Gameboy

Greg Dixon reflects on how to collect rent from his properties. Photo / Supplied

It's only a game. This is what you tell yourself. This is what you mutter through thin lips as you face down steely-eyed dealmakers, or land on Mayfair and notice the bugger who owns it has just built a hotel. This is what you tell yourself when you draw a "Chance" card ordering you to go straight to jail and instructing, as the game's famous phrase has it, that you "do not pass go, do not collect $200".

Yes, Monopoly is a only game. But this particular Sunday afternoon in Auckland's Botany Downs it had assumed an importance beyond a few hours of dull diversion on a wet family holiday in some crappy camping ground in the back blocks. In the upstairs atrium of Botany's Whitcoulls, 19 amateur capitalists and I had gathered with the same hope: to be crowned the Auckland region's Monopoly champ.

The monopoly on hope doesn't end there. The Auckland regional champ - along with those from Wellington and Christchurch and a fourth wildcard entry - will pass on to the national final at Auckland's Motat, next weekend. If you conquer there, well, you'll take on the Monopoly universe in Las Vegas at the World Championship, where the winner will not only pass go but collect US$20,000 ($32,000) and a fancy trophy. No wonder I detected, in the shop's brightly sunlit atrium, not just an air of suppressed excitement, but also the whiff of an impending no-holds-barred, kill-or-be-killed fight to the death.

Suddenly I was nervous. The cheery enough atrium had been roped off, with seats outside for spectators - gladiatorial contests have always drawn a crowd - while inside five tables had been squeezed in, each with a black table cloth and chairs covered in black fabric and tied with fetching red ribbons.

The tables had places for four players and a banker, and Monopoly money - $1500 a piece - had been set out neatly. At the judges' table by the windows there were two impressive-looking digital clocks and by the entrance to the playing area was a poster-sized chart for tallying scores. It had the deceptive appearance of a small, but well-organised, wedding reception.

To complete this conceit, there was a chap decked out in a top hat, white and grey stick-on 'tache, red bow tie and tailcoat. He was, he informed me, "Mr Monopoly". How jolly.

The contestants, or the enemy as I began to think of them, had mostly come from around the city. Craig O'Hagan - who played as "Stryper", would finish second and sported a most impressive mullet - was from Weymouth. Jay Gajera, game name "Asset", had come from Greenhithe, while Tanya Kitching, aka Miss Moneybags, was from out Henderson way. There were a few foreign imports too.

Alison Derbyshire (who adopted "Property Developer" as her moniker and, a little too ironically, finished last by going bankrupt in every round) had come all the way from Rotorua. Craig Porter - who has been New Zealand Monopoly champion twice - had travelled from Upper Hutt. He called himself "House".

I, meanwhile, had chosen "The Press" as my handle. Yes, I know. There was a pleasant burble as the first of the three, one-hour rounds approached, and my 19 foe and I took our seats. But as the countdown to the first game began, it dawned on me there was a not-so-small problem in my quest for world Monopoly domination: I couldn't for the life of me remember the rules.

Monopoly is not a game of chance. Porter is sure of that. The Wellington IT consultant first played the game, like so many of us, as a youngster but it was as a young adult that he took it beyond child's play. The basic Monopoly strategy is to get as many assets as you can so that you can trade them, make money from them and, hopefully, bankrupt everyone else with exorbitant rents - even I could remember that. But which properties are the better buys? Porter decided to work it out.

"Each property has a certain probability of landing on it. The orange set is the most landed on, the red is next, but the green set, if you can get at least three houses on each, is the best for return on investment."

How does he know this? Well, he wrote a computer programme back in the mid-1980s that could play endless games of Monopoly so that he might work out the chances of landing on each of the board's squares. The advantage of this, he maintains, is he can select properties to buy at times when others wouldn't. "I know that there is a higher probability that I can win the game [with this information]. There is also the matter of timing when you do your trades. Sometimes I'll take what looks like a bad trade, but I know the probabilities of it working."

The evidence that 48-year-old Porter, a seriously focused sort of chap and a student of the game, is not, well, talking bollocks is where his probabilities have taken him: to three New Zealand national finals and to two world championships. He was finishing his BSc at Waikato in 1983, when he jetted to Palms Springs, Miami, to take on the world the first time - and he had to postpone finishing his last degree paper (which he went on to complete the following year) to do it.

He finished a respectable 11th out of 25 in the world. His second world champs - the first part of the competition was held in New York's Waldorf Astoria and the finals in Atlantic City - was two years later in 1985, coincidently the official (though disputed) 50th anniversary of the game. He did better, coming ninth.

Even now he has vivid memories of individual games from these two adventures, including, in great detail, the most boring game of Monopoly he's ever played - "and I instigated it". However, his stories of being put up at the famous Breakers hotel in Palm Springs and playing in something called the "Gold" room at the Astoria are good yarns, just like the story of Monopoly itself.

The official version is this. Amid the deprivations of the Great Depression, one Charles B. Darrow, unemployed, put together, in his kitchen using oil cloth, the first version of the game which he made copies of and sold to family and friends. Two years later, in 1935 and after first rejecting the game, Parker Brothers finally bought the rights when Darrow had successfully flogged 5000 handmade sets through a Philadelphia department store.

More than 70 years on, Monopoly is the best-selling board game in the world, is available in 80 countries, produced in 26 languages and is available in many versions. An estimated half a billion people are believed to have played it. However, Parker Brothers - now owned by Hasbro - has been accused of, well, monopolising the truth about the game's origins.

