stevesbets

Growing up I drank a ton of Coke and Pepsi. People always told me that no good would come from drinking all that soda. Only on my recent Vegas trip did I learn just how wrong they were.

Poker players have a habit of betting on just about anything from how high they can jump to how many 3 pointers they can make in a row to the gender of the next person to walk around the corner. My friend Luke (http://lukekim.blogspot.com) has been offering action lately on a coke pepsi taste test. His rules are simple, people get an hour to correctly differentiate between 10-20 cups randomly filled by him with either Coke or Pepsi. He first mentioned this bet to me months ago and since I’m not a hustler, I instantly told him that i was pretty sure I could do it. Since then, he did the bet with 5 people and every single one has lost. I was still confident, so upon arriving in Vegas, I booked 1k in action with both him and his friend Andrew at 2 to 1 odds that I could correctly differentiate 10 cups.

Throughout the trip we trash talked back and forth about the upcoming bet, no matter what I said, he responded, “I have heard it all before and the people still lose”. The big night came and I devised a strategy. Luke and Andrew  filled and anonymously labeled 10 cups and sealed the answer key away into an envelope. I had one hour which was more than enough time to taste each cup multiple times.  With the aid of scratch paper, I did the first tasting and wrote down what I suspected each cup was. I was sure that the 2nd cup i tasted was coke, so anytime I drank one that I was unsure about, I went back to that second cup to instantly compare (I called it my litmus coke). I then took a ten minute break and went back and tried each cup again. After the third tasting, I confirmed all my answers and was ready to submit. When I told Luke and Andrew that I had 7 cokes and 3 pepsis Andrew exclaimed, “Crap I think he got it”. It turned out I was the first person to win the Coke-Pepsi challenge, a title about which I am very proud.