Yeah, after the dust settles on the legal battle, I would love to hear the Canadian version of "This American Life" get the full backstory on this. Were these guys pals playing in the living room or at the bar, or was it between strangers at some kind of underground RPS parlor? The latter seems ridiculous, but so does the former, since I imagine it would involve the loser saying "C'mon man you can't be serious?" for weeks, at least.
I couldn't find more indepth coverage in the recent news, but here's a relatively lengthy article from 2017 (before the recently ruled-on appeal):
It doesn't go into the personal details (or link to the source court documents), but it does say that the men (both "experienced businessmen", which I assume means: "guys with expendable wealth") signed the notarized contract after the game:
> After the match, the winner had the loser sign a notarized recognition of debt contract that was secured by a hypothec (mortgage) over the loser’s house. The winner subsequently attempted to enforce the gambling debt and hypothec, leading to litigation.
I'm intrigued why the loser signed the notarized contract at all if he was planning to fight it in court.
The court argues it is a game of skill but follows up with:
> it seems evident … that the game also involves a large part of chance, so that it does not take 'only skill or bodily exertion on the part of the parties,'
They would have invalidated the bet even if wasn’t “excessive”. Presumably, the law also bans wagers on gambling activities, such as poker.
I love playing cards, but poker is just... not as much fun because there's too much luck involved compared to, say, Rummy-type games (like my biased favorite, the Brazilian Buraco: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buraco)
There's only "too much luck" in games like poker, or backgammon, sports betting, over a short timeline, which is probably longer than you think. That can be hundreds, or even thousands of hands or games.
Over a statistically large sample of hands or games, skilled players will almost always dominate unskilled players.
Poker (or Hold 'Em at least) is right in the sweet spot between "too much luck" where skilled players either don't reliably win or the long run takes too long to converge and "not enough luck" where recreational players don't have fun because they feel like they can never win. Luck obscures who is really winning in terms of EV enough to keep the game going. If there were much less randomness involved, it wouldn't be so popular.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of this. While it's true that the more skilled party in a traditional physical sport will do better over the long run, their advantage will also be more apparent over the short run.
Skill in poker comes from managing variance over a long horizon; the advantage for a particular hand is largely determined by randomness
The advantage in sports does not derive from randomness, but from physical skill, and is generally apparent, and quantifiable, over a single contest (typically represented by a point spread or odds of winning). It would be almost impossible to quantify odds of winning a given poker hand before any cards are dealt.
> It would be almost impossible to quantify odds of winning a given poker hand before any cards are dealt.
You're literally making my point, now, namely: luck is a much bigger factor in poker than in other card games, so I prefer to play those that require less fortune from me and more strategy.
If you want to call it "variance" instead of "luck", I would agree with that. There aren't that many decisions to be made in a given poker hand, and many times they won't matter anyway. So, I get what you're saying. However, variance is exactly what makes poker a great gambling game. The very skill in poker is managing the variance.
I would also add that poker, in the absence of real money, is not that fun, and that for pure entertainment value, I would rather play a game that relies less on variance.
> Over a statistically large sample of hands or games, skilled players will almost always dominate unskilled players.
> It would be almost impossible to quantify odds of winning a given poker hand before any cards are dealt.
Not directly relevant, but it just occured to me that, if you're playing poker against someone you know is more skilled than you, the best strategy is to not look at your cards.
Two players are playing, heads up. Both players always play every hand, and there is always exactly one bet and call per betting round. Under this scenario, the EV for each player is 0, since we could expect them to both win half the hands, and importantly, win exactly the same amount of money each hand.
Now consider a second situation in which player A plays every hand the same way, but player B folds with the lowest EV hand before any additional cards are revealed. (in hold'em this is 2-7 offsuit). What happens is that player B is losing less money with their worst hand than player A. And since this is zero-sum, it means player B will expect a very slight profit.
Now, extrapolate this to player B only playing +EV hands, while player A doesn't even look at their cards and plays every hand. The following betting rounds still proceed the same way. Player B will be losing a small amount - the ante - on poor hands, and willing a much larger amount with their good hands.
This gets to the heart of my argument - that skill in games like poker or backgammon - will inexorably prevail over a long enough timeline. Sure, player A might catch a great string of cards and beat player B sometimes. But play enough and player B will eventually dominate player A even if no other decisions are made.
This is all, of course, just a thought experiment, but it's meant to illustrate that skill in poker is equivalent to making +EV decisions in the face of incomplete information.
Burraco (that's how's called here) is fairly popular in Italy as well. My family has been playing it for generations and has been a staple of family reunions.
