Knowing that your answers can be stolen makes for some interesting strategic decisions. If you’re confident about your answers to 40 of the 50 questions, do you post them right away? That might give someone else the ammunition to post the 10 he knew and the 40 you got for him… on the other hand, if you don’t post them soon, and no one gets those 10 answers, but someone else posts 40 correctly first, then they’ll win by virtue of having the earliest post.
So you have to juggle.
At least, that’s my take. Last year, I think people just sort of played it as a fun game, without a sense of cutthroat competition, and so there was no sandbagging, no timing of answers, just a lot of people adding their input.
Towards the end of last year, and the two contests this year, there’s been some attention to timing, although that may be coincidental as opposed to strategic. I am curious to see if the game play would change if the prize were $1000, but Mrs. Bricker won’t let me do that.
Actually, I had a couple of answers that I was holding back. Oddly enough, 49 was supposed to be one of them, but a cut-and-paste error let it out of the bag early. The other was La Ciguapa, but that one showed up from someone else.
Bricker, don’t know about the rest of the “contestants”, but the prize amount wouldn’t make a difference to me. It wasn’t until the day before the end of the contest that I actually read all the way through the rules and realized that there was even a prize at all. I was doing it for fun (yes, I am a geek, why do you ask?).
[QUOTE=Bricker]
Now that we’re done, I’ll just note for jeevwoman’s benefit that the slogan was “Zimmerman flew and Tyler knew.” The rhyme made it an easy chant, you see…
D’oh! I totally knew that; I am apparently just unable to think and type at the same time.
In the challenges I’ve played I tried some of that and wasn’t typically very good at it. After my three-peat (that’s right!) I figured I’d taken advantage of Bricker’s generosity enough for a while and would just blunder in and make stuff up to confuse the players, but then I got out of the habit of reading MPSIMS and kept missing the challenges. Now that I know they’re back on, I’m going to start playing again.
