Why ‘Going All In’ is the Worst Possible Move in High Stakes Chicken Game

Two cars race toward each other on a narrow desert road. Dust billows. Engines roar. The first driver to swerve loses everything: reputation, respect, the girl watching from the sidelines. The driver who holds steady wins it all. Simple enough, right?

Wrong.

This is the game of chicken, and it has destroyed more careers, companies, and countries than any amount of careful calculation ever could. The tragedy is not that people play it poorly. The tragedy is that the most confident players, the ones who think they have it figured out, consistently make the single worst possible move.

They go all in.

The Seductive Logic of Total Commitment

Picture a corporate negotiation. Two companies want the same acquisition target. Company A announces publicly that they will pay whatever it takes. They burn their bridges. They tell shareholders there is no plan B. They throw away the steering wheel, metaphorically speaking, before the cars even start moving toward each other.

This feels like genius. After all, if your opponent knows you cannot back down, they must back down themselves. The logic appears airtight. By eliminating your own options, you force the other player into retreat. The strategy has a name in game theory: credible commitment.

But here is what the all in crowd misses. Credible commitment works beautifully in certain games. Chess, for instance. Poker under specific conditions. Any contest where both players have perfect or near perfect information about payoffs and where surrender carries no catastrophic penalty.

Chicken is not that game.

When the Road Has No Shoulders

The original chicken game emerged in 1950s American youth culture, but the structure is ancient. Nations edge toward war. Businesses compete in price wars. Labor unions and management stare each other down during strikes. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts and skeptics battle over the future of finance. Climate negotiators from different countries position themselves at summits.

The common thread? Both sides can win something by cooperating. Both sides can lose everything by stubbornly holding position. And crucially, both sides face deep uncertainty about what the other will actually do when the moment arrives.

This uncertainty is the key that unlocks the whole puzzle. When you go all in, you are not playing against a rational opponent in a vacuum. You are playing against a human being who might be irrational, misinformed, proud, desperate, or simply bad at math. You are also playing against your own future self, who might discover too late that all in meant exactly that.

Consider the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. The United States declared this unacceptable and blockaded the island. Both sides had committed publicly. Both had their reputations on the line. Neither could easily back down without looking weak to allies, enemies, and domestic audiences.

The world came terrifyingly close to nuclear war. Not because either side wanted war, but because both had committed so heavily that retreat seemed impossible. The crisis resolved only because behind the scenes, both sides found face saving ways to partially retreat. The Soviets removed missiles from Cuba. The Americans quietly removed missiles from Turkey months later. Public commitment nearly killed millions. Private flexibility saved them.

The Paradox of Weakness as Strength

Game theory offers a counterintuitive insight about chicken games. The player who maintains some flexibility, who keeps some options open, who refuses to commit totally actually holds more power than the all in player.

Why? Because flexibility creates uncertainty for your opponent.

Imagine that desert road again. Driver A has thrown the steering wheel out the window. Everyone knows it. Driver A cannot swerve even if they wanted to. Driver B, however, keeps their steering wheel. Driver B has choices.

Now put yourself in Driver B’s position. You know Driver A cannot swerve. You know that if you hold steady, you both die. Your only rational move is to swerve, right?

Not so fast.

What if you suspect Driver A is bluffing? What if the steering wheel flying out the window was a stage prop? What if Driver A has some hidden emergency brake? This uncertainty, this sliver of doubt, changes everything.

But there is more. Even if you fully believe Driver A has no steering wheel, you still face a problem. You are approaching each other at high speed. You need time to swerve safely. If you wait too long to decide, even your choice to retreat might fail. The all in move by Driver A has not just forced you into a corner. It has forced both of you into a situation where mistakes become deadly.

This is the hidden cost of going all in. You remove your own flexibility, yes. But you also create a fragile situation where small errors, miscommunications, or unexpected events can trigger catastrophe for everyone.

The Business World’s Expensive Lessons

Corporate history overflows with cautionary tales of all in strategies gone wrong. During the streaming wars, companies declared they would dominate or die trying. Some spent billions building platforms. They committed publicly to subscriber targets. They burned money on content. They had no fallback position.

Many of them are now desperately looking for exits. Mergers. Partnerships. Anything but the all in position they had proudly announced. The companies that maintained flexibility, that kept multiple revenue streams, that refused to commit everything to streaming dominance, often ended up stronger.

Or consider price wars in retail. When one company announces it will match any competitor’s price no matter what, they imagine this forces competitors to raise prices. Sometimes it works. Often, though, it triggers a race to the bottom where nobody wins except customers. The company that maintains pricing flexibility, that can selectively compete while protecting margins elsewhere, survives. The all in price matcher bleeds money until shareholders revolt.