My family has a lot of long-lost Italian influence (my father is called Mario, same as 5 other relatives including great-grandfather, uncles and cousins...) so I'm not surprised it's popular there! My family actually called it Biriba, which I learned is the name of the Greek variant, though our rules were closer to Buraco...
Now I wonder what your family rules are! A lot of people restrict the types of runs you can play (like only allowing grouped runs with for face cards and aces, or banning groups altogether), but my grandpa was a beast at the game so we played with pretty open rules which actually made the game more aggressive – i.e. wait too much to act and you'll fall behind, but play too open early on and you give away your strategy.
Today we play with the official Italian rules, but even before, we actually had only very small divergence (you were not allowed to clean dirty plays, you could play a tris of deuces and you could discard a decue as your last card); also we used to play to 2000 points instead of three games.
More interesting is that we actually called the game canasta, which actually is a different but related game.
The poker variants that are popular are popular exactly because there is so much more chance. The edge that skill gives is less in Texas Holdem than Omaha Hi-Lo. Which is why you see the former more than the latter.
Not really. Source: Omaha High Low (8 or better) has become surprisingly popular at my local casino, and the edge for skilled players does not seem to be any greater.
Limit poker has thinner edges than no limit, but NL has been the ocular game.
Source, my brother-in-law is a WSOP champion in Omaha Hi-Lo. At low levels of play, the edge for skill isn't so big, but once you get someone who knows the game the edge goes up.
Tip, one of the best positions to be in is going for both hi and lo while an opponent thinks they have a lock on one of those. They feel committed to matching any bet, but you're going to walk away with 3/4 of the pot.
I’ve played O8 and Holden for a living in cash games for years. I know multiple world champions in O8, including WSOP world Players of the year. They are all terrible poker players we used to line up to play with in cash games.
Winning tournaments proves little to nothing, the long run is far longer than any tournament. But boy was it great when one of those fish won a bracelet and took their winnings back to our games so we could bleed them of it over months and months.
O8 has similar variance to Holden, there isn’t a big difference. Most Fish quickly learn to rarely draw at the high only, and how to read the board, and that they have to play two cards. They still make numerous smaller mistakes, which is why they are fish.
My estimate was predicated on employment. If you don't have your job anymore, then it's of course 0% (and you are well aware of your $0 EV). The complement equals "company ceases to exist" + "banking errors" + "getting laid off without receiving your last paycheck".
I think they meant that usually (90% of the time, say), you (know you) have a ~99.999% chance of getting your paycheck, and sometimes (the other 10%, say) you know you have <50% chance.
Law and the government are there to do what benefits the society that grants them their power. Blindly upholding contracts does not benefit the society that grants them their power.
("But look at all these other things they do that suck!" - yup, I'm there with you, but the purpose of government is to be just, which is not the same thing as clueless.)
> Law and the government are there to do what benefits the society that grants them their power. Blindly upholding contracts does not benefit the society that grants them their power.
That is but one (very left) interpretation. Good luck getting everyone to agree.
I find it surprising that anyone would disagree with this. What do you view as the purpose of government? Isn't any other role just instrumental to ultimately benefiting society?
Or are you just disagreeing with the part about contract enforcement in particular?
I didn't state a preferred position, just that it's not that simple. For example, some forms of libertarian thought would definitely disagree that government has any role outside of contract enforcement.
Judges very much, all the time, deem whether a contract is exploitative or not. Valid contracts are signed between two parties where both are very much aware of what they're doing and fall within non-exploitative bounds.
You're not allowed to contract yourself into slavery no matter how much you want to. Indentured servitude is similarly illegal. You also can't charge someone a billion percent interest on a payday loan.
Now, granted, some people see the absurd levels of modern student debt as something not so far off from indentured servitude. But the point is that the government and judges absolutely draw lines between which contracts are permitted and not, for the express reason of protecting people from being led into terrible mistakes no matter how much they may want to. Kind of the same thinking behind certain drugs being illegal: the government trying to protect people from their worst impulses.
Of course, libertarians (as opposed to liberals and conservatives) think people should be able to contract whatever they want, hence the "liberty" in their name. But pretty much everyone else on the political spectrum thinks it's pretty essential to protect people from the absolute worst irrevocable things.
The loser is exploited. Imagine if the losing condition were that the loser is enslaved. Just because you can't tell at the start which party will be the loser (and so exploited) doesn't mean the contract itself isn't exploitative
I’m not sure you’re right about libertarians. I haven’t sensed widespread libertarian support for long term debt collection by the government to recover money for foolish lenders.
Because the libertarian ethos ought to support debt collection 100%. I'd be shocked to see any libertarian state any position contrary to that. Libertarianism is essentially entirely about the role of government being to enforce contracts and natural rights.
