Rock, Paper, Scissors, Stupid!

Please no. Please do not do this to us. Please do not let Rock, Paper, Scissors become a major sporting event. Please ESPN do not dedicate programming to show it next year. You already have dominos and darts wasting space, so RPS has an outside chance. But RPS as a sporting competition has got to be the stupidest things I've seen. What's next pencil break?

Waking up on Sunday morning I turn on my television and stopped on CBS to see a story about the popularity of RPS. By saying popular it meant they had a tournament in someone's backyard and the winner got a $1,000. The guru of RPS, Master Roshambola, spoke about the strategy, the mental aspect, and the skill needed to be a great winner.

"Rock, paper, scissors mastery was not a path that I chose," he said with a distinct humility. "It was thrust upon me. To some extent, I am the Bobby Fischer of RPS; and to another extent, Bobby Fischer is the Master Roshambola of chess."

Quick somebody check the insane asylum to see if a patient went missing.

After fierce single elimination competition, the winner was a young lady who didn't look like a RPS expert. What was her strategy? She seemed dumbfounded by her win and said she was just playing whatever came to her mind. What about hours of preparation? Practicing with neighbors? I think she practiced with her cat. So much for skill and strategy.

Later in the morning ESPN ran a story about the RPS championship held in Las Vegas. Just because it was held in Las Vegas doesn't mean it's becoming a huge event. Remember a lot of stupid things happen in Vegas. This is one of them.

257 competitors were flown into Las Vegas in April after winning regional tournaments in their neighborhood bars. Seeing the variety of colorful characters made it seem like a RPS competition broke out at a Halloween convention. There were some nuts dressed up in goofy outfits. I'm surprised no one dressed up as Spock and threw out the Vulcan hand sign for scissors.

One lady wearing bunny ears (who said her job is a human being. No joke) made it to the sweet 16 to meet Kristina Hartman who belongs Mensa. It's the organization whose members' IQs rank in the top two percent of the population. That's what must have gotten her so far in this competition. She proclaimed…

"This game is as complex as the mind of your opponent."

When your opponent has no brain it must mean the game isn't that complex. Who won? The super smart lady lost to the dumb wacko in bunny ears. So someone with probably an IQ of 100 and drunk so minus about 50 points beat someone in Mensa.

But the prevailing strategy seemed to be drinking of the alcoholic variety. All day long. Some even chugged a beer before the start of their match. Drinking even turned out to be the key to success.

The winner was carpenter from St. Louis who told us how he trained. It perfectly summed up how seriously RPS should be taken next time someone says it's going to explode.

"I shotgunned a ton of beer," he said. "I listened to a ton of Stevie Wonder. I was nailing that."

Don't talk about RPS as a serious sport anymore. He just prove why.

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