also disallows same-line walks and shunts. |
| nights Neudorf |
Old Street | Right. I've been thinking long and hard about this, but I think I've got it. Mortenstern, if I'm not mistaken, caused wide controvery when it was first introduced, due the the unpredictable nature of LV dispersal it produces. There was also a tendency to provoke a cascade reaction along adjacent lines, causing widespread confusion, and of course, scattering tokens to the winds. Given that I am somewhat restricted in my options, due to LV, token counts and this odd pins-and-needles sensation in my feet, I'm taking a slightly roundabout route, but one that will hopefully pay off. I am also choosing to take up a more upright posture. |
| PaulWay The Antipodes |
Chalk Farm | Left hand running allows me to keep to the Edgware branch without sacrificing tokens. I think we now need a signal failure at King's Cross St. Pancras. |
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| Script last updated 06-May-2008 | dunx@dunx.org |