I see a reluctance to involve the government in long term wage garnishing or collection
I very vaguely recall an article on reason.com that opposed protecting credit card lenders from cancellation if debt post bankruptcy (similar to student debt) but honestly I don’t really remember. I briefly tried to find it but couldn’t.
I’d be more interested in knowing more about the libertarian position on bankruptcy
I took a semester of contract law, though I am not a lawyer either. I believe what you write is not accurate. I vaguely remember a case about someone who sold a refrigerator for four times it’s retail value to a low income couple, collected three times the value, and then sued for the remainder. The court would not enforce further payment. However I believe it would not reverse what was already paid either.
I probably have a lot about this wrong but I recall the professor saying “if that’s he bargain, that’s the bargain!” Is not a good description of contract law.
Contracts are important and generally are upheld. However there are limits to how much of the governments time, resources, and monopoly on physical force the courts will marshal to enforce contracts.
Not really. I can't contract you to do something illegal for me (e.g. kill somebody, even me!). Now, if you are saying that these kind of contracts SHOULD be valid, that's another thing but that's not the case at the moment (and rightly so, imo)
The validity of hit contracts should probably be upheld in the following way: the contractee must pay the amount (in addition to whatever penalties they face), but that money is seized. It could be put into a fund that helps victims' families.
But you can't contract to do something illegal, and contracts must have consideration ("this for that"). Not sure what their test for excessiveness was.
Reminds me of predatory lending rules like charging more than X% interest is excessive.
Insanity can be written into contracts. Like an employer who states you aren't allowed to write code for anyone else for at least 5 years after termination.
>the Superior Court cancelled that mortgage in a 2017 decision, which was appealed by Michel Primeau, who beat Hooper in the game of rock paper scissors — and won the $517,000 wager.
Seems like the court itself decided to cancel the mortgage and the winner was the one who decided to appeal it in court.
>This gambling debt had even been recognized in a notarized contract and had led to the registration of a mortgage on the house of the loser, Edmund Mark Hooper.
>The mortgage was canceled by a judgment rendered by a Quebec Superior Court judge in 2017.
Because it was on a notorized contract. The guy that won is a huge asshole honestly.
Why is no one talking about the true jerk in this situation? The guy legally forcing the other to mortgage his house in order to give him $500k — because of rock, paper, scissors...
Well, we do not know what would happen if the situation were opposite. They both entered into the agreement, presumably seriously. It seems like just playing the game qualifies both sides as jerks.
Yes but sometimes you have a shark that eggs on the game knowing it is rigged.
Google rock paper Scissors robot. It's not inconceivable that a human may have some skills close to that. Or was purposely slowly entering their final state.
How do you propose to enforce this? If these two people had simply gambled the same way, and the loser took out the mortgage and paid the winner, nobody would even know.
It's illegal to gamble where I live, yet every year my friends and I place bets on major sporting events.
The solution to problems isn't always more government. Particularly when the proposed laws are totally unenforceable.
To penalize them, you have to identify them first. Gambling is like corruption, in that two innocent activities (a game and a transfer of money) are combined, and you need to prove that link to prove that gambling occurred.
To be fair, what you actually accomplish there is not to ban gambling, but just to limit it to table stakes. Though that's probably a more useful goal anyway.
It will not. First, large numbers of people will still gamble, and pay a far higher price to do so.
Sports betting is illegal in my state, yet the poker games at my local casino has always been full of bookies taking bets from other players, at significantly worse lines and higher vig than legal book makers in Vegas charge. And sometimes stiffing winners clients after they have a big win, or using threats of violence to collect from big losers.
A few years ago the poker room had to shut down fir nearly 6 months due to a flood. Private games spring up all over town, and instead of taking $126 an hour ($14 per player per hour) like the casino, they raked as three and four times as much. In one game a friend of mine saw the dealer cashed out $2500 in “tips” from her shift. she had been skimming from the pots and the “host” claims he wasn’t in on it. With no cameras, floor management, security etc, they are lucky they didn’t just get hit by a home invasion given the tens of thousands in cash at each game.
Legalized gambling doesn’t just save lives by keeping it out of organized crime control, it makes it far less costly for participants, and making its negative impacts on society much lower. In a competitive market the rake/vig is much lower, playing poker for $14 an hour has much more limited personal impact than playing it for $50/hour.
Lastly legal gambling can enforce rules to protect players from their worst instincts. One example is banning collection of gambling debts to help ensure players only play with what they can afford to lose.
> Sports betting is illegal in my state, yet the poker games at my local casino...
So gambling is still allowed in your state. I'm saying to ban it completely so the entire market is closed.
