I don't know if you cared if you received an answer to your question, but if you did then it's a good idea to add the word "Nactation" to the header of your post. (If Stein hadn't changed the header of his post, I would never have read yours, as I read a very small percentage of posts: those involving the early game, Nactation, and a few others that randomly catch my eye.)
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For plays with two move portions entirely on the far side and two move portions that Cross the (near-side) bar, use C. This is one of the BEACON letters.
For a play in which the move portions are split 3:1 (or 1:3) in those regions, use an underlined C.
That is the main idea. For Christian's play (shown in the right-hand diagram above), you can either
- (1) Write c, by assumption. Logic: "7/6(3) is ridiculous, so it must be 7/6, then of course you want to spread the four back checkers. By 6pt convention, 16/14 19/18 is C, and 16/15 19/17 is c."
(2) Write "C7" (7 means 17pt, and 16/15 is the only fourth ace).
(3) Figure out that red c is the strict-usage symbol.
I don't recommend (3) except for a computer, and I don't expect more than a few people to be interested in how red c is arrived at, but (at the risk of someone inevitably forgetting that this is NOT the recommended Nactation answer) for those people I'll run it out:
- "There is no C-type play that hits, so ignore that part of the hit/most/6 rule and move on to 'most' (i.e., most points). Start hierarchy with plays that lose one point, which is 7/6 plus three aces on the far side.
We're at 6pt convention (of hit/most/6), for which point ownership overrides blot/spare destination. I know from having seen two-point formations, that there are six plays (one makes the 15pt, two retain the 16pt, one makes the 18pt and two retain the 19pt).
Finally, the double point-breakers. 7/6(3) (closest to 6pt) plus one ace on the far side adds two more plays. (We're up to eight, which uses up the black typeface.) 7/6 plus a double break on the far side yields blot destinations of 14pt+18pt, and 15pt+17pt (Christian's choice)."
In other words, 19/17 16/15 7/6 is the tenth member of the C family. The ninth is red C and the tenth is red c.
Blot-sprays are the hardest plays to nactate. Yet I would be able to nactate this play as red c (if I happen to have a red pen handy, else I can supplement with a mark) during a game and keep up, because I have familiarized myself with the number of blot-sprays available from some point formations. But I would only do so at some point in the future for a computer (if software is written to accommodate). If the play were made quickly, I'd choose assumption and polish it at the time of input.
If we show this play to each of the world's 5 foremost nactators (whoever they may be), will they arrive at the same letter (assuming they don't know what the others answered)? How confident would they be that the others would understand their Nactation?
Prior to this post, there may be a few people that had a chance to nactate this play using the suggestions of (1) and (2), but I've only barely mentioned the underlined families, and I think that mostly people are waiting for my tutorial update before learning how they work.
The concepts of (1) and (2) are worth digesting, if only for the methodology.
To clarify, assumption is used within the definition of each letter. It doesn't matter if shifting to the 3pt is better than not hitting. When you use or read C (or member thereof), all other types of plays (e.g., anything that moves an inside checker) are excluded from contention.
Nack