The Mathematics of Mayhem

Strip away the drama and look at the payoff matrix. In a standard chicken game, both players have two choices: continue or swerve. If both continue, both get the worst possible outcome. If both swerve, both get a mediocre outcome. If one swerves and one continues, the one who continues gets the best outcome while the one who swerves gets a poor but survivable outcome.

Now add the all in move. When a player credibly commits to never swerving, they theoretically remove one branch from the decision tree. The opponent supposedly faces a simple choice: swerve and live, or continue and die.

But this is where the model breaks down in reality. The all in player has actually created a new game with different payoffs. They have added a chance of mutual destruction even when both players would prefer to avoid it. They have introduced coordination problems. They have made the entire interaction more volatile.

Real world chicken games include factors the simple matrix cannot capture. Communication delays. Misperceptions. Pride. Reputation effects that extend far beyond this single interaction. Third parties watching and judging. The possibility that even a technical victory leaves both sides worse off than if they had found a cooperative solution.

The player who goes all in optimizes for one specific outcome: forcing the opponent to swerve. They neglect all the ways this strategy can fail catastrophically or succeed in ways that still leave them damaged.

When Commitment Becomes a Cage

There is a deeper problem with the all in approach. Once you commit totally, you lose the ability to respond to new information. And chicken games in the real world rarely have perfect information from the start.

Suppose a company commits to acquiring a target at any price. Then discovers the target has been cooking its books. The all in company faces a terrible choice. Follow through on the disastrous acquisition and lose billions. Or back out and suffer massive reputational damage from breaking their public commitment. The flexible company simply adjusts its bid based on new information.

Or consider international relations. A nation commits to defending an ally no matter what. Then the ally starts behaving recklessly, knowing it has unconditional backing. The committed nation gets dragged into conflicts it never wanted. The nation that maintains strategic ambiguity retains leverage over the ally while still providing meaningful support.

Going all in trades current negotiating power for future handcuffs. It feels empowering at first. It becomes a cage surprisingly quickly.

The Art of Strategic Ambiguity

So what beats going all in? Not cowardice. Not immediate surrender. But rather the sophisticated art of strategic ambiguity.

The skilled player in chicken games maintains multiple options while appearing possibly committed. They create uncertainty in their opponent’s mind. They signal toughness while preserving flexibility. They make it unclear exactly what they will do, which forces opponents to plan for multiple scenarios.

Diplomats master this. When asked if they will use military force, they respond that all options remain on the table. Not a yes. Not a no. Just enough ambiguity to make aggression risky while preserving room for negotiation.

Successful negotiators do this too. They express strong preferences without ultimatums. They create alternatives to agreement without explicitly threatening to walk away. They make it genuinely unclear where their actual red lines lie.

This ambiguity is not weakness. It is strength. It forces the opponent to consider the full range of possibilities. It prevents the opponent from simply optimizing against one known strategy. And critically, it preserves the ability to adapt as situations evolve.

Perhaps the cruelest irony of going all in is that sometimes the commitment succeeds too well. The player manages to force their opponent into retreat. They win the immediate confrontation. And then they discover that winning this particular chicken game has destroyed something more valuable.

The company that forces a hostile acquisition discovers the target’s talent flees. The victory is hollow. The nation that forces another into humiliation creates a lasting enemy. The short term win plants seeds of long term conflict. The executive who forces board approval through aggressive tactics finds themselves isolated and eventually ousted.

Going all in optimizes for winning this game. It neglects what happens after the game ends. The relationship damaged. The trust destroyed. The future interactions poisoned. The resentment that festers.

The Wisdom of Keeping Your Steering Wheel

Return to that desert road one final time. Two cars racing toward each other. The crowd watching. The pressure mounting.

The player who throws their steering wheel out the window makes for great theater. Bold. Committed. Decisive. And potentially dead.

The player who keeps their steering wheel, who judges distances carefully, who watches their opponent’s behavior, who maintains options until the last responsible moment, lacks dramatic flair. But they drive home alive. And they remain free to compete another day, on terms they can influence.

Going all in feels like the power move in chicken games. It feels like the ultimate display of commitment and courage. But it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes these games dangerous in the first place.

The danger is not that players might lack commitment. The danger is that mutual commitment with insufficient flexibility creates situations where everyone loses. The danger is that public positions become traps. The danger is that eliminating your own options eliminates your ability to prevent disaster.

Game theory is often presented as cold mathematics, but it carries a deeply human lesson about chicken games. The lesson is this: preserving your ability to change course is not cowardice. It is wisdom. Real strength lies not in burning all your bridges but in knowing when to cross them, when to guard them, and when to build new ones entirely.

The worst possible move in chicken is not surrendering too quickly. It is making surrender impossible. Because when both sides make surrender impossible, the only remaining outcome is the one nobody wanted from the start.

The cars collide. The companies collapse. The nations go to war. All because someone thought eliminating their own choices would force better choices from someone else.

Keep your steering wheel. The road ahead is uncertain, and you will need it.