There’s little room for fun and games when the nation’s Monopoly masters meet to decide who’s chairman of the board.
There’s a palpable frisson on the 88th floor of Melbourne’s Eureka Tower. Through floor-to-ceiling windows, the streetscape stretches out to the horizon like a child’s play mat nearly 300m below. Against this auspicious backdrop, eight would-be moguls eye each other warily and contemplate their game plan. Each has come with a singular ambition: to bankrupt their opponents and make their fortune.
Welcome to the 2009 Australian Monopoly Championships. During the next couple of hours, the country’s best Monopoly masters will do battle in a ruthless contest of fast deals and funny money, plastic houses and mortgage meltdowns.
This is no ordinary friendly family game designed to fill in the hours on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Rather, it’s a whip-fast, take-no-prisoners fight over two one-hour rounds, where luck takes a back seat to steel-eyed strategy, and the introduction of a third so-called speed die means $3500 can be lost or won on a single roll.
Six of today’s contenders won their place here through the state championships. Now they line up against the defending Australian champ, Leon Hechtman, 26, and the only female in the group, Kelly Altair, 30, who finished fifth at the Victorian championships in January, but snared a wildcard entry into the national final.
Before lunchtime, seven of the players will have lost their respective faux property fortunes, leaving one victor to walk away with the mantle of Australian Monopoly Champion and a ticket to Las Vegas, to compete at the world championships, starting October 20.
Like the Olympics, the World Monopoly Championships are normally held every four years (although the 2008 contest was postponed 12 months) and attracts elite performers from a melting pot of countries; 42 are competing this year. The ultimate winner takes home US $20,580, which is equal to the amount of play money used in a standard Monopoly game, but also bragging rights to being the world’s best player at the world’s most popular board game.
According to Hasbro, which makes and markets Monopoly worldwide, more than 480 million people in 102 countries have passed ‘Go’ since the game first hit shelves in 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression, and its popularity shows no signs of abating.
Hasbro Australia’s marketing director, Roz Fisher, says national sales jumped 54 per cent in 2007, when the company released the Australian ‘Here & Now’ edition featuring attractions such as the Great Barrier Reef and the Barossa Valley in place of the traditional Whitechapel Road and Mayfair.
Earlier this year, Monopoly City, in which players can build skyscrapers and power plants, as well as houses and hotels, took out the coveted Toy of the Year award at the Australian Toy Fair. It joins an ever growing list of more than 1500 themed and national versions on the world market, including a new Beijing edition, SpongeBob SquarePants and Disney Pixar variations, and My First Monopoly for the preschool set.
The Monopoly phenomenon can be traced back to its unlikely origins in 1903, when American left-leaning political activist Elizabeth Maggie Phillips developed a game called The Landlord’s Gamble to highlight the evils of private property monopolies. When she later approached leading games company Parker Brothers with her prototype, it was rejected for being too complicated.
It wasn’t until unemployed radiator repairman Charles Darrow rejigged the format in 1933, with a new board, dice, play moneyand carefully typed title deeds, that Parker Brothers finally showed interest. Two years later, Monopoly went on sale.
Hasbro organised the first World Monopoly Championships in 1973, in New York City. Since then, only one Aussie has taken the title: real-estate agent Greg Jacobs, in 1983. Last time around, at the 2004 tournament in Tokyo, Spain’s Antonio Fernandez took top honours, while Australia’s Leon Hechtman finished in the bottom half of the field. Undeterred, the project manager from East St Kilda is back to defend his national title and vie for the chance to rewrite history at Caesars Palace in Vegas.
With his intense stare and designer glasses, Hechtman looks every inch the young property mogul on the make, although he protests he’s here “just to meet new people and have fun”. Hechtman has been playing the game since he was six or seven, but says he’s no fanatic, dusting off the Monopoly set just once or twice a year to play with friends.
Still, he admits to having an arsenal of proven tactics to trounce the opposition. One favourite is to create a housing shortage by amassing as many houses as possible on his properties and delaying converting them to hotels. “There’s a limited number of houses in the bank. If you have them all on the board, the other players can’t build,” he explains.
Hechtman’s greatest threat appears to be Christopher Harrison, a jovial psychologist and Sydney University researcher who beat two of today’s contenders at the NSW championships in January.
The clean-cut 29-year-old hadn’t played for 15 years when he entered the state championship “for a laugh”, but it took him less than an hour to bankrupt all his opponents.
Among his victims were Timothy Hawes, a 41-year-old home maintenance contractor and 2000 Australian champion, who went on to win this year’s Victorian championships, and Anthony Jucha, a 34-year-old lawyer who snatched the Queensland state title.
“The game is won or lost in the trades,” says Harrison. “When you’re trying to strike a deal, it’s useful to make out someone else is the leader, and get the other players to gang up with you against them. It’s a bit of social engineering.”
Lining up against Harrison, Hechtman and the Victorian and Queensland champions are South Australian champion and engineering student, Alexander Jenner-O’Shea, 23; poker-faced WA champ and radio producer Graham Mason, 41; and ACT winner and car salesman, Gerard Abideen, 30.
