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The hands of fate

Through rock, paper, scissors, Graham Walker found the kid in all of us

By Dave Faries
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 14th, 2007 issue

Jan Přerovský/THE PRAGUE POST

Graham Walker is animated when speaking about the game that has taken him around the world, made him an author and put him in the midst of philosophical controversy.

Graham Walker can be beaten at his own game.

The author of The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide is sipping a beer at Fraktal, ruminating on the game, mindless fun and Zen, when another patron challenges him to a quick contest. It takes five throws, but the other guy comes out on top.

A bidding war erupted over the publication of his strategy guide.

Walker just shrugs. “Those that can, do; those that can’t, write books about it,” he says. It’s a kid’s game, after all.

The generations born into a televised world have found it difficult to leave childhood behind. On the cusp of this small-screen era, when suburban lives played out in black and white, young fathers dispensed wisdom from stout chairs behind curling tufts of smoke from well-worn pipes.

A fistful of nothing: Walker in an epic struggle with a bar patron. He ended up losing to a throw of scissors.

Now, it seems, adulthood has been stripped of its dignity. All we ever needed to know in life, after all, we picked up in kindergarten. Chicken soup has become symbolic for shared advice. And the most elementary of games, rock, paper, scissors (RPS), has emerged from playgrounds as a nonviolent form of conflict resolution, a path to spiritual enlightenment, even a means by which to peer into the human subconscious.

Or that’s what you soon come to believe — sort of — listening to Walker. Even after a crushing defeat, scissors slicing his throw of paper, the 39-year-old expat from Canada expounds on the topic with a mix of exuberance and thoughtfulness, but mostly with wry, tongue-in-cheek nods. His strategy guide is a mildly humorous read, similar in sophomoric vein to Harvard Lampoon’s parody Bored of the Rings, containing such prudent admonitions as “think twice about using RPS for life-threatening decisions.”

Walker is, with his brother Douglas, president of the World RPS Society — a triviality that has earned him C-level celebrity status. Both Fox Sports and CNN covered the annual championship tournament, held in his native Toronto and last year won by the quick wrists of the United Kingdom’s Bob Cooper. Rolling Stone magazine ran a piece on the organization. A bidding war erupted for publication rights to Walker’s paperback, eventually won by Simon & Schuster, and a full-length documentary on the brothers and their organization is due this summer.

Rock, paper, scissors is, at its core, about making a selection.

Perhaps reflecting a line of the strategy guide, Walker’s path to semistardom began, naturally, with a bout of RPS. Sometime in 1995, after settling an argument about who would step into a frigid Canadian night for another armload of firewood with a quick round of RPS, Graham and his brother Douglas launched a Web site dedicated to the game.

“We developed a site as an experiment,” he says. “If you declare yourself a worldwide authority on a subject, what happens?”

What happened was a matter of perfect timing. Quite by accident, the brothers tapped into the recurring youth of Western culture and its brand-new medium for sharing information. People from around the world began posting RPS-related memories on the site. They found out that in almost every country kids square off using a version of the game. This universality allows RPS to bridge barriers of nationality and age.

“Everybody grows up with it,” Graham explains. “You play it as kids or in college — who has to get off the couch to get beer? Who has to change the diaper?” (He became a first-time father a couple of months ago.) “For a lot of people, they hold an affectionate spot in their hearts for the game.”

Eventually, Graham and Douglas developed a set of rules and started tournament play. The first World Championship, back in 2002, sold out in 45 minutes. Last year’s drew more than 500 competitors and 300 fans.

It is not the tongue of man that will abolish conflict, but the hand.

But once again, Walker was beaten at his game. Defeat came after the producer of Fox Sports’ segment, Los Angeles promoter Matti Lesham, recognized the marketing value of this new form of mano a mano inaction. The World Series of Poker drew marketing dollars and TV audiences, so why not RPS? Lesham trotted the idea to Budweiser and a glitzy, big-money competitor, with dancing girls and a Vegas finale, was born. Lesham’s “stab in the back” — Walker’s phrase — garnered astounding publicity, including a front-page piece in The Wall Street Journal. Yet all the money flowed south.

“We’d like it to be [moneymaking], obviously.” Walker says of the World RPS Society. “It could have been if we didn’t get stabbed in the back.” Lesham did, according to published sources, shell out $20,000 (430,000 Kč) for initial rights, and it would be difficult to prove, in court, ownership of an impromptu contest known to kids all over the world.

So the brothers hope completion of the as-yet-untitled documentary will win them sympathy, if not cash. “The documentary is about us developing RPS as a going concern, versus the other guy funded by Budweiser,” Walker continues. “We want to have events in bars, but we wouldn’t have promoted it in that direction” — meaning 18 to 35 titillation and lowbrow sports bar shenanigans.

If the game teaches you anything, it’s to shrug off defeat. Unlike with a coin toss or random selection, Walker explains, “you win or lose based on how well you play.”

Even high stakes players sometimes rely on RPS to resolve disputes. Frustrated by a courtroom stand off, a judge in Florida once ordered lawyers to meet outside for a binding round of RPS. And, when Japanese businessman Takashi Hashiyama couldn’t decide between offers from Sotheby’s or Christie’s to peddle a $12 million Cezanne, he asked the two auction houses to square off. The latter sought advice from 11-year-olds, who recommended scissors.

Rookies tend to throw rock first, they pointed out, in part because it seems more assertive. Therefore Sotheby’s would likely counter with paper. “Humans are incapable of being random,” Walker explains, commenting on the auction house dilemma. “There’s a lot of subconscious thought going on.” If, through deductive reasoning or trash talking, you manage to eliminate one option from your opponent’s repertoire, victory almost certainly follows.

Christie’s won the match.

The first throw is a window into the style, strategy and capabilities of an opponent.

After another sip of beer, he ad-libs on the meaning of the game. “Ultimately all rock, paper, scissors is, is a nontransitive tripartite system,” he explains. Transitive relations and nontransitive systems are mathematical concepts of interest only to a few graduate wonks, of course, so he clears up the matter.

Win, lose or break even, RPS is perfectly balanced. No throw exists that will wipe out all the others. Victory or defeat comes through human idiosyncracies — guesswork, psychology, that sort of thing. Rookies betray themselves by certain throws.

“The game is simple,” Walker says. “The gamesmanship makes it complex.”

Like game theory in political science, it’s a straightforward concept concealing a series of decisions leading to an outcome — if you choose to see it that way. The fundamental balance, again, is key to the game’s success. At the risk of sounding vaguely philosophical, Walker compares it with Asian metaphysics and the primal, competing forces that rule nature. “It’s yin, yang, yong,” he says.

Walker’s presence in Prague has more to do with the forces of nature than the brisk and sometimes bitter machinations of international RPS. He simply met a Czech woman in Canada. They married, and, when she expressed a desire to live closer to family, he ditched a day job in advertising sales and moved overseas. In addition to handling organizational business, he spends his time parenting, struggling through Czech-language lessons and looking for work. “It’s funny what love will do,” he says. Then, after a pause, adds “There’s another way to look at it: We’ve opened up a European office.”

Ah, yes. The calm, shrug-it-off demeanor of someone locked in a game entirely human, egalitarian, effortless and pointless. Graham and his brother come up with a wild idea, which leads to a Web site, which spawns a world championship, which makes them authors and inspires a documentary.

And still friends and acquaintances question their obsession with a kid’s game. “People say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ ” Walker finally acknowledges. “You know what? You don’t get it. It’s about life experience.”

Dave Faries can be reached at dfaries@praguepost.com

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