It won't be too difficult to crack down on private gambling sites as well. The issue in the US is that each state has its own laws, so this won't work unless there is a ban at the federal level.
> Legalized gambling doesn’t just save lives by keeping it out of organized crime control, it makes it far less costly for participants, and making its negative impacts on society much lower.
I don't agree. There are countries where gambling is banned, and they don't have a gambling or crime problem.
You ignore what I said and ignore reality. I gave real examples of two real gambling markets, one legal and illegal, that demonstrated how much worse the effects of the illegal market were.
Instead you claim countries have successfully banned gambling completely. OK name one so we can correct your misapprehension.
For example Sports betting has been illegal almost everywhere in the US for a long time. Illegal sports gambling has peaked near $150B a year.
> There are countries where gambling is banned, and they don't have a gambling or crime problem.
Like which? The only democracy I see that (almost) fully banned gambling seems to be Israel, and their underground gambling industry is estimated at $3.5 billion.
Not sure I follow? If two people have a 'rational' bet, then is that legal in your eyes? Surely you can't be saying that irrational actions should be illegal, or that gambling on 'irrational' decisions (however one might even try to define that) should be banned? Or that all gambling should be banned, because there is a chance that some bets might be irrational? None of those viewpoints seem to make any kind of sense, as far as I can see?
If the roles were reversed, I would have a similar criticism of the other guy. Clearly, the loser didn’t want to pay because he contested it in court — and the victor could have forgiven the debt.
I wouldn’t even make my friend pay me back for lunch if they forgot their wallet — let alone put them through financial hardship for such a trivial, low-effort event as a game of RPS.
> I wouldn’t even make my friend pay me back for lunch if they forgot their wallet — let alone put them through financial hardship for such a trivial, low-effort event as a game of RPS.
That's a bit different. Your friend is presumably not deliberately forgetting his wallet while eating $500k lunches, and if he was I bet you'd expect him to pay you back. And the game of Rock Paper Scissors may be trivial and low-effort, but betting $500k on the game is very much not.
If I enter into a $500k bet on a game of Rock Paper Scissors, it's with the understanding that I stand to lose $500k if I lose the game, and I take that seriously. The only reason that risk is worth taking is if I also stand to win $500k if I win the game. If I win and you turn around and say "oh come on man I really don't want to pay", then you're basically saying you entered into the bet with the intention of scamming me out of an expected sum of $250k, so yes I'll insist that you pay up.
This is a fair point. Part of the reason I would not make this bet in the first place is because I wouldn’t want the put myself into a situation where I either lose lots of money or risk causing financial hardship on another person. It’s lose-lose, in my opinion (I don’t think it’s worth $500k).
I understand how people can reasonably disagree about this and I take back calling him a jerk (although I hope I would not behave the same way in his circumstance). I also lack information about the specifics of what happened.
>I wouldn’t even make my friend pay me back for lunch if they forgot their wallet — let alone put them through financial hardship for such a trivial, low-effort event as a game of RPS.
What is the minimum amount of effort required to make a bet of $500,000 valid?
If he's a true jerk, he'll report the now cancelled debt to his country's equivalent of the IRS. If you owe money and some or all of that is cancelled, in many countries the amount cancelled might count as income to you for tax purposes.
I'd expect that in this case it would not be income, because it sounds like the court determined that the debt was not valid in the first place and so it is more of a "there was never a debt in the first place" than a "cancelled debt" situation, but being investigated to determine that would likely be annoying.
This does not hold true for the appellate court's decision:
> While it found the game may call up a certain measure of skill, "it seems evident … that the game also involves a large part of chance, so that it does not take 'only skill or bodily exertion on the part of the parties,'" the court concluded.
I fully agree that it's excessive, but I admit that I have no rational basis for that position. I wonder how they would make that claim, while also acknowledging that gambling exists.
You can lose 500k on roulette easily. That seems no less arbitrary
The rule with friends is to put money on the table immediately and agree on a deposit space/person until the outcome. Otherwise it is a sissy bet & thereby things we don't engage with. The whole betting ritual is a masculinity proxy and proposed solution is levering the fact that people that say A are willingly to agree on B at more at that moment in time than afterwards.
I think the fact that a mortgage was taken out to pay off the debt was used to argue the loser didn’t have adequate assets to cover the bet, and that it was excessive.
I suspect if it was Bill Gates vs. Larry Ellison they wouldn’t have been able to argue the wager was excessive.
Not the same thing. The hand gestures of the rock, paper, scissors game constitute the entirety of the result. whereas, the actions of the entire company over time, coupled with immeasurably complex interactions with the rest of the world, constitute the result of a stock trade.
You can choose to gamble with stock by buying and selling randomly, but that is a property of your behavior, not the entirety of the system.
