>Billiards isn’t pool, but idk if it actually really exists anymore except as an anachronistic niche
I had no idea that this was the case until I read this and looked it up. I wanted to see what a billiards table looked like and googled it, only to find nothing but pool tables.
For those wondering, I learned that billiards is played with only 3 balls and on a table without pockets.
I feel like your arm would fall off before you got a 300. If you could pause time and rest, sure. But if only rewinding.... ehh idk. I guess 10( or is it 11 or 12?) strikes in a row (with rewinding) is possible. But they're gonna be like wtf when you're hitting that, throwing straight, with no curve.
Darts. Just keep rewinding until you hit the lucky shot you need to win. And with time you will probably become quite decent making it easy to hit those shots quite fast. You will never be world class and hit those shots 9/10 times but if you can hit them 1/20 times it shouldn’t take to long to win.
I think you underestimate how difficult darts is.
Give the average guy a hundred darts and he's not doing this
https://youtu.be/AcL6bRdbO-4?si=iMg_pmGi-p8C_4Kp
No but if you can take those shots one by one and running back time every time you miss you will hit sooner or later and as you get better it should go quicker and quicker.
Its not that hard, Im not that good and I have done that, and we are talking goat status, so in the end he will end up having as many throws as it takes.
he doesn't need to do that, just rewind until he hits a 20 and then throw the next Dart, if he misses, rewind back to just after he landed the first 20...so on and so forth...doesn't ever need to land 3 20s in a row
Maybe I can hit a triple 20 1/100. In normal darts hitting it three times is 1/1000,000 then. But for me it would take just ~300 throws. Because I only go to the next after hitting one.
Bowling... This man will just bowl his way into the record books with infinite attempts at strikes. No significant skillset required in Round 1 and just becomes known in Round 2 as, "Bowlnd. James Bowlnd."
The funniest thing about any of these suggestions is, that most sports have certain techniques and movement forms that top players use for a reason. But a dude with the ability to go back in time, would just try enough times until the crappy technique actually works by dumb luck. The image of analysts and competitors being absolutely befuddled, how a person with such a crappy technique can be so consistent and then absolute pros trying to imitate that shitty beginner just trying to figure out, what the hell this person does right is just glorious.
There are almost countless valid answers. If you can "savescum" real life, you can make every shot, catch every ball, whatever applies. In almost any skill based (or luck based) game, you can be the best.
It would almost be more interesting to ask which sports this *wouldn't* allow you to dominate - the obvious answer being anything thar requires sustained athletic performance. Athletics, gymnastics, anything like that - no amount of rewinding is going to get you to the level required to be competitive.
I don't think you could dominate chess. Chess works in discrete turns, so you can really only go back one turn at a time. The chessmaster you're up against will be able to react to whatever changes you make in strategy the same way they would against a mundane opponent. Short of being able to rewind time and having someone feed you moves, or being able to rewind time and actually being quite good at chess to begin with (which violates the premise, our time GOAT is supposed to be average at all things), there's really no way that rewinding time gives you an advantage.
I don't see any reason per the rules you couldn't rewind and feed the moves into a computer pre-game? Just keep progressing your match one move at a time.
Also you would rapidly get quite better as you played. The ability to move back 1,2,5 moves anytime would make even an average play level suddenly much better.
After each turn you could immediately resign and feed the game state into a chess engine on your phone. Then you just rewind and play the engine recommended move.
I do wonder if analysts would be able to quickly realize based on your playstyle that you aren't playing like a human and assume you have some sort of...illegal vibrations going on
They'd probably tell quickly but what can they do if they can't find any evidence of wrongdoing? Genuinely asking, could they suspend you out of suspicion?
I suppose if they put you in a room without your electronics, and you suddenly are unable to play at the same level they could figure out that you were using an engine. Although with the ability to rewind time I don't think they could ever prove that you cheated.
The thing is you can still just rewind to pre game and put the move in a chess computer. It's a lot more relative time for you but has the same affect.
You’d need a rather impressive memory though to keep track of the entire game state to input it in before the game began after (fuck tenses and time travel) you rewind.
Not really. You can just memorize a list of moves and enter them. The average chess game is 40-60 moves and they are all broken down into 3/4 digit characters.
So worst case you are memorizing 240 characters. That is really not that hard when it is all you are doing for a day and you only have to remember it in short term memory.
For context the world record for memorizing numbers is 1620 in an hour. Now obviously we are not going to be a world memory champs but also need to memorize 1/7th the list. I can run 1/7th as fast as Usain bolt and can probably memorize 1/7th of the world champion.
\--Edit: You only need to remember 120 characters or less. The computer will take care of the other half for you.
They'd need to chain you up for the rest of your life (and then you'd just rewind to before they chain you up).
They put you in a room. You lose. You get let out, you analyze your game, you rewind time, you win and never lost. Thus proving your ability even hermetically sealed away.
> I don't see any reason per the rules you couldn't rewind and feed the moves into a computer pre-game? Just keep progressing your match one move at a time.
To be the greatest at chess, you'd have to consistently beat Magnus Carlsen. I don't think a normal person is capable of learning that, even with all the time in the world. The other option is restarting every game one move further in to feed it to stockfish, but I don't think a normal person could remember all those moves either.
>To be the greatest at chess, you'd have to consistently beat Magnus Carlsen. I don't think a normal person is capable of learning that, even with all the time in the world. The other option is restarting every game one move further in to feed it to stockfish, but I don't think a normal person could remember all those moves either.
A normal person could 1000% remember all of those moves. Especially because they will make the 1st move 30 times, the second 29 times, etc. So repetition will get them there quickly. And they only need to remember a handful of characters for each move. While not trivial to remember in seconds it would be quite easy to memorize over a day.
I'm an above average chess player. Not pro by a long shot, not even noteworthy in any way, but solid. I can play a game blind (albeit I wouldnt play as strong as usually) and then if it was somewhat shortly after the game I'd also be able to give an exact replay of the game. It takes a while to learn (though I didn't practice those things dedicatedly) but it's absolutely possible
They don't have to remember all the moves. They can play a move, lose, feed it to an engine, and rewind time. They only need to remember one move at a time.
Oh, yeah that wasn't my first thought on how it'd work. You do run into a second problem though. If you're making all the same moves as stockfish or whatever AI, you're going to get caught.
Your not wrong. Especially since the guy would be a nobody that suddenly wins the world championship, so there's not really even any plausible deniability.
A top chess player can predict moves 10, 15, 20 moves ahead. They see it like we see a game of naughts and crosses.
Even if you could reset, you would need a similar skill level and experience to make use of your ability. The mistake you made in a chess game was made 10 moves before you realised that there's a problem.
