Mipplington Convention

Named after [Ernest Mipplington]?, a 1960s MC player who had an undistinguished playing career but possessed the best theoretical understanding of the game in the 20th century. Certain complicated moves involve complicated calculations of coefficients and tokens. Sometimes they are so complicated that a player is unable to make the move or simply can't be bothered to. To get round this, Ernest Mipplington studied such calculations very closely over a five year period and published the results in his masterpiece Maths for MC Players (1966). In it, he sets out certain rules which enormously simplify the calculations. For 97.4% of moves they give the correct answer. Despite giving the wrong answer in 2.6% of cases, they proved to be of enormous benefit and improved many games in which they were used. The Mipplington Convention is now an accepted part of MC. Players are only allowed to use it for moves with a Hughes difficulty rating greater than 3.5 and they must explicitly state that they are doing so. The results are taken to be correct but the convention is not allowed in moves to Mornington Crescent.

[TCM]

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