I spent several happy wet-weekends playing long and unfinished games of Monopoly, when I was young. Then at the age of 45 I learnt about tournament Monopoly. By sheer good luck, our nine-year-old son won our Island's Monopoly Championship, the prize for which was a trip to the next World Championship in New York. I won't bore you with the whole story; it's told in a blog-post of mine in January 2013. Suffice it to say that we all frantically swotted up the rules and tactics of tournament play, in which games are limited to 90 minutes and as often as not there is only one player left solvent at the end! (No, he didn't win in New York, but came a respectable 10th out of 20.)