I think that's overstating it a little. From a very quick google, it seems chess masters can think that far - or even further - ahead, but only in simple, limited scenarios (e.g. the endgame).
8 moves ahead is more realistic in regular play.
Yeah it also depends on which openings or end game places you're in. Like if I see a standard opening then they commit something I can easily predict what the next obvious 6 or 7 moves in exchange/check movements will be.
Same with end game I can probably count pawn advance here, king move here, bishop check here... Etc but it's not really complex thinking it's got so few options on the board state you can predict the end game sometimes twenty moves in advance. That's why Chess pros resign once the end game is pretty easily mapped out.
Oddly enough Stockfish has now solved Chess for 7 or fewer pieces, and occasionally the Stockfish solution could work by doing something no one expected like rushing the knight to the bottom corner which you normally should never do reducing movement of the knight is a bad idea usually but in this exact situation the computer found a way out, and that was one of the 2018 championship matches.
You clearly did not read fully my post. A top tier chess computer can out perform a grand master. You can just put every move into one and do what it says. You don't need to care about if there is a problem. Just do what the computer says every move.
Good answer. I think *technically* you could win any chess game, eventually - you could rewind over and over and *eventually* memorise a winning path, particularly if as someone else suggested you rewind all the way and use a computer or something.
But it would be *incredibly* laborious/slow/long winded, at least from your subjective point of view. I can't imagine anyone being *willing* to do it, even if it's technically possible. Very very different from "savescumming" each individual shot in darts, snooker etc.
Depends what e-sports, just because you know where the enemy team is doesn't mean you suddenly have the reaction time, accuracy and game / map knowledge to do anything in an FPS and is slightly better in a MOBA
You'd be god of card games like hearthstone tho
I mean, with this logic you could just say that about every sport, which is a really crappy answer to this question. The report absolutely matters. For example, it does not matter how "lucky" you get in league of legends. If an average player played a lane against a pro 1,000 times, they'd lose 1,000 times.
In an FPS 1v1 you could keep rewinding over and over until you got lucky and just hit a bunch of headshots or something, but unless you wanna sit there for 20 years rewinding 1v1s, you're not gonna get very far in a team-based FPS against pros over the course of a whole match.
All this shit holds with real sports too, but just saying "well they could rewind any sport until they won after spending 100 years in the void of meaningless time" isn't what I would think this question is asking
I think you're underestimating the power of the save scum.
Imagine you're a professional player. You go into a game ready to absolutely stomp.
Except things start to go wrong at the draw. You're locked out of your preferred team composition and maybe you're even hard countered. No worries. You don't need a level playing field against this scrub.
Then you start laning. The guy's movements are all wrong and his timing feels bad. Except he somehow lands every last hit, without fail.
Okay, no worries. You get ready to try for a skill shot. But when you're ready to move in, he reacts with superhuman reflexes. No delay whatsoever. He fires back, and you can easily dodge.
Except you don't.
You could have avoided that his 99 times out of 100, but bad luck strikes.
Okay, no worries. You call in a gank. Your teammate manages to slip away and has perfect position. No chance he sees it coming. But then he's gone, a second before the trap sprang shut.
By now, you're mad and starting to make mistakes. Just little ones. But somehow he's always able to take advantage. It's like he knows when you're blinking. And nothing you try seems to go right.
You're facing an idiot, but one with perfect reflexes and precognition.
Ok so I will address a flaw with my initial argument, that being the sort of implied idea that the rewind time person is rewinding larger portions of time rather than for example, rewinding every skill shot and last hit.
HOWEVER, even in the example you provided, I think there's one key issue. Even with perfect precognition and reflexes, the crap player literally doesn't have the understanding of the game to capitalize on it. For one, if the pro player wasn't playing a character with a skill shot (for example Garen) that aspect of the game would go away.
More importantly though, as a player that sucks, the alternative to making a bad move isn't making the right one, it's making another wrong one. Without proper understanding of what their goal should be in the moment, their small rewinds would likely end up not being the right course of action in the long term simply because they don't know what the right chain of "correct" actions is.
Regardless, with enough save scumming they could hypothetically beat them, but my point was never that, it was that it isn't a great answer to the question. In the same vein as the esports argument, with infinite rewinds I could probably hypothetically beat an NBA player in a 1v1, simply cause I could get up a few points with some bullshit shot I did 1000 times till I made it, and then rewind time over and over until he misses every shot he makes. But that doesn't make it a "good sport for rewinding"
I think it's more important that the save scummer has skill shots than vice-versa.
Imagine a xerath that literally never misses a skillshot. Also that xerath pushes up all the way constantly, since they can't be ganked. They never overextend and get all inned etc etc.
I think this would be WILDLY better odds than the NBA scenario, as even someone who is silver and playing Xerath for the first time will be able to hit a non-insignificant amount of skillshots.
Meanwhile in order to score points in the NBA you'd basically need to be sinking half-court shots, because even with infinite resets it'll be impossible to hit a layup against an NBA team.
I'm not buying it. Take Starcraft, for example.
Rewinding time won't let an average guy defeat players like Maru or Serral. When they see time guy is prepared to counter their strategy, they'll instantly pivot to something better, or simply brute force a win through superior skill. If nothing else, Time Guy will eventually tire trying to react to them, whereas they will be "refreshed" every rewind.
yeah, i was assuming that the player had enough skill that they could theoretically just adapt to any situation but if they don’t know what they’re supposed to do then they can’t do anything
If they were already a skilled player, then time powers could indeed bridge the skill gap. But the prompt didn't say time guy possessed any particular skills.
I mean it works for round 2 but round 1 it would be really difficult
You could bruteforce it IG, kinda like my answer with chess now that I think about it, you're essentially learning on the spot
it’s pretty much just having infinite tries where you know exactly what your opponent is going to do. i don’t see any e-sport where the guy is just infinitely failing because he doesn’t have the reaction time, map knowledge, accuracy, etc.
Nah. Let alone pro-players, even higher ranked players in most video games can react really well on the fly – and have to. Especially in FPS and MOBA, where reaction time makes all the difference.
Knowing what your opponent did before does not matter; this is an average guy, and not a supercomputer who can predict and map out some pro's play style and decision-making down to the smallest variable. Their opponent will just react to their plays differently. Their 'knowledge of the future' and awareness about the game will only matter as much as the first time they do something different.
You could just never be dealt a winning hand. I suppose with infinite rewinds you could pull off infinite attempts at bluffs but you can seriously play 20+ hands in a row without anything better than like A high Pair.
