Almalieque wrote:
2. If you watch any "competition" show, e.g., cut throat kitchen, ink master, etc., if the big players focus on each other, the less qualified tends to out do better players. They usually lose at the end, but they get much further than they would if any attention were placed on them from the beginning.
I've determined that if I were ever on Cutthroat Kitchen (this presumes I were a far better chef than I am, of course), the correct strategy is to spend no money in the first round at all. You don't appreciably improve your odds unless you spend a lot of money, which usually hurts you in later rounds. There's usually a sabotage that affects all three of the others to some degree in there, so you're unlikely to be the sole target for anything (especially if you keep your head down and don't get into a bidding war). Just don't get dorked more than anyone else and you'll be fine. It's worth the risk of getting randomly knocked out in the first round to ensure you have max cash going into the second.
In the second round, jump on the first sabotage. Doesn't matter what it is. You want to win this because you're sitting at full cash and thus are the target of elimination for everyone else. Win it, pretty much at any cost and play it on whichever of the other two players has the most money. This serves to do two things:
1. You decrease your cash supply, thus making you less of an apparent threat and less likely to be targeted for sabotage.
2. Lumping multiple sabotages on one player is the best way to ensure you go on to the next round, thus the guy you didn't target (the one with the least cash coming out of round 1) may target the same guy you just hit if he wins an auction himself. So double threat reduction basically.
The hope is that the guy with the poor spending control in the first round will still have poor spending control and will blow even more money and will target the other player and not you. But even if you do get hit, you made sure someone else got one too, giving you decent odds (nothing is guaranteed in that game). The key point here is that you get the first sabotage, but don't spend any more money after that. The objective is to go into the final round with a significant cash advantage over the other guy.
Oh. And far more important than the auctions, but what everyone forgets. Pantry strategy. I've seen more contestants get eliminated by not getting key ingredients than because of sabotages. 60 seconds is not much time to gather what you need, and IMO that's the hardest part of the game. Not sure how one practices for this, but if I were going to be on that show, I'd be finding some way to do that.
Yeah. I like the darn show. Sue me!
Oh. I suppose I should mention the alternative, more or less opposite strategy. Bid heavy in the first round. Deplete your cash to around $12k or so. Theory being that you'll make it to round two and will be ignored because everyone else should want to take the guy with the least cash to round three. Unfortunately, this is risky because it's pretty clear that most of the people who play the game don't seem to grasp the concept of having more cash in round three than your opponent and will sometimes dump on the guy with the least cash in round two for some random reason (like say, revenge for some sabotage placed on them in round one). I mention it because it *should* be a good strategy, but unless you're playing with more game savvy players, it probably wont.
Edited, Jan 15th 2015 7:15pm by gbaji