Grand master is no geek

By SHELLEY HOWELLS

Matt Peek looks pretty relaxed - the words "quietly confident" spring to mind - despite the fact he is juggling study for university exams with defending his World Tantrix title.

The online version of the game, that Kiwi inventor Mike McManaway says has the strategy of chess with the family appeal of Scrabble, attracts players worldwide.

Kiwi, Hungarian, US, French and British players reached the quarter-finals of the 5th World Tantrix Championship this year.

"The tournament gets bigger every year," says 19-year-old Peek, who plays as "pekko". "So it's getting better and better."

Over Labour weekend he won his quarter-final six games to one to qualify for the semifinals.

His room at his parents' Auckland home is not, what you might expect from someone with the title of Tournament Grand Master, a darkened geekish dungeon.

It is strewn with finance and statistics books, not wires and techie bits and pieces. "Uni, cricket and my friends are my main interests," he says.

McManaway, who invented Tantrix while nursing a broken arm and waiting for a swollen river to go down in the Patagonian mountains of Chile, says that Peek is spookily good at the game.

"It's a game that is a combination of luck and skill, so the best player doesn't always win," he says from the Nelson home where he runs the Tantrix empire.

"For instance, I win about 55 per cent of my masters games, but Matt wins 70 per cent of his games against the top 50 players in the world.

"That's impressive for a game involving luck. None of us can work out how he does it."

Tantrix has been good to McManaway (who plays as "mikem").

The Bakelite tile version was released internationally in 1993, and has sold more than two million copies worldwide.

The website, created as a money-making exercise for a North American dotcom startup in 1996, has run as a labour of love, involving hours of volunteer maintenance, since it was discovered there was no profit to be made on it.

The first online year was very slow (Peek recalls the days when he would turn up online and there would be no one there to play).

But the addition of the "robot" which you could play against at your chosen level made all the difference.

"We reached critical mass at that point," says McManaway.

"Now we have 30,000 games played a month. All going well, over the next 12 months we expect that figure to be half a million."

Sales of the Tantrix board game are also taking off, especially in the UK.

The website has a huge effect on game sales, says McManaway.

"But not in the way you'd think. The main thing is that it is through the site we have found first-class agents."

People who are passionate about a product make excellent salespeople.

"With the current growth path in the UK, it would be nice to think we could earn some money over the next year," says McManaway, who is a past NZ backgammon champion.

He says until recently profits went into developing the game - a "luxury" version will be released next year.

"If you add up the time we put into the web site it would work out at hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"We get more fun out of watching the website grow than from sales of the game," he says.

The other Kiwi quarter-finalist was Massey University senior mathematics lecturer and ultra-marathon runner Shaun Cooper (who plays as "scoop").

Like Peek, Cooper isn't really into online gaming, or computers, in a big way. There was just something about Tantrix that appealed.

Both have bags of real-world Tantrix tiles, but find that it is easier to find competitors at their level online.

Puzzles, Rubix cubes, Tantrix and an abacus - share space on shelves groaning under the weight of mathematics tomes in Cooper's office, where he tries to describe Tantrix's appeal.

"I like the simplicity of it," he says. "I like a game which has very few rules and a simple objective, yet beyond that there is deep complexity to it."

He and Peek, who have met at a couple of Tantrix player get-togethers, also enjoy the social element of playing online.

Players can chat online as they play and many get to know each other very well.

"A good balance of people play," says Cooper. "Not just nerds - all sorts."

"The people are really great," says Peek.

"If some troublemaker comes on, they get told to go away. It's a really good environment."

It's an environment equally accessible to masters and newcomers to the game. There is no software to download, and you can play at your own level against the robot or a real player, as a guest or member.

Equally you can just sit back and watch the 5th World Tantrix Championship.

Although he might appear relaxed, grand master Peek is keen to hold on to his title. "I'd definitely like to win," he says.

And he'll be hard to beat, but with luck involved, anything could happen.

Tantrix