In 2005, Takashi Hashiyama, CEO of Maspro Denkoh, a Japanese television equipment company, had to choose between Christie's and Sotheby's to auction his collection of Impressionist paintings. The collection included works by Cézanne, Picasso, and Van Gogh. Both auction houses had made strong proposals. Hashiyama couldn't decide. So he told them to settle it with a game of Rock Paper Scissors.
This is not a story about desperation. Hashiyama reportedly believed that when two options are equally good, a game of chance is as rational as any other tiebreaker. What made it interesting was what happened next.
Christie's took the game seriously. Their international director Nicholas Maclean asked his 11-year-old twin daughters for advice. Their reasoning: most beginners expect opponents to open with Rock, so they throw Paper to beat it — which means Scissors is the smart counter to that anticipated Paper. It's one layer of prediction, the kind of thing that sounds obvious once you hear it and that most adults never bother to apply. Sotheby's treated it as pure chance and threw Paper. Christie's threw Scissors. Christie's won.
The collection sold for a combined total well into eight figures. Cézanne's Les grands arbres went for $11.8 million. Picasso's Boulevard de Clichy went for $1.7 million. Van Gogh's Vue de la chambre de l'artiste went for $2.7 million. With Christie's commission, the single game of Rock Paper Scissors was worth roughly $2.2 million to them. Advice from two children who had been playing the game for maybe five years.
The same story plays out in the other direction in Quebec, which is a lesson in what happens when the stakes are high enough that a court gets involved. In 2011, two men in Quebec played a best-of-three match for a wager of C$517,000, secured by a mortgage. One man lost. When the winner tried to collect, the loser refused to pay. The dispute went to court. In 2017, a judge voided the debt. The Quebec Court of Appeal upheld that ruling in April 2020. The reasoning: the amount was excessive, and the role of chance in Rock Paper Scissors meant the wager couldn't be enforced as a legitimate contract.
Michael Jordan's locker room games exist somewhere between these two stories. Jay Williams, who played with Jordan in the NBA, has described sessions where single throws went for $20,000, with at least one reported instance at $100,000. No judicial involvement. Just Jordan — the most competitive human being who ever laced up basketball shoes — betting large sums on a three-gesture hand game because that's what Jordan does with downtime.
What all three stories share is that Rock Paper Scissors creates an interesting credibility problem for high-stakes decisions. The Christie's game worked because both parties accepted the outcome and were bound by the professional stakes of the situation. The Quebec game didn't work because one party didn't honor it and there was a court willing to agree. The Jordan games worked because nobody involved needed a court to enforce anything. The game is only as binding as the social contract around it. When you're a major auction house competing for a collection worth millions, you don't renege on a fair game. When you're in a Quebec courtroom, the judge has different ideas about what a mortgage-backed RPS wager should be worth.
Rock Paper Scissors makes an excellent tiebreaker. It makes a poor basis for secured lending. The game doesn't know the difference.