That as a distinction between friends and acquaintances isn’t necessarily crazy, but it certainly is not how the word friend is used in practice, so this is a weird thing to insist upon.
I disagree with the excessive argument. The argument should be to completely ban gambling, because it's been proven to be a harmful practice on society, whether practiced in excess or not.
The fact that people lose money for no reason other than delusion that they're going to make a lot of money doing nothing is enough proof. Gambling is fundamentally immoral and parasitic.
Most players don't hold any such delusion, they just like the thrill of the chance despite knowing it's quite unlikely. Gambling addicts are quite a small percentage, compared to the millions who spend a coffee cup's worth every week on a lottery ticket.
If you're going to outlaw an activity because a small percentage can't control themselves, you'll have to outlaw quite a few activities.
While I agree that many casino games have skill involved, I'm pretty sure slots literally has no skill involved outside of learning if there is a issue with the random number generator.
Skill doesn’t mean it makes the game profitable, it means the game rewards intelligent choices with improved returns.
Different slot machines have different payout percentages, simply selecting the best improves your returns. The Stratosphere used to have 101% payout machines that could only be reached by walking all the way to the very end of their dreary mall.
There are also progressive slots, different comp rates and negotiable loss rebates for high rollers.
I wonder if there's any legal prohibition against excessive bets in canada. Is there a law or doctrine that invalidates such contracts, or is it just courts saying "this doesn't look right to us, therefore it is invalid"
I'm interested in the backstory. How do two people decide to wager such amounts of money over rock paper scissors? Like were they bored or was there some serious reason such a casual game was chosen over a serious amount of money? Clearly the loser couldn't easily afford the amount they were wagering since he had to take out debt for it, which makes it even more confusing why this seemed like a prudent decision.
You can have the money and still decide that you can beat the interest from mortgage with another investment, i.e., stocks. So, that's not necessarily indicative of a financial standing. :)
I can't find the source right now, but I remember reading about a court case centered around whether Bridge (the card game) is gambling or not due to the influence of chance on its outcome. It was settled by holding a string of games that pitched players with varying experience against each other and the outcome was that better skilled ones _always_ prevailed. And so the Bridge was ruled to be a game of skill.
Bridge is unfortunately rife with cheating at the highest levels. It's simply too easy to communicate information with your partner that you're not allowed to through subtle signals, and this is very hard to police except at the macro level using a statistical analysis of many games to determine if it seems like players are acting on more information than they should have. The only way to play Bridge without cheating is to isolate each player in a separate room, confiscate all electronics, and have them play on provided computers running electronic Bridge that only transmits bids and cards played. So never bet on Bridge.
> The only way to play Bridge without cheating is to isolate each player in a separate room, confiscate all electronics, and have them play on provided computers running electronic Bridge that only transmits bids and cards played.
You'll still have "cheating" in this scenario. The rules of bridge consider it to be cheating if partners have a bidding convention that they don't explain to the other team. It's stupid, but those are the official rules.
Oof. The game itself just doesn't lend itself to fair competitive play owing to its very nature. It's like how the overhead press was removed as a powerlifting lift in competition: It's just not possible to judge fairly (too easy to cheat using your legs).
This I don’t agree with: they should have left it as leg-assisted overhead press. So what that you helped with your back and legs? It’s a full-body activity anyway.
There already is a "leg-assisted overhead press" widely seen in competition -- the jerk. Except you see it in Olympic lifting, not powerlifting, and it's generally not done on its own, but as part of the clean and jerk. The snatch is another form of leg-assisted overhead press.
So if that's what you're into ... take up Olympic lifting!
There is no element of overhead press in snatch. In jerk feet are moving. I think it would be beneficial to have third exercise where the final motion is overhead press after pause and feet are not allowed to move.
No, you want the poker face; you don't want your opponents to be able to discern anything, and if it seems to a judge that you might be communicating information based on your reactions to certain plays then you could be disqualifed.
So you need the poker face, and you need a surreptitious system to exchange information out of band.
Neither a bridge or poker player, but these games that have both a huge mathematical and psychological component to their strategy seem to be obvious games of skill. Even blackjack with much stricter (loosing) probabilities IMO is a game of skill because "good" players will lose at a slower rate than bad ones (even without card counting).
Rock-paper-scissors just seems too simple to allow for any performance improvements that don't involve luck or cheating. For a judge to highlight "speed of execution" or "the sense of observation" doesn't make sense; this sounds like bridge players using secret signals, or a roulette player trying to squeeze their bet onto the board after the wheel has slowed - skill should be related to performance within the parameters of the game, not waiting for your opponent to throw scissors and changing to rock...
