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2009 Monopoly Championship teaches lessons in trading strategy
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The 2009 World Monopoly Championship was held in late October, at the Caesars Palace hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. It tells some interesting stories, granting some insight in the process. Read the full story here.
To summarize, after a key series of trades in the middle of the title match, a young Norwegian, Bjorn Knappskog, actually had no monopolies. But Russian Oleg Korostelev let Knappskog completely back into the game by trading him the properties Knappskog needed to monopolize the light blue group, in exchange for the reds. Knappskog responded by going all out, focusing his funds entirely on building hotels on the light blues. Despite having to dodge a gauntlet right around the corner and rely on others' unlucky dice rolls, Knappskog held on through the rest of the 45-minute final match to win the world title and over $20,000 in prize money.
In terms of probability and strategy, was his risk advisable? Would the Norwegian have won any other way? The answers are, in this strategists's opinion, yes and no, respectively. When you're in a bad position such as Knappskog's, mortgaging non-lucrative properties just to erect buildings elsewhere is often advisable. But at the same time, such an assessment doesn't tell the whole story.
If one really wants to win badly enough in Monopoly, one must be ruthless, maybe even cold. This may sound like the game is taken too seriously, but when a hefty sum of cash and the ability to say you're the best in the world at something are at stake, one can hardly be too serious! That said, Korostelev should not have allowed Knappskog even one inch of breathing room. The Russian may very well have thought that the key trade would give him advantages against other players still in the match, but he failed to understand that the overall goal is to bankrupt competitors. Once they are out of assets, that's it! They can't come back.
Since each other player besides Knappskog had at least one monopoly at the time of the key trade, Knappskog himself was in a position to bankrupt quickly: the most one can earn in rents without a monopoly is $100, for landing on one of any three railroads owned by the same player. The odds of survival with such poor cash flow are next to nothing, so Korostelev should have simply waited him out, or if other circumstances dictated a trade, he should have left Knappskog and the light blues out of negotiations entirely.
To boot, Korostelev did not negotiate for cash, with which he could have both developed the reds and kept Knappskog from developing the light blues! This double fault of sorts means the Norwegian did not so much earn the championship as much as he simply took advantage of poor judgment on the part of a competitor. And that, my friends, is how to be ruthless when playing Monopoly.
Have fun, and never lose that competitive spirit!
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