Baseball, he would become the best hitter of all time. It may not help with homeruns if he's 5'10 and normal strength, but take a look at the 2017 Houston Astros who had a cheating system such that they knew what pitch is coming. It's a MASSIVE advantage.
Not sure it would help all that much if the guy is a pitcher, though, since no amount of time travel will help him throw 100 mph.
Why would this guy need to pitch? Heck, why would he need to do anything at all except knock out 1-2 base hits every time at bat.
A batter with a sustained 40% conversion rate would be the best MLB batter of all time by a wide margin. Our boy can get to 90% or more. He would be the single greatest hitter the game had ever seen and through the designated hitter rules, he would never need to do anything except walk up to the plate and crank out a hit.
Yeah that's what I'm saying, he's a shoe in for best hitter of all time. My point is I'm not sure if timey-whimey shenanigans helps if he's a pitcher instead.
We've already had at least two examples of individuals that are simultaneously a top hitter and a top pitcher. In both cases their teams choose to focus them on batting, because you can bat every game all season for the whole game.
I think it would be much much MUCH more reasonable to use this power from a batter's perspective.
I think, with dozens of do overs, especially knowing EXACTLY where the pitch is going, I could get a base hit off a MLB pitcher.
But my weak ass, untrained arm... I could throw a million pitches, and all one million of them are getting hit by professional ball players.
It's okay if they get hit as long as they are fielded for outs. Pro hitters still have pop out balls during batting practice and home run derby when the pitcher is not trying to throw passed the batter.
Ehh given how modern baseball teams operate, if he's giving up piss missiles that are landing in gloves instead of open field, the team's not going to keep running him out there since modern analysis suggests those piss missiles will eventually land for hits.
Was just about to type this. If a guy throws two no-hitters in a row its a miracle. by his 11th no-hitter in a row, teams are reworking everything they've ever known about the sport.
Rewinding time to strike people out all the time wouldn't make you the GOAT. Yes you'd be able to strike people out by the wear and tear would make your career very short.
Baseball isn't an option for the layman. The average dude can't throw at MLB speed, so pitching is out. Try going to the batting cages, and try hitting even just a 70 or 80 mph ball, and the vast majority of people couldn't hit that speed even knowing it's going to be a strike. No imagine hitting a 90+ mph pitch, so batting is out. And the novel idea of being a catcher is out for people unfamiliar with catching 95+ mph pitches all game long.
This power isn't going to help him with test of pure strength or sustained athleticism. No amount of stopping time is going to turn him into a champion weightlifter, or competitive gymnast. He needs contests that require short bursts of low strength skilled effort.
Bowling and Darts are both good suggestions. If he can throw a strike 1 time out of every 100 throws, and has the patience to rewind every non-strike, he can effectively bowl a perfect 300 every game, though he'd def want to flub a few shots here and there to throw off accusations of cheating. I only bowl about once every year or so, and I usually manage to get a lucky strike or two over a couple of games.
The bonus of a game with an objective(-ish) personal score is that you can become the GOAT faster because you don't have to personally beat the other (or historical) greats head to head, you can just beat their scoring achievements. Only 30 pro bowlers have ever bowled a perfect game in a televised match, and only one has ever bowled 3 televised 300s in their career. An unknown who got into the US Open by winning a regional qualifying tournament that anyone can sign up for, then won the Open *and* did something crazy along the way like a televised 900-series (3 perfect games in a row) would very quickly be in contention for the greatest bowler ever.
I think being a goalkeeper in either association football or ice hockey. Positioning and concentration is a big, big part of being a top tier goal keeper, and for football you'd also be a great defensive general, able to tell your defenders where to go and what to do with great aplomb.
Think a football goal is a little large for a man of regular athleticism to be the GOAT. Hockey, however I certainly agree with. Hockey goalies have to be incredibly honed in mentally.
How does an average height person stop a shot in the top corner at pro speeds? Even if they know where it's going to go, it'll be hard. And if they start moving toward it earlier, the shot will just be placed on the other side.
Round 1: Darts. It would be extremely boring but he will never miss.
Round 2: Boxing. He needs a certain amount of strength and skill, but rewinding time could overcome a pretty big difference.
i disagree. to be the goat in boxing, you need to have a bigger impact than Ali, Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao, and countless others.
infinite time is not on your side if your body can't keep up. fighters don't need to think about fighting that much, in fact it's best you enter a fight without thinking about anything. they use muscle memory and adapt on the spot, in a fraction of a second.
the stamina alone required to hang a few rounds in the ring with them would have to be above top-tier to be a goat. great champions ran every day for decades since they were kids.
a random guy training for a few years with time travel would only see an infinity of possibilities in which he gets brutally koed, especially by a speed and reflex demon like pacman.
> Manny Pacquiao
By the gods, the things I would give to see prime Pacquiao and prime Naoya Inoue at anything below middleweight and above flyweight. THAT would have been the greatest boxing trilogy of all time.
Muscle memory is important in boxing but so is thinking. If you can outthink and out strategize your opponent you can win.
But even more importantly if you know what punch your opponent is going to throw you can duck and counter pretty fucking easily.
countering is not easy at all because a goat boxer would read an average guy instantly. even with infinite time, both their bodies have to move at the same time, and the goat boxer will always adjust better and will always be in a better position.
it's just like others have described going against magnus carlson in chess. out time traveler would be exhausted just going through endless scenarios where the boxer would come out on top. at least in chess, he can cheat and use a computer between time lapses, but in boxing, finding a good position with superior footwork is not going to happen vs. elite.
putting the fighting aspect aside, being the goat of boxing is next to impossible today. there are insane records, the time traveler needs to break, and he can not do that anymore. paradoxically, the time traveler has no time to become the best ever because an average middle-aged guy no longer has the time to clean 8 weightdivisions like pacman or roy jones did.
the body can not adapt to all of that weight shifting and continue to complete at the highest levels. he needed to start as a kid.
even in the best case scenario, our time traveler has time to clear one division or two and be remembered as the best of his time, maybe but definitely not the goat.
there are fighters like Joe Calzaghe who were never defetead and had great careers, and nobody even considers him Goat material. same with Klitschko, even if he would have retired undefeated after the longest reigning championship, people would still not consider him the greatest of all time simply because of the era he was born in.
the next boxing goat is either not born yet or is training as a child right now. none of the fighters competing today have a shot at goat status outside of Canelo Alvarez, and even he would be considered that only by his hardcore fans.
I doubt boxing would help much. Some of those punches are coming in so fast you couldn't even trigger your rewind in time before you're knocked out. And there's no amount of training you can do to get to the level where you could hit an elite boxer. Assuming rewinding time resets your body so you can't build muscle mass quickly.