Fwiw when playing my wife at rock paper scissors I once won over 20 times in a row. The odds against this happening randomly are pretty extreme - but I know her very well and can read her well enough that it was possible. I think it's fair enough to say that there might be a psychological element there that could pull the game out of straight random chance.
One theory I have with RPS is if you say right before the game “I’m gonna play rock”, it may change the odds slightly to non-random. I’m not sure any sort of speech is within the bounds of a fair game though.
The only way I'd play Bridge with anything serious on the line would be to generate a long truly random string of moves beforehand, and then memorize them and play them.
Then, you can analyze your performance afterwards and if you're statistically losing more than you should be, you know you're giving tells.
I don't think it would be considered cheating. It's more like a poker player with a way too obvious tell that is used (abused) by the other player to gain an advantage in the game that should be random.
Hard disagree. Better games make affordances for players of differing skill level (like Go for example), but in games where this is not possible, the ethical calculation is more complex (although I would argue the ethical calculation isn't really relevant in a game, as the whole point of most games is about creating a safe place for the mutual exploration of systems).
Whether or not the specific examples constitutes cheating is up for negotiation by the participants.
> as the whole point of most games is about creating a safe place for the mutual exploration of systems
What?
Can you imagine saying to any reasonable person, “do you want to create a safe place for the mutual exploration of systems?” And having them reply, “oh yeah, I would like to play a game.”
I found it apt. Your attempted reductio ad absurdum assumes there's an injective mapping from activities to points-of-activity. This is clearly not true.
I've given this a little more thought after reading your comment. And I was wrong. The point of games is drama.
Drama in music comes from an anticipated causality from A->B and either the fulfillment or denial of that causality. Romantic-era music strives for maximum drama by injecting as many fulfillment/denial moments as possible, with denials that are stretched to the limit of the implicit rules of the cultural context / musical system.
Minimalist music does something entirely different, by first breaking the expectation of resolution, and then becoming the flame that we stare into; it begins within a known system and then subverts it through stasis.
Can you imagine saying to any reasonable person, "do you want to skip all the boring parts and get to the final note?" Or, "yeah, ok, I don't want to see or even know what happens in the movie, just tell me what the final shot is."
In games, the drama of the "game part" is in exploring the edges of a system, with the added engagement of partial agency towards "resolution" (in a musical sense).
I still can't imagine any reasonable person thinking the "point" of a game is to win. Winning is the objective, not the point. Whether or not employing agency from outside the system is appropriate for a game is up for negotiation among the players, but without some level of adherence to an agreed system, it ceases to be a multiplayer game and becomes a game of solitaire where the rules are whatever the cheater decides.
I can appreciate that there is drama in that, and perhaps the drama of avoiding being caught is more satisfying than the drama of performing "the perfect game" for some people. In that situation, though, I think I'd still describe games as "a safe place for the mutual exploration of systems."
The argument isn't against good/poor play; it's if this is cheating. You're essentially saying it's unethical not to cheat if you can get away with it, which is obviously untrue
It’s not cheating. Your opponent knows they’re supposed to keep their throw a secret as long as possible. Otherwise why not just say, “here comes rock” before they start? It’s the same as a pitcher tipping their pitches in baseball.
It's also apparently a college sport. From one of my favorite Metafilter comments:
One chilly night in the fall of 2004, I chanced to find myself upon the streets of Toronto. I represented one half of the august top-rated debate team from a small upstate NY liberal arts school ([cough] named after a man shot by Aaron Burr), recovering from a day in which we had arrived at a debate tournament and discovered, 11 minutes before the commencement of Round 1, that we would be competing using a format heretofore unknown to us. A lot of hemming and hawing ensued, before we ultimately turned to face the task awaiting us, and swaggered to the podium to stare down the fate bearing down on us like a hawk on a rabbit. The night was not kind to us, and by 11PM, we had succeeded in drowning our sorrows in a heretofore unimagined selection of Labatt's higher-gravity options available at the corner pub.
Which is when we were wholly taken aback to encounter none other than Syracuse University's internationally ranked (!!) team of rock-paper-scissors players, fresh off their top-32 finish in that year's invitation-only (!!!) tournament. I admit I was skeptical as to the provenance of their accolades, but a quick glance at the large medallions hanging off two team members' necks was enough to assuage any doubts; these were our fellow Upstate New Yorkers, and they had come to win RoShamBo rounds and chew bubblegum, and they were all out of bubblegum.
Naturally, we did what any self-respecting half-in-the-bag Americans would do upon meeting so-called champions of the rock-paper-scissors arena on the streets of a foreign nation, and challenged them to a duel on the spot. We proceeded to go a spectacular 0-24 against our fellow countrymen, before realizing that maybe there's more to the metagame than we had previously considered. It's only now, 15 years later, upon reading this description of the algorithm, that I have come to understand the instrument of our demise.
