"Serving the Needs of Decision Makers"

Villar Raposso was crowned the national winner Saturday in the dramatic Mexican playoff final of the "Rock, Paper, Scissors" tournament, paving the way for a trip to Canada and the world championship title of the World RPS Society.

You may not have known that there is a World RPS Society, that it has a world championship, or that there is even The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide.

Silly you.

In fact there is another, unaffiliated league, the USA Rock Paper Scissors League.

You may even believe that RPS is a stupid thing to have tournaments in, but Christie's International and Sotheby's Holdings might just disagree.

In 2205, when Takashi Hashiyama, CEO of a Japanese television equipment manufacturer, decided to auction off the collection of Impressionist paintings owned by his corporation and worth more than $20 million, he contacted the two leading U.S. auction houses for their proposals on how they would bring the collection to the market as well as how they would maximize the profits from the sale. Both firms made elaborate proposals, but neither was persuasive enough to get Hashiyama's business.

Unwilling to split up the collection into separate auctions, Hashiyama asked the firms to decide between themselves who would hold the auction, but they were unable to reach a decision.

Hashiyama told the two firms to play RPS, to decide who would get the rights to the auction.

"I sometimes use such methods when I cannot make a decision," Hashiyama said. "As both companies were equally good and I just could not choose one, I asked them to please decide between themselves and suggested to use such methods as rock, paper, scissors."

explaining that "it probably looks strange to others, but I believe this is the best way to decide between two things which are equally good".

The auction houses had a weekend to come up with a choice of move.

Christie's employees in New York said Kanae Ishibashi, the president of Christie's in Japan, spent the weekend researching the psychology of the game online and talking to friends, including Nicholas Maclean, the international director of Christie's Impressionist and modern art department.

Mr. Maclean's 11-year-old twins, Flora and Alice, turned out to be the experts Ms. Ishibashi was looking for. They play the game at school, Alice said, "practically every day."

"Everybody knows you always start with scissors," she added. "Rock is way too obvious, and scissors beats paper." Flora piped in. "Since they were beginners, scissors was definitely the safest," she said, adding that if the other side were also to choose scissors and another round was required, the correct play would be to stick to scissors - because, as Alice explained, "Everybody expects you to choose rock."

In this, they echoed master RPS strategists who recognize that "Rock is for Rookies".

"The client was very serious about this," said Jonathan Rendell, a deputy chairman of Christie's in America who was involved with the transaction. "So we were very serious about it, too."

Sotheby's said that they treated it as a game of chance and had no particular strategy for the game, but went with "paper". The fools.

Christie's won the match, with millions of dollars of commission for the auction house.

While the game is often dismissed as amounting to simple chance, the charge is dispelled by RPS fans with one of their mantras: "To the beginner the choices are few; to the expert the choices are many."