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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2892 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 15, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Two people are being forced to fight each other to the death. They are both equally inexperienced and of the same height and build. They are fighting in a flat open area.

One has a 6 inch hunting knife. The other has a 34 inch wooden baseball bat.

Who is likely to win?

There was a Twitter poll a few years ago here, but you should post your answer before you look.

I personally thought the answer was pretty blindingly obvious and this question wouldn't even be interesting since everyone would agree, but I've been taken aback at how I'm actually in the minority opinion.

Edit: You bat people are insane. They're both inexperienced fighters so the bat hits are going to be pretty bad and the knife hits are going to be pretty bad. But a bad knife hit still means someone is getting stabbed, which is way, way worse than a bad bat hit. The only way the bat user wins the fight is if they get lucky and get a very good hit in (like bashing the person full-force on the head). They only get maybe one chance, then the knife user can just close the distance by lunging.

We have to take on the prompt with the fullness of its details:

inexperienced

forced

A person with a knife who has never fought, and who is forced to fight, is unlikely to understand that he needs to zerg rush his opponent in order to win. He will hesitate, he will fail to commit. The only way to win against a man with a bat is to rush him and hope that he doesn’t swipe your knife away. This is possible, but not probable.

The batter, on the other hand, simply needs to stay two feet of distance away and hit his opponent. The opponent — again — would need to understand that he needs to commit to something in order to win, in this case commit to grabbing the bat all while carrying a six inch knife. This is an unreasonable level of difficulty for an inexperienced person forced to fight to the death.

In most cases, the batter will win. And the batter only needs to batter his opponent twice before he is made ineffective with a knife.

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