RPS in the strictest sense is a totally balanced game which cannot have a winning strategy if played completely logically.
Yet, all the RPS algorithm starts from the same premise.
The counter-intuitive reason why there can be winning strategy to RPS is that people try to devise winning strategies. Once you deviate from purely randomly choosing RPS, your adversary can try to analyze your past moves to create a model of your strategy and used that model to defeat you.
As for us poor humans, we're really bad at choosing randomly, so the best RPS players are very good at picking up what type of players you are.
PS: and in any population of players in a tournament, the mere presence of a few that want to have a non-random strategy will win over those without strategy. The strategy-less will just have a random streak of wins and losses no matter who they are facing. Of those with a strategy, the one with the best analysis of their opponent will win.
>> No one has yet dominated Rock Paper Scissors like Tiger Woods dominated golf; no winner of the RPS world championship in Toronto has ever won twice. According to Fox, however,
So no one has used math to back up their claims of skill, but one anecdote says "there's totally skill involved"...
OK - then make these guys play 100 or 1000 games against each other and see if anything beyond the very small sample size is responsible for the difference in win. If the previous winner is superior at RPS he should show a statistical advantage over the loser.
I can insist that there is skill in coin toss too.
I think what we want to look at is how much luck/skill percent is there. If tennis was luck overpowering skill, it wouldn't be an international sport in my opinion.
So rock paper scissors is 90% luck + 10% skill. A kid can potentially beat a professional rock player. Same is not the case for tennis.
You can't influence the result of a coin toss, unless you're using a manipulated coin.
I'd put rock paper scissors more into the poker category, but actually there's less of a luck-component in rps, because there's no drawing of random cards. You're only playing your opponent, and unless your opponent hast figured out a way to be completely random, you can "read" them if you're good enough. But that's very hard and impossible to do perfectly, so we call it luck.
Tennis is mostly a matter of the body, rps or poker are games of the mind.
When I was a kid I learned how to reliably cheat at a coin toss. The trick was to use the popular method where you flip the coin into the air, catch it in the palm of the same hand, then flip it over on top of your opposite wrist. And you would have the other person call heads or tails during the toss.
Normally if the coin landed heads-up in your palm, it would then be tails-up on your other wrist. But with a little practice it was easy to sneak in a half-flip during that last maneuver, so heads-up in your palm would also be heads-up on your wrist.
If you did all this fast enough, the other person wouldn't notice that you got a peek at the coin as it landed in your palm, so you could decide whether to do the expected final flip or the sneaky one.
I got away with this for quite some time before anyone figured out what I was doing!
There's a great scene at the beginning of American Gods where the protagonist ("Shadow") is talking to a guy in a bar ("Wednesday") who wants to hire him for miscellaneous purposes. The protagonist doesn't really want to take the offer, but he humors Wednesday by flipping a coin for it. (Wednesday has already identified himself pretty unambiguously as Odin, but Shadow is quite unintelligent.)
You see this sequence:
> Shadow took a quarter from his pocket, tails up. He flicked it up in the air, knocking it against his finger as it left his hand to give it a wobble that made it look as if it were turning, caught it, slapped it down on the back of his hand.
> "Call," he said.
> "Why?" asked Wednesday.
> "I don't want to work for anyone with worse luck than me. Call."
> "Heads," said Mr. Wednesday.
> "Sorry," said Shadow, revealing the coin without even bothering to glance at it. "It was tails. I rigged the toss."
> "Rigged games are the easiest ones to beat," said Wednesday, wagging a square finger at Shadow. "Take another look at the quarter."
> Shadow glanced down at it. The head was face-up.
> "I must have fumbled the toss," he said, puzzled.
> "You do yourself a disservice," said Wednesday, and he grinned. "I'm just a lucky, lucky guy."
Tennis would also have some part of mind games right ? The more I think about it, obviously it definitely is a matter of body excellence, but if you can always predict where your opponent going to hit, wouldn't that be a sure win (considering the players equal in matter of body)?
I don't see any "reaction time" available in RPS (considering equal in matter of body), and no way to predict the choice of the other one (as you stated) so similar to coin toss (you can't influence the choice of the opponent).
Poker also gives you some amount of time to "react" to what others did. So I am still seeing RPS heavily biased towards luck.
Tennis certainly has a mind-game component, but it's smaller, I believe, because you're reacting intuitively, you simply don't have the time for mind games, unless those at the press conference where you tell everyone that you've barely been able to train.
