Actual quote from the show serving as definitive proof that CTK is the best.
The concept is simple: four chefs compete in three different rounds of cooking to make whatever the assigned dish is. The dish is then judged on taste, presentation, and whether or not the dish actually reminds the judge of what it's supposed to be. Seems pretty strange that one of the criteria is actually making the assigned dish though, right? Like, how hard can it be for professional chefs to be told to make a loaded baked potato and actually produce a loaded baked potato? As it turns out, it can be very hard, because when making a loaded baked potato in Cutthroat Kitchen, you might not have a potato to use, because it was confiscated and replaced with a bowl of crushed potato chips.
Not what most consumers would consider a viable substitute.
That's the real trick of Cutthroat Kitchen. Each round begins with an auction in which chefs can purchase sabotages to hurt the other chefs' ability to cook properly, thus making it easier for them to get eliminated. The chefs are of course not meant to use their own money for buying sabotages. At the beginning of the episode, each competitor is given $25,000 in cash to use in the auctions. Whatever money you use is taken away, and if you win you only keep whatever you did not spend of the $25,000. Now that money disappears fast, and CTK is a really hard game to play, but with some understanding of economics (particularly behavioral economics and personal finance), you can employ strategies that just might get you out of Cutthroat Kitchen alive.
Section 1: Bidding vs. Saving
So, like I said, each chef gets $25,000. However, the winning chef does not always (if ever) walk away with $25,000. That $25,000 prize is hard to come by, because it would mean surviving three rounds of sabotages being thrown at you without getting to sabotage anyone else. Because the idea of leaving with $25,000 (or a similarly high sum) is so enticing, many chefs are tempted to save their money and bid rarely, if ever, and only in small amounts. See, the mistake these chefs are making is accepting the $25,000 as theirs and seeing any time they spend the money as them "losing" their prize money. However, in reality, none of the chefs own that $25,000. People who get too wrapped up in not wanting to surrender the money that they now view as theirs to take home results in over-saving and elimination. What the chefs need to keep in mind is that if get eliminated, they walk away with $0, even if they had the whole $25,000 saved. That $25,000 they refused to spend is of absolutely no use to them if they don't actually get to take it with them. Logically, it is better to spend $24,000 and win, because while $1000 is a small prize compared to $25,000, it is a big prize compared to $0.
Pictured here: all the things that can be bought with $0
So in the auctions, it's definitely better to spend, right? Well, in true economics fashion, the answer is yes, but also no. You see, there's basically no benefit to saving all of your money. However, you also can't blow all of your money right away. You have three rounds to get through, and if you spend too much too fast just trying to make it to the end with way less money than your opponent, you basically have two options: you can save the rest and allow your opponent to stick you with whatever sabotages are in the last round, or you can spend all of your remaining money to sabotage your opponent and walk away with only a victorious title and the pride of winning.
Pictured here: all the things that can be bought with the pride of winning.
To sum it up, when questioning whether to bid or save, it's generally better to bid because all that money you save does you no good at all if you get eliminated because you got stuck with a sabotage you could have bought your way out of, but don't get crazy! You want to save at least a little bit of that money, because whatever method you happen to come by walking away with $0, walking away with $0 sucks.
Section 2: Sabotage Strategy
Now that we've established the basics of spending or saving when it comes to auctions, let's discuss a few of the more nuanced strategies of sabotaging other chefs. The first one I think is pretty obvious, but people fall still into the trap pretty often.
Rule #1: Don't jump the price for no reason. Let's say the bidding starts at $500. You raise to $1000. Someone else raises to $1100. You raise to $1200. They raise to $1300. You raise to $7000 for no reason at all. Seriously, what are you doing? What are you trying to prove there, buddy? Assuming the other chef stops bidding and just lets you take it, your "victory" is winning an auction item for $7000 that you possibly could have gotten for $2000. Who cares if the other chef keeps raising just above your price? Keep going in small amounts until they're done. You don't know them. You don't know that there's something magical about the price of $7000 that they would have continued to bid until you got there and you just saved everyone a lot of time. No. All you did was jump the gun and spend more money than you needed to. That has to be like a golden rule of economics or something. Do not spend more money than you need to. People who do this are not being efficient with their limited resource of money - that money is not being optimally allocated. And now, guess what, there's another sabotage coming up and you just over allocated your cash to one thing and now you might not have the funds to feel like you can get over this one as well. Bid in $100 increments. Don't spend more money than you need to spend. Allocate your limited resources appropriately.
This is the face of someone who is about to spend $7000 on those spoons.
Rule #2: Don't feel like you need to spread out your sabotages evenly.
Seriously, what are you, like the Bernie Sanders of ruining someone's day? This isn't socialism, sweetie, this is Cutthroat Kitchen. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that it's best to just freely sabotage every chef who isn't you. In fact, because of the rules of this game, that's one the the worst strategies to have. Here's an example: the first sabotage of the first round is almost always the same. One out of the four chefs can buy the opportunity to confiscate some essential ingredient from the other three chefs and replace it with a less-pleasant substitute. People tend to like to spend more money on this sabotage because of behavioral economics: whoever buys this sabotage feels like they're getting more bang for their buck because they get to sabotage three chefs at once. However, this is actually a less valuable sabotage than a single-target sabotage for two different reasons. You see, on Cutthroat Kitchen, you don't need to have the best dish each round. There's no benefit to having the best dish. In fact, you don't even need to have a good dish. You just need to not have the worst dish. So if three other chefs are all sabotaged more or less equally, that can sort of even itself out. And now that you've sabotaged your three competitors, you've painted a big target on your back for them to all be gunning for you when Alton Brown brings out the next sabotage (which is a flawed strategy for the same reason. if they hit you with that sabotage, each chef will have a sabotage and each dish will have a flaw, which means the judge will have to be nit-picky and you might go home.) It's a much better plan of attack to hit one or two chefs with every sabotage you can, not even as collusion per say, just as everyone acting in their best interest to sabotage the people who are already getting sabotaged and stack up as many obstacles for them as possible. Much like a lot of things in economic competition, your product doesn't really have to be good. It just has to be slightly better than the competition and you're golden.
Cutthroat Kitchen is a really great show, but it's also a really great example of economics. Everything seems to involve economics these days, but with this show, basic economic principles we've talked about can really help with strategy. We can all rest assured that if I ever compete on CTK, my downfall won't be a lack of economics knowledge, it'll be from things like me not knowing what a Baked Alaska is or me arbitrarily not liking mushrooms or something.
Keep an eye out for me, I might just be the next one in the shame cone.
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