CULTURE | Welcome to the Rock Paper Scissors world championships!

Yes! This contest exists.

 See my previous piece on this “sporting event” here.

GAMES | I let you down, Vancouver. This past Saturday, I competed in the (international!) Rock Paper Scissors world championships and I lost. Big time. Luckily, unlike most world championship events, this one wasn’t really about winning.

For most of the costumed competitors, the championship seemed to be more about who was the funniest, most witty, and most unusual, rather than who was actually best at the game. Sure, we all had a chance at the $7,000 grand price, but within an hour of arriving, most of the 606 participants (including most of my team) had already been eliminated. If the cash had been the only draw, it would have been a pretty depressing night. Particularly since there was a little too much waiting around and drinks were overpriced.

As it was, despite crippling defeat, Saturday night at the Rock Paper Scissors world championships proved to be more fun than I’ve had in ages.

For the price of an evening at any urban nightclub, I got a chance at some big money, an opportunity to dress in costume and act silly with my friends, an interview on Fox Sports, and most importantly, I got to meet some of the funniest people I’ve encountered in years.

Contrary to what I’d been told by former competitors, not one person I met at the Rock Paper Scissors event appeared to be taking it all that seriously. According to the event’s official website (www.rpschamps.com), in addition to coast-to-coast Canadian participants, “the World Championships brought competitors from as far away as Australia, The Czech Republic, Norway, [and] 21 U.S. states.”

But even the international contingent seemed fairly laid-back about the whole thing.

Team Czech Republic, RPS World Championships 2004.

The all-female Team Czech Republic, for example – clad in red hoodies, black ruffled mini-skirts and rainbow knee socks – was eliminated as quickly as I was. Even so, the girls assured me (in their very limited English) that their loss didn’t diminish their experience in the slightest. This seemed true for most competitors.

Most teams were obviously in attendance for the sole purpose of having fun. Team themes ranged from the bizarre to the hilarious and included everything from Team What Would Jesus Throw? – whose member Heather Birrell of Toronto took second place overall – to Team Swayze (as in ‘80s hunk Patrick Swayze).

My own team (Team Skule) arrived in borrowed UofT Engineering Alumni sports jerseys.

We pretended we were a flag football team that accidentally ended up at the wrong competition. Though not particularly inspired, our costumes and repeated use of the Heisman pose got us a lot of laughs as well as a TV interview, but we were hardly the most spirited participants there.

One team dwarfed all others.

The largest team at the event (and according to them, in Rock Paper Scissors world championship history) was the 22-member Act Random All Stars, who were kind enough to adopt me after my own friends left in favour of a good night’s sleep.

Co-captained by last year’s silver medalist, Marc Rigaux, (a.k.a. Fist Full O’ Sneer), the All Stars rolled up to the venue in what can only be described as a phat SUV limo, flanked on all sides by members of the press as if they were The Beatles.

Marc Rigaux (L) and friends, at the Rock Paper Scissors World Championships 2004

Costumed as Miami Vice, the team also featured a former top-ranking female competitor – Lauren Batty (a.k.a. Force of the Fist), 26-year-old Vancouver competitor Anil Sabharwal, and Anil’s “coach”, one Troy Forsythe (who participated only in an advisory capacity).

Thanks to their team strategy of “relying on a complex series of mathematical computations designed to make each throw appear completely random,” the All Stars managed to send Rigaux – who wore an oven mitt for most of the night “to keep his playing hand warm” – to the final eight, where, amid team chants of “it’s all math!” he was sadly eliminated.

I’m not sure that means anything.

Though the World RPS Society insists that Rock Paper Scissors is a game of skill, having participated in the event and having listened to the strategies of hundreds of competitors, I can’t say I buy it.

According to event organizers, the victory of this year’s first place winner, Lee Rammage, was due to “a brilliant combination of gender-based insight, quick delivery and sheer bravado.” But one of my own teammates, Parag Dhar (a.k.a. The Great Brown Hope), played Rammage in the round of 64 competitors and almost beat him. Frankly, I think Rammage just got lucky.

And the bottom line is that if you participate in this event next year, you could get lucky too.

Like all competitive events that aren’t for the kindergarten set, in Rock Paper Scissors there can be only one victor. I return to Vancouver feeling more akin to Perdita Felicien than to the world champion, but I’m okay with that. I went, I saw, I failed to conquer, but I had a really good time.

Published October 23, 2004 in The Vancouver Sun.

Baby journalist and world-champ hopeful.

2018: As I transcribed this old article for the new site, I was surprised to find that this event seems to have been discontinued in 2009. (Though their website seems to indicate there is some hope of bringing it back.) Just kidding! I was not at all surprised that the Rock Paper Scissors World Championships are no more (for now). The idea seems very 2004, you know?

Anyway, on the night I recount above, I was on a self-funded visit home to Toronto, and I tied this in because writing about it would guarantee me one more (unpaid) byline. And as detailed in previous updates, I was obsessed with amassing as many as I could.

Fun fact: A seasoned, Boomer-aged columnist actually tried to steal this story from me.

It was something I pitched (both the first piece and this one) and after hearing about the event, he rolled past my desk to ask me if I would mind if he wrote about it instead! Actually, what he said was, “This wasn’t your own idea, was it? Are you really going to write about it yourself?” RUDE. I mean, I get it, and I got it, even at the time. Coming up with ideas for a weekly column is hard. But this dude was in a corner office, where he’d been comfortably ensconced for something like 30 years. Fucking Boomers, man.

Post-competition inebriation. Jen Selk (R).

Anyway, as I also mentioned in a past update: I knew this dude Marc Rigaux from high school.

A few years older than me, we’d nonetheless had a brief, if unlikely friendship. (Though as adults we had little in common and even less to talk about.) Alas (or luckily?) by the end of this event, which I attended not exactly with a “team” as written, so much as with a reluctant group of college-era friends of friends I’d roped into it, none of whom was particularly interested, and all of whom left early, Rigaux was practically too drunk to speak, let alone to be much help as an interview subject. Eventually I got in touch with his Vancouver-pal Anil, mentioned in the article, who did the work of confirming names and other team jokes and for a time, became a friend. (Eventually he left Vancouver to work for Google, and as with Rigaux, our very different interests and lifestyles meant we fell out of touch.)

It’s also worth noting that on the night of the RPS World Championships in 2004, I lost my backpack.

It contained my camera (a Christmas present from my parents from the early 90s) and all the film therein. I have a couple of photos from the night (shown here), but I had none to run with my story. Close readers may have noted that the cutline below the photo in the original piece makes no sense. It was entirely incorrect. It’s possible that at this point I was still being trolled by my irritated coworkers. The incorrect cutline could have been deliberate. It’s also possible that this happened because I lost my camera. (So I wasn’t able to provide the original photography I’d promised.)

Hard to say for sure.