Date Posted: July 4, 2011
Print Edition: June 24, 2011
By Alex Watkins (The Cascade) – Email
Do you seek the fame and glory of professional sports but feel more at home handling a doughnut than a football? Are you a failed hand model looking for a pastime that showcases the true beauty of your assets? Or, has your extensive collection of locks of celebrity hair left you with a looming debt that you’re looking to pay off? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may want to look into the World Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) Championships, an annual competition that brings together the world’s best and brightest to compete for $10,000 total prize money, as well as international recognition and a boost in the number and quality of one’s romantic partners.
The rules of the game are identical to those of any casual rock paper scissors match, but they are applied on a significantly larger scale. This is because the World RPS Championships welcomes over 500 participants from three continents “to determine who is the world champion of the most universal form of hand-to-hand combat in the world.” The championships have been held annually since 2002, the last of which was hosted by Toronto’s notable Steam Whistle Brewery in 2009; the 2010 championship was cancelled due to a mourning period for the passing of Wojek Smallsoa – Chairman of the World RPS Society Steering Committee – at age 87. Smallsoa was integral to the RPS Society and had a large hand in its operations. As of now, plans for the 2011 World RPS Championships remain unannounced.
A visit to the World RPS Society’s official website (www.worldrps.com) will almost certainly prove profitable to newcomers, as it offers a brief overlook of not only the basics of the game but special strategies it claims will allow the reader to beat almost anyone at RPS. But what kind of strategy could possibly be applied to a game that is entirely reliant on chance, you ask?
Well, as the site claims, “Humans, try as they might, are terrible at trying to be random. In fact, often humans in trying to approximate randomness become quite predictable. So knowing that there is always something motivating your opponent’s actions, there are a couple of tricks and techniques that you can use to tip the balance in your favour.”
The site outlines techniques on how to subtly manipulate others into making predictable throws and reveals the patterns that players of varying skill levels tend to follow. Additionally, it claims that in competition play, scissors is statistically the least-thrown move; it is used 29.6 per cent of the time, which is significantly less than the 33.3 per cent average one would expect from a game with only three possible moves with equal rates of success. With this statistic in mind, the World RPS Society suggests that paper may give participants a slight edge whenever they are in a bind and don’t know what to do next.
The site also offers a helpful FAQ section, where you can have such burning questions answered as “Why does paper cover rock?” and, “When in an RPS match against a perceived psychic, what is the best strategy to adhere to?”
When the plans for the upcoming championship are finalized, tickets will be made available for purchase online at the World RPS website – for competitors, advance tickets sell for $25. RPS groupies will be pleased to learn that spectator only tickets run considerably cheaper at $15 a pop.
