How long have you been playing Monopoly? It’s been about three years since I seriously started playing this game.
What does seriously mean? Before that I played the game with the neighbors–just for fun–but seriously means going into many competitions to win.
Why did you start playing competitively? Just about three years ago I entered a regional Monopoly championship game in Tokyo. I did very poorly, actually. My rank was 150 out of 300 contestants. So that made me think that I should start seriously playing the game for competition.
How had you done when you were playing with your neighbors and your family? When I was playing the game with the neighbors, I usually played once a year, so it was largely about luck. If you’re lucky, you win; if you’re not lucky, you lose. So that’s how I played.
Everybody knows to build up properties as soon as you can. Is there some other special strategy you used to win the tournament? I’m not so interested in accumulating property early in the game. I’m more interested in using the property efficiently.
How? My strategy is to decide which color you want to remain focused on early on in the game–like maybe the first round or second round, I decide which one to build on.
For the tournament, you played on the Canadian version of the game. Did that make any difference? I have been playing the standard U.S. version of Monopoly for a long time. Once I learned that I would be in the World Championship game I got the Canadian version of the game from Hasbro, and since then I have been playing the Canadian version for about one month. I find it very difficult to put it in my mind all the different names of the Canadian places.
How has Monopoly changed your life? Have you learned lessons about life from the game? One of the lessons that I learned by playing Monopoly is how to negotiate with different people, and this was certainly very beneficial to my real life. Also, the experience that I had in terms of negotiations in my real life affected my style of game in Monopoly. Another thing that I would like to point out is that once you start competing in the game with different people, this gives me a great opportunity to make friends with a lot of different people, so that is my asset.
Are you good at other games? How about Connect Four? I’m sorry, I don’t know that game that you mentioned. But generally speaking, I’m playing different kinds of games, and one of the games that I’m very interested in these days is a German game called Catan.
So how about checkers? Could I beat you at checkers? Checkers? I haven’t done that before.
So, I could probably take you in checkers. [Laughs]