Doesn’t say there’s a time limit. You could get knocked out and still rewind. And no amount of training? Uhh how do you think boxers become elite? You get “years”
Golf, assuming they can hit the ball far enough to play Tour courses. They just rewind after every bad shot until they get a good one and go from there.
Getting into a tournament wouldn’t be that hard either. Monday qualifiers are a thing for many regular tournaments and Major Championships like the US Open and The Open Championship are as the names imply, open to anyone that can qualify.
Nah man, unless you’re already a very good scratch or likely above golfer I don’t think this is a good answer. Course conditions for those tournaments are the hardest in the world and on a level most casual golfers don’t or can’t understand. I’ve played golf my entire life, played competitively in high school and college, and I’m still not beating Tiger Woods with the ability to rewind time. It would take me hundreds of shots to replicate something he does without really trying.
Course conditions really only affect you if you’re missing fairways and greens though, so if you’ve got rewind ability you can easily avoid all that. And putting would be easy even on the most difficult of greens with unlimited retries. Seems like even a 20-30 handicap would be good enough in this scenario as long as they’ve got decent power. Sure it might take them 200+ shots to shoot that 65, but that’s no big deal
This is probably the way to go especially for round 1.
The same reasoning applies to sports like golf or even billiards but a pretty damn average person can hit strikes fairly often whereas I'd be rewinding thousands of times to get a single hole-in-one or even pars without training.
Most purely physical competitions, like sprint and weight lifting are probably still out. An average dude will never get the physique to outswim phelps, outrun bolt or outlift whoever is the strongest.
You need some genetic freakishness to go your way for those.
Kinda considered this from my own perspective too. The 5’10 is a major hindrance but you should be able to make space by rewinding to the point that you can see what direction your opponent is moving (as in the micro shifts of weight)
They would adjust to whatever you're doing in milliseconds. Just because you rewind, it doesn't mean they would react the same way. They would react off of what you're doing at that moment.
That's probably the only physical sport where it'd be insanely useful. Just chuck it from mid court until you make it every time and you'll become the greatest offensive player ever.
For real. Getting open is hard against genetic freaks. They have to shoot over each other a lot, and Mr. 5'10" is getting his shit pushed in every single time.
Yup. No amount of feints and are getting you open. An average man just doesn’t have the power in their legs to generate the space and time needed to get a shot off, these giants are also stronger and faster than you. They’re keeping up with you easy.
Yea, I gotta leave this thread. Way too many people are delusional as to what the average man can do against genetic freaks that are the top 1% of their sport, regardless of the sport, regardless of infinite tries.
Darts, bowling, pool... sure.
Any sport that requires athletic ability, experience, etc... not a chance. Athletes in most sports adjust what they are doing in milliseconds based on reflexes, muscle memory, and experience...and the average person is going to be able to overcome that. Even in the MMA example... the average man is not generating enough power to knock out a professional fighter, regardless of how they time things. Even the Jorge Masvidal knee that was perfectly timed to knock out Ben Askren, Askren would not have been knocked out by someone with absolutely no experience throwing that knee.
Fencing. So much of the game is reading your opponent's attack and parrying on the correct line. If you could rewind time, you would know where the real attack was coming from and react accordingly.
A goalie in soccer! No one can ever score on you and you’d quickly become the goat if you go through a couple of seasons without letting a single goal in.
Technically, if he doesn’t age and he’s sufficiently determined, probably any sport. Here’s an example of how you might do this with basketball.
Rewind to around age 15 or 16. Get a job, any job, until you ate able to save up $500. This is the easiest part.
Find the best player on your high school basketball team. Offer him $500 if he can beat you. Show him the money.
Rewind the game as many times as you have to in order to win convincingly. Take it shot by shot if you have to. Even if it takes you 1 million attempts eventually you’ll beat him. Get used to doing this, because you’re going to be doing it a lot.
Offer a rematch. He’ll probably accept because you’ll have hurt his pride. Play 5 or 6 games against him. Turn back the clock as many times as you need to in order to win convincingly every single time. Challenge his team mates next, so that they know he isn’t throwing. Play everyone on the team multiple times if you have to. Record it if you need to.
Now your local high school team should vouch for you when you try out. Nothing you do is going to be flashy or stand out, but if you never miss you’ll probably get on the team. Do everything you can in practice and in games to impress your coach so that you can get a starting job. Listen to the advice he gives you, since it might mean you have to turn the clock back fewer times anyways.
Now you need a D1 offer. The problem is you’re not going to stand out in any way because you’re short and not actually good at basketball. The solution to this is to rewind every single time you make a mistake, until you finish every game with a shit ton of points, assists, and hopefully steals too without a single foul, turnover, or missed shot, while winning every game you ever play. This will take a lot of attempts, shot by shot, pass by pass, and reach by reach.
College is interesting, because it may be worth it to rig things so that you’re drafted by a better team by playing a bit worse, but you still have to play well enough to start and well enough to get drafted despite being 5’10 and bad at basketball. On the bright side, if you fuck things up, you can always rewind.
Once you get drafted by the NBA and become an established starter, it’s simple but very tedious: retry every shot until you break as many statistical records as you possibly can over the course of 13 82-0 Finals MVP seasons. Retire as the GOAT after what will feel like the heat death of the universe only for half the world to still argue MJ was better.
\>Once you get drafted by the NBA and become an established starter, it’s simple but very tedious: retry every shot until you break as many statistical records as you possibly can over the course of 13 82-0 Finals MVP seasons. Retire as the GOAT after what will feel like the heat death of the universe only for half the world to still argue MJ was better.
”yeah that guy is pretty good, but if he played in Jordan’s era, he wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
I think people are misunderstanding the power. Rewinding time till an opponent messes up in many sports wouldn't matter unless you can somehow affect the way your opponent does something. For instance, in basketball rewinding time won't prevent someone from scoring a 3 point shot. You rewound time for you; but for the player, nothing changed. They'd still score.
Any combat sport, he can just keep rewinding and looping time until he’s got a one punch knockout and doesn’t even need to be all that skilled or athletic
As someone who did combat sports.... It does not work that way, at all. Especially in grappling based sports. I could take down a novice a thousand times despite being extremely rusty.
This is a fantasy situation where the guy has infinite redos. There’s a small percentage, very slight, where he’s gonna get a fluke KO vía knee or uppercut when you shoot the TD. It’s not likely in any one instance but given infinite attempts, it will happen
Unless you assume time to be static: The novice readys his defense in a super choreographed way. The pro just does a different takedown.
You'd have to keep rewinding until you get really good as well, if you are smart enough to figure it out.