> I don't see any "reaction time" available in RPS (considering equal in matter of body), and no way to predict the choice of the other one (as you stated) so similar to coin toss (you can't influence the choice of the opponent).
But you do have ways to predict the choice of your opponent. You "just" need to understand how they think. If you chose rock and they chose scissors, what will they choose next? Are they the type that figures "he will choose rock again, I'm going to pick paper", or are they thinking "he will try to mix it up and pic scissors because he thinks I'm going to react to rock by using paper, I'll take rock"?
If you played against a computer that just used a perfect random number generator, I'd agree with you. But you're playing a human, and they're terrible at being random.
It would be absolutely a game of luck if you played one game against one person without knowing who they are. But since, similar to Poker, you can learn over multiple rounds, the luck quickly fades. And apparently, if you're playing the odds, many people will start with certain choices, and they don't pick each choice at the same rate. There are quite a few articles (and books) out there, and they often mention the World Rock Paper Scissors Society, which also holds international tournaments.
Influencing a coin flip is certainly possible. If you can reliably flip it the same way each time it's not hard to get 5-10 heads in a row, with a little practice.
I want to know more about the circumstances that led up to this. What situation results in someone saying "I'll let you $500k I can beat you at Rock, Paper, Scissors..." And actually being willing to follow through?
It's really the same thing. Under what circumstances would you figure 'as a person who does what i say i will do, 500k is a reasonable amount to bet, even though I need to take out a mortgage'?
The ruling seems to have a lot of ambiguity. At what point does a game of skill become a game of chance? What amount of money is considered “excessive?”
Is such ambiguity normal for court rulings? (Genuine question - I’m not super familiar with legal stuff)
I just watched that video. Fascinating. Of course it means if the other person is playing the strategy, then you want to play the strategy to beat that strategy, which is just as simple. But if they realise you are doing that they might switch to the one that beats the one that beats the one. I guess it gets a bit like poker where you are trying to appear "loose" then suddenly play tight or whatever.
I was wondering how a human can generate random numbers while playing. One way could be if you can hear your heart beat, the number of beats between plays mod 3 would allow you to play randomly enough to throw off your opponents strategy.
You could also memorise a recently generate sequence of random numbers!
> Of course it means if the other person is playing the strategy, then you want to play the strategy to beat that strategy, which is just as simple. But if they realise you are doing that they might switch to the one that beats the one that beats the one.
My favorite entry in that competition was Fork Bot.
The contestants were written in C, you see, and all rounds of play executed in the same process. Obviously there's all kinds of ways you could cheat in this environment but Fork Bot struck me as especially clever.
Fork Bot, on its turn, would fork() twice and return a different move in each of the three resulting processes. On its next turn, it would look back to the previous turn and see if it won. If not, it would exit(). So only the process where it won every round would survive...
Though, it ran into a problem with one of the other cheaters: "Unfortunately, since all three moves lost to the Psychic Friends Network after the first turn, the program exited and the remainder of that match was declared forfeited."
20 years ago my friend made simple RPS computer game that always won iterated games against human player. It was relatively simple Bayesian algorithm (not naive Bayes exactly).
No pure Nash Equilibria means they won't ever converge, as humans are great at seeing patterns that aren't there and cannot make random choices without outside help.
It could be, if you can react to the other persons movement fast enough but appear to not have cheated. Also repeat RPS is definitely a game of skill for humans since humans don't do random, so if you can guess what the other person's bias is you have an advantage.
If you choose your moves randomly in equal proportion, then you will always win 50% of the time no matter what the other player does (not counting ties).
But humans are bad at making truly random choices. If your opponent isn't random, you can exploit what they're actually doing.
And if you're exploiting what the opponent is doing, then you're not random anymore and your opponent can exploit what you're doing.
The only edge you can get is if your opponent is making their sign early while their hand is still up. People do that unconsciously.
That being said, the game can have an element of strategy if it is played many rounds (hundreds), but humans don't wager beyond one or three rounds. Ain't a fun game if you need paper and keeping track of scores.
You have to wonder if Rock, Paper, Scissors is a front for some other wager/deal they had to settle. E.g., a large bitcoin transaction, a drug deal, idk. Since they wanted it notarized, they had to change the face of it.
It says that while it is considered partially based on skill, it has a large element of chance. It seems likely they would have invalidated it based on that alone.
Quebec courts are not arguing that Rock Paper Scissors is not a game of skill.
They only ruled that the bet was "excessive" which is against the law.
IANAL, but betting half a million dollars on three hand gestures qualifies as excessive imho.
I am thoroughly impressed that the loser actually made good on their commitment though and took out the mortgage on his house!
My friends would try every angle to weasel their way out of a $100 light hearted bet!