To clarify, my answers mostly began with "so you're describing Clue X, didn't Person A do that?"BG MSL Champs wrote:Am I the only one who thought this sounded like stalling? My understanding of blitzing is that it occurs when somebody is unsure what is being asked for, they say the possible things that the answer could be. This is not at all what you are claiming to have done. You know the clue that was mentioned could not be the answer to the question, so why are saying it? This seems like a cheap ploy to gain additional time rather than a blitz.Huang wrote:Maybe I'm a bit biased. I know a majority of my points at HFT came from blitzing a clue that had already been mentioned ("oh <clue>, that's what <answer> did?)Matt Weiner wrote:I don't know about that, Sandy. "Blitzing" in its pure form seems to only be useful on bad questions. I've been involved in something like 3000 games as a player or moderator, and I can count on one hand the number of "blitzes" I've seen anyone attempt. Whether we need this rule or not is a discussion that can be totally subsumed in issues of question quality.
Sometimes when I was blanking, I would repeat the last clue I heard to jog my memory. When I didn't get the correct answer out in 5 seconds, I was negged.
In the example given by Lee, gamesmanship was absolutely not involved. Blitzing, I assume, was explicitly allowed at this tournament and in no way were the rules on blitzing pushed to the limit. Lee's player made a standard creator-creation blitz. So I'm still confused as to why you (initially?) agreed that Lee's player should've been punished for giving "Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis."centralhs wrote:I am actually arguing the same thing that everyone else is... that the focus should be on knowledge, not on gamesmanship. My true main objection to blitzing is that people seem to use IT for gamesmanship.
I know I was negged at HFT after "thinking out loud" without giving the correct answer within 5 seconds. As a lot of people have said, the TD's job is to train his or her readers to do a better job of this. I think I get what you're trying to say but you seem to forget there's already "stalling" built into the game with the 5 second hesitation rules.centralhs wrote:However, in my experience, readers/timers only pay attention to how much time it takes for you to say your first word, not how long it takes you to give the entire answer. Therefore, someone who blitzes buys extra time to think of the answer. Several people pretty much acknowledged in this thread that they intentionally used blitzes to "stall" when they couldn't think of the answer (although they didn't expressly call it stalling.)