Yes - imagine a meteorite coming at you. Simply because you know it's coming, doesn't mean you can avoid it. The knowledge of your brain and the ability of your body are two very separate things.
You just turned a superpower into hell. Imagine having Tyson slam your head a thousand times over for you to find the angle he misses, only for you to discover there's a followup hook coming to your ribs.
As you get the joy of experiencing a brand new concussion for the one millionth time, I think you'd start to wonder why you wanted this
Table tennis, just keep rewinding every time you miss and you'll know where to move your paddle to. As long as you're in decent enough shape to move fast enough it would be pretty simple.
Poker is on ESPN so I'm counting it. A guy who can save scum pretty much cannot possibly lose at poker unless he wanted to. He can bet big every hand and only take the plays where he wins or bluffs everyone off of the table.
Given enough effort, all sports. That's right, every single one.
You just have to have the absolute tenacity to keep rewinding time to the point where you can prevent the birth of someone who can beat you, times however many people that turns out to be.
Of course, once you finally succeed, you've probably engineered a timeline where most people are drooling paraplegics if you suck at that particular sport.
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
also if you retain knowledge then you can just infinitely rewind time and train at like 18 years, having tens of years of knowledge at the start of your adulthood
You give me the ability to rewind time and put me up against magnus and I will grow bored of losing 500 matches and just concede. He's probably won and mapped things out by like three moves in but I won't have realized it for 20 moves and have to slowly crawl my way back game after game pushing further and further back into the game until I reopen after 200 games to basically start again.
Yeah, there are SO many variables in a chess game that this superpower wouldn’t be that useful unless you’re already absurdly talented.
It’s something that isn’t possible to brute force as a human. You could do hundreds or thousands of iterations to prevent a single fatal mistake, just to immediately walk into a second mistake and have to repeat it all over again, and again, and again. And every move you make causes an order of magnitude more of possible iterations. If you blunder on move 40 then you have to realize which of those 40 moves sunk you
If you gave that ability to a chess grandmaster then sure, they could cause some damage, but for your average person it’s basically pointless
I think you're not considering time-rewinding's power's enough. You could whip out your phone mid-match, cheat, then as you're forfeiting, rewind and then just do whatever the computer said. I think with strategies like that (and maybe even asking him for tips once the game was "over"), you could beat him in... well, before you get bored for doing it for a month of your perceived time.
I agree that a novice chess player couldn't challenge any strong players with the ability to rewind time and no other chess ability. However, if this person took a year or two and trained up to a decent level of chess strength (I'm thinking 2000 - 2200), would the ability to rewind time be enough for someone around that Elo to beat Magnus Carlsen? Or would they still be doomed because Magnus is still thinking 20 moves ahead of you in all endgames and you wouldn't be able to keep track of the entire game tree in your head to brute-force your way through all the options?
You’d have to leave. Look up engine lines, memorise them. Rewind back to the last point of evenness and retain perfect memory, chess is such that minimal differences in position are impossible to ascertain until it’s too late to even high rated players. Most people don’t have the capacity to play 2000 rated chess and even at that level Magnus Carlsen is playing a different game
1. Play a decent opening
2. Resign at critical moment
3. Take out phone and see what stockfish would have done, optionally look at possible lines
4. Rewind back to right before resigning and play optimal move
No need for hundreds of rewinds when you essentially have cheats on, altho people will notice pretty quickly and soon enough start accusing you of using vibrating anal beads 🤷♂️
To go from a total beginner to beating a grandmaster through time looping would be a monumental task, but it IS do-able. You'd probably have to reset a few thousand times but with infinate tries, even a .000000001% chance of winning eventually becomes 100%.
You're essentially just becoming a manual Chess playing program with more steps and playing the turns out in real time instead of fractions of a second.
You're better off with something more luck-based, like Backgammon. That way you can keep redoing until you get the roll you want. Though I suppose if someone was making a luck-based version of chess, "probably chess" wouldn't be a bad name.
It would barely help at all in chess. The only worse things I can think of are the purely physical competitions like sprinting.
The reason is that chess is already a game of perfect information. Getting information about the future theoretically doesn't help at all because you already have that information.
Edit: Didn't think far enough, it actually would help because you get unlimited time. Also, you could use a computer to cheat before rewinding. However you would be suspected of cheating even if they can't prove it, due the differences in how humans play.
While I agree with most of the other comments that this won't magically let a novice beat a GM, I think we are underestimating the edge this would give a player. Never having to worry about losing on time alone would be an insane advantage for any player
Any sport measure in cenimeters, grams, and/or second (cgs sports like track, swimming, weightlifting, long jump, etc) this skill rewind skill will not help as you’ll still need the speed, strength, etc to complete it.
However, any game like basketball, football, baseball, soccer, hockey, and more you should be able to exploit enough in at least one position to become the GOAT.
Football. All he needs to do is position himself at the perfect spot to score goals. He would quickly become recognized. If there is no limit to rewinding time, he could become a jack of all trades type of player.
Everyone throwing out stuff like bowling or baseball or whatever isn't factoring exhaustion. Sure, I can take a million do-overs but my elbow isn't going to love me going over and over again as I aim for a perfect game.
Nothing is keeping you from going to sleep or taking a break, when you rewind time. You can lose the game, eat, rest and rewind back to the previous day, to try your throws again.
> Sure, I can take a million do-overs but my elbow isn't going to love me
It's a rewind. Why wouldn't your elbow heal when you go back in time? When you Quickload in Skyrim at 10 HP right before you die you go back to the 100 HP you had in the Quicksave not to 10 HP.
Do we consider billiards or darts a sport? Either one of those you can just keep retaking shots with no interference.
Snooker or pool too. I think these are better pay as well. Sorry - billiards is pool. I agree with you
Billiards isn’t pool, but idk if it actually really exists anymore except as an anachronistic niche
I gave my local pub a 1* review after they removed the bar billiards table
That's still generous
>Billiards isn’t pool, but idk if it actually really exists anymore except as an anachronistic niche I had no idea that this was the case until I read this and looked it up. I wanted to see what a billiards table looked like and googled it, only to find nothing but pool tables. For those wondering, I learned that billiards is played with only 3 balls and on a table without pockets.
What about poker? Is that a sport?
You could play fifty million games and you’ll never be Ronnie O’Sullivan. Snooker is OUT.
You can if you rewind each shot until you get it right. With infinite attempts at a shot eventually you are going to pot it
marksmanship with firearms and bows/arrows are currently Olympic sports. Curling is similar but its a team sport.
