500K bet on rock paper scissors ruled invalid by Quebec court
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
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!
> 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.
wouldn't this depend on income/assets of those involved?
I suspect if it was Bill Gates vs. Larry Ellison they wouldn’t have been able to argue the wager was excessive.
I mean, the guy went to court to weasel out of the bet.
>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.
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.
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 would be equivalent to burning $500,000.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
Don't legally recognize gambling debts. If people lose a bet they can pay it if they want to, but the law wouldn't recognize or enforce the debt.
This appears to be basically what happened in this case anyway.
Correct, and you take it a step farther. People don't pay even if they want, both parties engaging in gambling are penalized.
This is how you get people with broken legs. As much as I dislike the payday loan places... they largely eliminated loan sharks.
You have legal gambling to keep it out of the hands of organized crime who will collect with illegal methods... not through the courts.
It just drives it underground where knuckle-breakers get to make and enforce the rules.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What’s next, you gonna want to ban gravity cause your feet are sore?
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.
> 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.
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.
More interesting is that we actually called the game canasta, which actually is a different but related game.
At that point, poker seems to me mostly about the skill of handling uncertainty and communicating with other players.
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.
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.
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.
Over a statistically large sample of hands or games, skilled players will almost always dominate unskilled players.
That's true of any game or sport, though. Poker is just one in which that is "less true".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well he didn't commit to it because he went to court to get out of it.
“But without government, who would break the contracts?!”
Good thing 'L' is not based on 'o' then.
How many finger (not even hand) gestures does it take to click "buy" on a stock broker's app?
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.
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):
https://www.fasken.com/en/knowledge/2017/12/can-you-legally-...
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.
To you it may be, but where do you draw the line though? Is $100,000 excessive? $10,000? $1,000? Tbh, $1,000 does actually sound excessive to me.
I would argue that the wager was for more than a necessary amount, and definitely not normal.
How often do you hear about half million dollar RPS games, really?
IANAL either but to me the law/government is there to uphold contracts. Not judge if they are smart or deemed a good idea.
Reminds me of predatory lending rules like charging more than X% interest is excessive.
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.
("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.)
That is but one (very left) interpretation. Good luck getting everyone to agree.
Or are you just disagreeing with the part about contract enforcement in particular?
To pretty much everyone else it's uncontroversial.
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.
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 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
You can lose 500k on roulette easily. That seems no less arbitrary
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.
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...
Then, you can analyze your performance afterwards and if you're statistically losing more than you should be, you know you're giving tells.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/07/the-cheating-p...
So you need the poker face, and you need a surreptitious system to exchange information out of band.
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.
So if that's what you're into ... take up Olympic lifting!
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-christies-soth...
> the sense of observation or the putting in place of a strategic sequence
The court can ask him to defeat 10 other people in that game consistently to prove that ? But then he could argue the others were also skilled ?
Whether or not the specific examples constitutes cheating is up for negotiation by the participants.
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.”
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."
After skimming your comment, I’ve decided you’re intentionally splitting hairs to create a difference between point and objective.
Ask yourself: What is the point of going to the grocery store? What is the objective of going to the grocery store?
Would that line apply when playing your young child in a game?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
the entire accepted premise of a coin flip is fair probability; yoou've subverted the game otherwise and should probably start working at a carnival.
With a fair coin and enough practice, you can: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8248810/
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!
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."
There is a detailed analysis in 10.3 "How to cheat at coin and die tossing" of E.T. Jaynes's Probability Theory.
[0]: https://priceonomics.com/the-world-of-competitive-rock-paper...
edit: wait something looks odd at http://www.worldrps.com/ , is it really an internationally recognized competition ?
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.
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.
So no one has used math to back up their claims of skill, but one anecdote says "there's totally skill involved"...
There's something to be amazed by, by this story, but it's not doing what you say you will.
This thread's...disappointing.
Is such ambiguity normal for court rulings? (Genuine question - I’m not super familiar with legal stuff)
If you do a 2/3, or 3/5, etc, then maybe. Numberphile did an episode on how you're more likely to win by following a particular strategy:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rudzYPHuewc
Presumably this works best if the other person is not following the same strategy. The paper that they reference (PDF):
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!
Reminds me of Iocaine Powder: https://web.archive.org/web/20100131080653/http://ofb.net/~e...
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."
4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 …
Humans really suck at producing randomness.
Considering that you can get a robot that will beat RPS 100% of the time, I would consider that a yes.
https://newatlas.com/unbeatable-rock-paper-scissors-robot/29...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skill_testing_question
I think these are my favourite legal loophole. I even remember teachers using them as examples in elementary math classes.
Edit: this is tongue in cheek, not legal advice