Then there’s wildcard Altair, who feels she has as much chance of winning as anyone else. “I have the strategies and knowledge to compete and I’m good with numbers,” she says.
She also has no worries about being the only female in contention. “At this level, the game can be quite aggressive, which may suit some men better, but there’s really no reason anyone can’t be good at it. You just have to have your smarts about you.”
The proof, of course, will be in the playing. At 9.30am, the eight contenders take their seats at two tables for the elimination round of the Australian Championships. At table one, defending champ Hechtman stares down Hawes, Mason and Altair.
On table two, Jenner-O’Shea looks nervous as he prepares to take on Jucha, Harrison and Abideen. Each player fingers a stack of brightly coloured bills, $2500 in all, while an official banker and judge hover beside each table.
At the first dice roll, an oversize digital clock starts ticking down the minutes. Play is ferocious as the little silver hat, thimble and race-car tokens move around the board in a blur. Within 10 minutes, every property on both tables has been snapped up and a fierce round of deals and counter deals ignites, as players scramble to collect a complete set of streets so they can start building houses and bleeding serious money from their opponents.
Forty minutes in, Hawes is the first to be bankrupted when he lands on Hechtman’s Park Lane with four houses, and then the similarly developed Mayfair. It’s a $3000 king-hit that forces him out of the game. Mason, Jucha and Abideen aren’t far behind. When the clock clicks to zero, Hechtman and Harrison are the victors. They’ll join runners-up Altair and Jenner-O’Shea in the final round.
It’s a tense 20 minutes as the four finalists cool their heels while officials set up the board for the championship game. Jenner-O’Shea spends the time chewing his fingernails, while Harrison’s earlier jocularity has been replaced by a rabbit-in-headlights stare. Only Hechtman’s cool mask remains intact.
Altair wins the right to the first roll of the dice and luck seems to be on her side. Within five minutes, she’s amassed eight properties, including two of the three coveted orange streets. She needs Vine Street to complete the set, but Hechtman has it and he’s driving a hard bargain. He eventually agrees to give her the outstanding orange in exchange for two purple properties and Old Kent Road.
Altair wastes no time putting four houses on each of her orange streets, while Hechtman crowds four houses on to each of his purples. By the time Harrison manages to collect the full yellow set – thanks to a side deal with Hechtman – there are only eight houses left in the bank, and Altair wants them, too.
The banker holds an auction, which sees the NSW champ pay $175 a piece for houses that normally cost $150. When JennerO’Shea lands on the last unsold property, Euston Road, it finally gives him a complete set, but there aren’t any houses left for him to buy.
With 20 minutes left on the clock, the SA champ pleads with Hechtman to free up some houses by putting hotels on his properties. In a rare moment of magnanimity, he agrees.
Five minutes later, Jenner-O’Shea lands on Hechtman’s Northumberland Avenue hotel. Unable to pay the $900 owing, he puts his head in his hands and cries out, “My dream is over!” before passing his cash and properties over to his nemesis.
Meanwhile, Harrison is hanging on by a thread, with just four mortgaged properties and two stations to his name. But his luck begins to turn when a cash-strapped Altair lands on his Kings Cross Station.
“Cut a deal?” she pleads.
“You weren’t very nice to me before,” he says, recalling an earlier round where she forced him to mortgage his yellow streets.
Altair’s earlier luck has soured and the strain is starting to show. When she lands on Hechtman’s Pall Mall and is forced to sell her houses back to the bank, she snaps, “Are you going to crack a smile or not?” Next round, she holds the dice close to her lips and implores, “Come on, give me some luck.” But they don’t.
The throw lands her on Hechtman’s Euston Road with four houses, which leaves her with a single dollar to her name. When her next roll lands her on Hechtman’s Whitechapel Road hotel, she’s bankrupted and out of the game.
Miraculously, Harrison is still in there fighting. Every round of the board he somehow dodges Hechtman’s land holdings, while the national champ repeatedly lands on his stations, having to fork over $200 each time.
“I’m on my way back!” crows the NSW champ, punching the air.
Without missing a beat, he converts his newly won cash to hotels on the brown properties he picked up from a struggling Altair – just in time for Hechtman to land on Old Kent Road. “That’s $250, thank you very much,” Harrison says.
But in the end, it’s simply not enough. When the clock finally clicks to zero each player’s property and cash is tallied. Hechtman is a convincing winner with a $9820 fortune, earning himself a shot at glory in Las Vegas.
Ever the model of the modern mogul, the champion remains at the table, stern faced and counting his cash while Harrison jokes with the crowd. “Leon won two in a row – I want a urine sample,” he quips.
Finally, Hechtman tears himself away from his faux fortune to collect his prize and face well-wishers. When I ask how it feels to be the best Monopoly player in Australia, I expect some ego-fuelled chest beating, but it turns out the ruthless competitor has a modest streak, “It’s fair to say I’m the luckiest, not necessarily the best” he says. “After all, it’s only a game.”
By Jane Hutchinson
(The Sunday Magazine)