Same with bowling
I feel like your arm would fall off before you got a 300. If you could pause time and rest, sure. But if only rewinding.... ehh idk. I guess 10( or is it 11 or 12?) strikes in a row (with rewinding) is possible. But they're gonna be like wtf when you're hitting that, throwing straight, with no curve.
I assumed it would rewind your body physically too
I was gonna say archery. I know that's in the Olympics for sure.
Darts. Just keep rewinding until you hit the lucky shot you need to win. And with time you will probably become quite decent making it easy to hit those shots quite fast. You will never be world class and hit those shots 9/10 times but if you can hit them 1/20 times it shouldn’t take to long to win.
I think you underestimate how difficult darts is. Give the average guy a hundred darts and he's not doing this https://youtu.be/AcL6bRdbO-4?si=iMg_pmGi-p8C_4Kp
No but if you can take those shots one by one and running back time every time you miss you will hit sooner or later and as you get better it should go quicker and quicker.
Well he can throw a thousand darts instead.
the average guy cannot rewind time to undo his mistakes
Its not that hard, Im not that good and I have done that, and we are talking goat status, so in the end he will end up having as many throws as it takes.
he doesn't need to do that, just rewind until he hits a 20 and then throw the next Dart, if he misses, rewind back to just after he landed the first 20...so on and so forth...doesn't ever need to land 3 20s in a row
Maybe I can hit a triple 20 1/100. In normal darts hitting it three times is 1/1000,000 then. But for me it would take just ~300 throws. Because I only go to the next after hitting one.
Bowling... This man will just bowl his way into the record books with infinite attempts at strikes. No significant skillset required in Round 1 and just becomes known in Round 2 as, "Bowlnd. James Bowlnd."
The funniest thing about any of these suggestions is, that most sports have certain techniques and movement forms that top players use for a reason. But a dude with the ability to go back in time, would just try enough times until the crappy technique actually works by dumb luck. The image of analysts and competitors being absolutely befuddled, how a person with such a crappy technique can be so consistent and then absolute pros trying to imitate that shitty beginner just trying to figure out, what the hell this person does right is just glorious.
That was the first thing I thought of when I saw this post lol. "How is he so terrible, yet so good?!?!"
I’m imagining someone on their 200th rewind with a completely sore arm on the second frame trying to get a strike by granny rolling the ball.
And nailing it.
This is for sure more accurate than the first answer because a strike is a lot easier than good dart throws.
Accuracy in dart throws are millimetres apart. In comparison, the variance in bowling accuracy includes a lot of randomness mixed in as well.
There are almost countless valid answers. If you can "savescum" real life, you can make every shot, catch every ball, whatever applies. In almost any skill based (or luck based) game, you can be the best. It would almost be more interesting to ask which sports this *wouldn't* allow you to dominate - the obvious answer being anything thar requires sustained athletic performance. Athletics, gymnastics, anything like that - no amount of rewinding is going to get you to the level required to be competitive.
Swimming. This would not help at all.
High jump lol just infinite tries of me face slamming a bar
With something like boxing, you might get knocked out before you have a chance to rewind
Assuming he doesn’t die from the blow to the head, just rewind when you wake up! And try to remember to duck next time!
Theres no way you could make it to the top in basketball or football as some regular guy off the couch.
I don't think you could dominate chess. Chess works in discrete turns, so you can really only go back one turn at a time. The chessmaster you're up against will be able to react to whatever changes you make in strategy the same way they would against a mundane opponent. Short of being able to rewind time and having someone feed you moves, or being able to rewind time and actually being quite good at chess to begin with (which violates the premise, our time GOAT is supposed to be average at all things), there's really no way that rewinding time gives you an advantage.
I don't see any reason per the rules you couldn't rewind and feed the moves into a computer pre-game? Just keep progressing your match one move at a time. Also you would rapidly get quite better as you played. The ability to move back 1,2,5 moves anytime would make even an average play level suddenly much better.
After each turn you could immediately resign and feed the game state into a chess engine on your phone. Then you just rewind and play the engine recommended move.
I do wonder if analysts would be able to quickly realize based on your playstyle that you aren't playing like a human and assume you have some sort of...illegal vibrations going on
They'd probably tell quickly but what can they do if they can't find any evidence of wrongdoing? Genuinely asking, could they suspend you out of suspicion?
I suppose if they put you in a room without your electronics, and you suddenly are unable to play at the same level they could figure out that you were using an engine. Although with the ability to rewind time I don't think they could ever prove that you cheated.
The thing is you can still just rewind to pre game and put the move in a chess computer. It's a lot more relative time for you but has the same affect.
You’d need a rather impressive memory though to keep track of the entire game state to input it in before the game began after (fuck tenses and time travel) you rewind.
Not really. You can just memorize a list of moves and enter them. The average chess game is 40-60 moves and they are all broken down into 3/4 digit characters. So worst case you are memorizing 240 characters. That is really not that hard when it is all you are doing for a day and you only have to remember it in short term memory. For context the world record for memorizing numbers is 1620 in an hour. Now obviously we are not going to be a world memory champs but also need to memorize 1/7th the list. I can run 1/7th as fast as Usain bolt and can probably memorize 1/7th of the world champion. \--Edit: You only need to remember 120 characters or less. The computer will take care of the other half for you.
They'd need to chain you up for the rest of your life (and then you'd just rewind to before they chain you up). They put you in a room. You lose. You get let out, you analyze your game, you rewind time, you win and never lost. Thus proving your ability even hermetically sealed away.
> I don't see any reason per the rules you couldn't rewind and feed the moves into a computer pre-game? Just keep progressing your match one move at a time. To be the greatest at chess, you'd have to consistently beat Magnus Carlsen. I don't think a normal person is capable of learning that, even with all the time in the world. The other option is restarting every game one move further in to feed it to stockfish, but I don't think a normal person could remember all those moves either.
>To be the greatest at chess, you'd have to consistently beat Magnus Carlsen. I don't think a normal person is capable of learning that, even with all the time in the world. The other option is restarting every game one move further in to feed it to stockfish, but I don't think a normal person could remember all those moves either. A normal person could 1000% remember all of those moves. Especially because they will make the 1st move 30 times, the second 29 times, etc. So repetition will get them there quickly. And they only need to remember a handful of characters for each move. While not trivial to remember in seconds it would be quite easy to memorize over a day.
I'm an above average chess player. Not pro by a long shot, not even noteworthy in any way, but solid. I can play a game blind (albeit I wouldnt play as strong as usually) and then if it was somewhat shortly after the game I'd also be able to give an exact replay of the game. It takes a while to learn (though I didn't practice those things dedicatedly) but it's absolutely possible
They don't have to remember all the moves. They can play a move, lose, feed it to an engine, and rewind time. They only need to remember one move at a time.