In the 1970s, an alternative history of the game's beginnings came to light: that a Quaker woman called Lizzie Phillips had invented the basics of Monopoly in something she called "The Landlord's Game". Interestingly, she is thought to have developed the game as a way to highlight the injurious repercussions of monopolies. It went through a few versions, but Phillips is said to have patented a revised version of her game in 1904, three decades before Monopoly's official invention.

Whatever the veracity of the Phillips' claim, Hasbro and Parker Brothers to this day credit only Charles B. as the person who made Monopoly, and the companies, after long legal battles, are the ones who own the trademarks. Mind you they haven't wasted their monopoly on Monopoly. Hasbro has consistently updated and reinvented the game, issuing at least 100 versions including Beatles Monopoly, Cat Lover's Monopoly and Seinfeld Monopoly.

The game has gone high-tech too, with the latest "Here and Now" versions of the game including an "electronic banking unit" and plastic debit cards instead of paper money. Porter, who has collected some 50 sets, including one he paid around $2000 for, is extremely complimentary about Hasbro's constant reinvention of the game. "Of course when I got married I stopped collecting [copies of the game] - which didn't seem to be too much of an issue. But now I see just about every month a new Monopoly set and I think 'oh, I'd like that for my collection'.

There is just no way I could collect all the different variations, but they make it just so interesting." He doesn't, however, have a favourite version. I suppose you don't need one when you can win on anything.

Rat-like cunning. A gift for being passive-aggressive. A strategic mind. A familiarity with that good-cop-bad-cop fandango. All of these things are useful for winning at the Monopoly table. However, financial acumen isn't necessary, apparently.

After the first two rounds at Botany, I was still having difficulty calculating how much rent I was owed - that was when I'd noticed I was supposed to collect it at all. Yet, I was doing okay. In the first hour-long game - competition Monopoly is hurried-up hugely with the use of an aptly named "speed die" - I finished second at my table of four, with a total of cash and assets just $1000 behind our table's winner, "Bayliff".

In the second round, I finished a less-pleasing third from four, but I'd made it through two rounds without tasting bankruptcy or finishing last. But it occurred to me as I sat down to play the third and final round with, gulp, the three top players in the tournament so far - Nimble Thimble, House (yes, two-time New Zealand champion, Porter) and Squire - that to play Monopoly is not to get Monopoly.

The first thing you notice about someone who knows what they're doing is their focus. The second is their competitiveness - a weapon in itself. One competitor I chatted to before the champs began, Angie Fitzgerald, said she was calling herself "Ice Queen". She described herself, rather proudly, I thought, as a "very aggressive player". Indeed, she told me she'd chosen her game name because it sounded intimidating. She was, I thought, only half-joking. Both House and Nimble Thimble - Geoff Christopher from Grey Lynn who was in first place going into the last round - as well as the table's other player, Squire (Paul Glenny from Waihi) radiated a cool combativeness.

When I later talked to 25-year-old Christopher - tellingly he works in risk management for a bank - he confessed to being naturally competitive and offered me a little post-match analysis on my own approach. "You didn't come across as the most aggressive person." Mind you, aggression doesn't seem to have won the Wellington or Christchurch finals. Marina Seager from Riverton in Southland finished first in Christchurch dressed in a sort of purple fairy get-up and played with the game name "Purple Property Princess".

The giggly 38-year-old told me she's a competitive person when playing Monopoly but also described her shock at some of the aggressive tactics and what she viewed as poor sportsmanship in Christchurch, particularly by one man who she described as "downright mean". Meanwhile, Martin Weaver, the 35-year-old who won the Wellington final, says his approach next weekend will be "ruthless". Though he rather undercut this stern game plan by laughing after he told me it.

Rather than ruthless, he seems to have a gambler's approach to the game. "I just take risks". So as I entered the last round, in the bottom half of the points table but with hopes still alive, my approach should have been focused and aggressive. Or perhaps I should have played the probabilities using a keen sense of tactics and a thought for the bigger strategic picture. Or maybe I should have dressed as a fairy and thrown caution to the wind. As it turns out, I should have stayed home.

Deal or no deal? Some 15 minutes into the final round, Nimble Thimble wants one. He would trade my single orange property, Vine St, for his Leicester Square. The offer would complete my yellow set of properties and I could start building houses. This was a no-brainer. Deal! Even better, as this last game wound on I was cleaning up.

Despite being at the table with the three best players - including a double New Zealand champ - I was the only player to complete sets of properties (the brown set, Old Kent and Whitechapel roads, was the other) and I got busy building houses, collecting rent and getting rich. As the hour drew to a close it was plain I'd won this final game, I would be the best. And then it dawned: Nimble Thimble had manipulated the game, allowing me to win, but hopefully helping him to win bigger.

By trading Vine for Leicester, I had unwittingly helped him block any chance of Squire - who was in second place going into the last round - winning the whole shebang. Here's how it worked: with Thimble owning Vine St, there was no chance Squire could complete Vine's set of properties (he was holding the other two orange streets). Why? Because there was no way in hell Thimble would trade it. No set meant no chance of Squire coining it.

Thimble, the risk management expert, had assessed the bigger strategic picture, made his calculations and backed his luck to win the tournament even if he lost this game. He'd also played me like a Stradivarius. As I counted up my cash and properties at the end of the game, my smugness at beating the best - and finishing a satisfactory seventh out of 20 players - was rather overwhelmed by the embarrassment of being so easily manipulated.

To his credit, Squire still shook my hand as we got up from the table to wait for Mr Monopoly to crown Thimble as Auckland champion and not him - and although he didn't mentioned it, we both knew it was plain enough: in that final hour, I'd been handed a lesson.

Monopoly, it is said, is just a game. But amateurs should stay well clear.