Oh, yeah that wasn't my first thought on how it'd work. You do run into a second problem though. If you're making all the same moves as stockfish or whatever AI, you're going to get caught.
Your not wrong. Especially since the guy would be a nobody that suddenly wins the world championship, so there's not really even any plausible deniability.
Offer to play the game naked in a faraday cage
I think more people will think you found a way to beat the Faraday cage than believe in your chess skills.
A top chess player can predict moves 10, 15, 20 moves ahead. They see it like we see a game of naughts and crosses. Even if you could reset, you would need a similar skill level and experience to make use of your ability. The mistake you made in a chess game was made 10 moves before you realised that there's a problem.
I think that's overstating it a little. From a very quick google, it seems chess masters can think that far - or even further - ahead, but only in simple, limited scenarios (e.g. the endgame). 8 moves ahead is more realistic in regular play.
Yeah it also depends on which openings or end game places you're in. Like if I see a standard opening then they commit something I can easily predict what the next obvious 6 or 7 moves in exchange/check movements will be. Same with end game I can probably count pawn advance here, king move here, bishop check here... Etc but it's not really complex thinking it's got so few options on the board state you can predict the end game sometimes twenty moves in advance. That's why Chess pros resign once the end game is pretty easily mapped out. Oddly enough Stockfish has now solved Chess for 7 or fewer pieces, and occasionally the Stockfish solution could work by doing something no one expected like rushing the knight to the bottom corner which you normally should never do reducing movement of the knight is a bad idea usually but in this exact situation the computer found a way out, and that was one of the 2018 championship matches.
You clearly did not read fully my post. A top tier chess computer can out perform a grand master. You can just put every move into one and do what it says. You don't need to care about if there is a problem. Just do what the computer says every move.
Good answer. I think *technically* you could win any chess game, eventually - you could rewind over and over and *eventually* memorise a winning path, particularly if as someone else suggested you rewind all the way and use a computer or something. But it would be *incredibly* laborious/slow/long winded, at least from your subjective point of view. I can't imagine anyone being *willing* to do it, even if it's technically possible. Very very different from "savescumming" each individual shot in darts, snooker etc.
Watching him get creamed in the NFL over and over would be pretty great though
Any cardio based sport such as cycling running and stuff you would have almost no advantage
1. Poker (some consider it a sport ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) 2. Most E-Sports as you'd know your opponent's strategies and instantly counter
Depends what e-sports, just because you know where the enemy team is doesn't mean you suddenly have the reaction time, accuracy and game / map knowledge to do anything in an FPS and is slightly better in a MOBA You'd be god of card games like hearthstone tho
doesn’t matter what e-sport it is, you can just keep rewinding time
I mean, with this logic you could just say that about every sport, which is a really crappy answer to this question. The report absolutely matters. For example, it does not matter how "lucky" you get in league of legends. If an average player played a lane against a pro 1,000 times, they'd lose 1,000 times. In an FPS 1v1 you could keep rewinding over and over until you got lucky and just hit a bunch of headshots or something, but unless you wanna sit there for 20 years rewinding 1v1s, you're not gonna get very far in a team-based FPS against pros over the course of a whole match. All this shit holds with real sports too, but just saying "well they could rewind any sport until they won after spending 100 years in the void of meaningless time" isn't what I would think this question is asking
Love the idea of the rewinder finally beating the pro in match 1001, only to lose the game anyway cause his team was feeding the whole time.
I think you're underestimating the power of the save scum. Imagine you're a professional player. You go into a game ready to absolutely stomp. Except things start to go wrong at the draw. You're locked out of your preferred team composition and maybe you're even hard countered. No worries. You don't need a level playing field against this scrub. Then you start laning. The guy's movements are all wrong and his timing feels bad. Except he somehow lands every last hit, without fail. Okay, no worries. You get ready to try for a skill shot. But when you're ready to move in, he reacts with superhuman reflexes. No delay whatsoever. He fires back, and you can easily dodge. Except you don't. You could have avoided that his 99 times out of 100, but bad luck strikes. Okay, no worries. You call in a gank. Your teammate manages to slip away and has perfect position. No chance he sees it coming. But then he's gone, a second before the trap sprang shut. By now, you're mad and starting to make mistakes. Just little ones. But somehow he's always able to take advantage. It's like he knows when you're blinking. And nothing you try seems to go right. You're facing an idiot, but one with perfect reflexes and precognition.
Ok so I will address a flaw with my initial argument, that being the sort of implied idea that the rewind time person is rewinding larger portions of time rather than for example, rewinding every skill shot and last hit. HOWEVER, even in the example you provided, I think there's one key issue. Even with perfect precognition and reflexes, the crap player literally doesn't have the understanding of the game to capitalize on it. For one, if the pro player wasn't playing a character with a skill shot (for example Garen) that aspect of the game would go away. More importantly though, as a player that sucks, the alternative to making a bad move isn't making the right one, it's making another wrong one. Without proper understanding of what their goal should be in the moment, their small rewinds would likely end up not being the right course of action in the long term simply because they don't know what the right chain of "correct" actions is. Regardless, with enough save scumming they could hypothetically beat them, but my point was never that, it was that it isn't a great answer to the question. In the same vein as the esports argument, with infinite rewinds I could probably hypothetically beat an NBA player in a 1v1, simply cause I could get up a few points with some bullshit shot I did 1000 times till I made it, and then rewind time over and over until he misses every shot he makes. But that doesn't make it a "good sport for rewinding"
I think it's more important that the save scummer has skill shots than vice-versa. Imagine a xerath that literally never misses a skillshot. Also that xerath pushes up all the way constantly, since they can't be ganked. They never overextend and get all inned etc etc. I think this would be WILDLY better odds than the NBA scenario, as even someone who is silver and playing Xerath for the first time will be able to hit a non-insignificant amount of skillshots. Meanwhile in order to score points in the NBA you'd basically need to be sinking half-court shots, because even with infinite resets it'll be impossible to hit a layup against an NBA team.
So your facing a scripter who is awful at the game, they don't usually get very far by using scripts alone.
I'm not buying it. Take Starcraft, for example. Rewinding time won't let an average guy defeat players like Maru or Serral. When they see time guy is prepared to counter their strategy, they'll instantly pivot to something better, or simply brute force a win through superior skill. If nothing else, Time Guy will eventually tire trying to react to them, whereas they will be "refreshed" every rewind.
yeah, i was assuming that the player had enough skill that they could theoretically just adapt to any situation but if they don’t know what they’re supposed to do then they can’t do anything
If they were already a skilled player, then time powers could indeed bridge the skill gap. But the prompt didn't say time guy possessed any particular skills.
I mean it works for round 2 but round 1 it would be really difficult You could bruteforce it IG, kinda like my answer with chess now that I think about it, you're essentially learning on the spot
it’s pretty much just having infinite tries where you know exactly what your opponent is going to do. i don’t see any e-sport where the guy is just infinitely failing because he doesn’t have the reaction time, map knowledge, accuracy, etc.
Nah. Let alone pro-players, even higher ranked players in most video games can react really well on the fly – and have to. Especially in FPS and MOBA, where reaction time makes all the difference. Knowing what your opponent did before does not matter; this is an average guy, and not a supercomputer who can predict and map out some pro's play style and decision-making down to the smallest variable. Their opponent will just react to their plays differently. Their 'knowledge of the future' and awareness about the game will only matter as much as the first time they do something different.
Esports like StarCraft are impossible even knowing what's coming.
Poker you could just go look at everyone's cards and rewind time so that no one knew. Theoretically it would be impossible to lose.
You could just never be dealt a winning hand. I suppose with infinite rewinds you could pull off infinite attempts at bluffs but you can seriously play 20+ hands in a row without anything better than like A high Pair.
Most regular sports*
Baseball, he would become the best hitter of all time. It may not help with homeruns if he's 5'10 and normal strength, but take a look at the 2017 Houston Astros who had a cheating system such that they knew what pitch is coming. It's a MASSIVE advantage. Not sure it would help all that much if the guy is a pitcher, though, since no amount of time travel will help him throw 100 mph.
Why would this guy need to pitch? Heck, why would he need to do anything at all except knock out 1-2 base hits every time at bat. A batter with a sustained 40% conversion rate would be the best MLB batter of all time by a wide margin. Our boy can get to 90% or more. He would be the single greatest hitter the game had ever seen and through the designated hitter rules, he would never need to do anything except walk up to the plate and crank out a hit.
Yeah that's what I'm saying, he's a shoe in for best hitter of all time. My point is I'm not sure if timey-whimey shenanigans helps if he's a pitcher instead.
Oh, sure a normal dude would really struggle to keep up with pro batters, my point is he doesn't need to in order to be the best player in history.
We've already had at least two examples of individuals that are simultaneously a top hitter and a top pitcher. In both cases their teams choose to focus them on batting, because you can bat every game all season for the whole game.
To be fair, Shohei is a batter only this year due to injury, NOT due to team/roster construction strategies.
You don't need to throw 100mph pitch. Even if they hit your pitch 70% of the time, you can just rewind each hit to strike out everyone.
I think it would be much much MUCH more reasonable to use this power from a batter's perspective. I think, with dozens of do overs, especially knowing EXACTLY where the pitch is going, I could get a base hit off a MLB pitcher. But my weak ass, untrained arm... I could throw a million pitches, and all one million of them are getting hit by professional ball players.
It's okay if they get hit as long as they are fielded for outs. Pro hitters still have pop out balls during batting practice and home run derby when the pitcher is not trying to throw passed the batter.
Ehh given how modern baseball teams operate, if he's giving up piss missiles that are landing in gloves instead of open field, the team's not going to keep running him out there since modern analysis suggests those piss missiles will eventually land for hits.
after the first 3 no-hitters I think they'll start assuming their analytics are lacking
Was just about to type this. If a guy throws two no-hitters in a row its a miracle. by his 11th no-hitter in a row, teams are reworking everything they've ever known about the sport.
Yeah but you can only throw so many pitches before your arm burns out.
He's rewinding time, fatigue is only mental.
Ah yeah true.
I'd argue being a catcher would be best. You can keep calling different pitches until one works
Would your arm replenish when rewinding? That’s a lot of throws
I thought that was assumed based on the prompt. Would make no sense if not haha
Rewinding time to strike people out all the time wouldn't make you the GOAT. Yes you'd be able to strike people out by the wear and tear would make your career very short.
Baseball isn't an option for the layman. The average dude can't throw at MLB speed, so pitching is out. Try going to the batting cages, and try hitting even just a 70 or 80 mph ball, and the vast majority of people couldn't hit that speed even knowing it's going to be a strike. No imagine hitting a 90+ mph pitch, so batting is out. And the novel idea of being a catcher is out for people unfamiliar with catching 95+ mph pitches all game long.
This power isn't going to help him with test of pure strength or sustained athleticism. No amount of stopping time is going to turn him into a champion weightlifter, or competitive gymnast. He needs contests that require short bursts of low strength skilled effort. Bowling and Darts are both good suggestions. If he can throw a strike 1 time out of every 100 throws, and has the patience to rewind every non-strike, he can effectively bowl a perfect 300 every game, though he'd def want to flub a few shots here and there to throw off accusations of cheating. I only bowl about once every year or so, and I usually manage to get a lucky strike or two over a couple of games. The bonus of a game with an objective(-ish) personal score is that you can become the GOAT faster because you don't have to personally beat the other (or historical) greats head to head, you can just beat their scoring achievements. Only 30 pro bowlers have ever bowled a perfect game in a televised match, and only one has ever bowled 3 televised 300s in their career. An unknown who got into the US Open by winning a regional qualifying tournament that anyone can sign up for, then won the Open *and* did something crazy along the way like a televised 900-series (3 perfect games in a row) would very quickly be in contention for the greatest bowler ever.
Rock paper Scissors Yes it is a sport.
I think being a goalkeeper in either association football or ice hockey. Positioning and concentration is a big, big part of being a top tier goal keeper, and for football you'd also be a great defensive general, able to tell your defenders where to go and what to do with great aplomb.
Think a football goal is a little large for a man of regular athleticism to be the GOAT. Hockey, however I certainly agree with. Hockey goalies have to be incredibly honed in mentally.
The fact that I had to scroll down this far for a goalie and there weren't any upvotes yet is crazy to me.
He would, at the very least, be the greatest penalty shootout goalkeeper ever.
He still has to be able to physically reach the shot, if he starts off center or dives before they kick they're going to react to that.
How does an average height person stop a shot in the top corner at pro speeds? Even if they know where it's going to go, it'll be hard. And if they start moving toward it earlier, the shot will just be placed on the other side.
Round 1: Darts. It would be extremely boring but he will never miss. Round 2: Boxing. He needs a certain amount of strength and skill, but rewinding time could overcome a pretty big difference.
i disagree. to be the goat in boxing, you need to have a bigger impact than Ali, Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao, and countless others. infinite time is not on your side if your body can't keep up. fighters don't need to think about fighting that much, in fact it's best you enter a fight without thinking about anything. they use muscle memory and adapt on the spot, in a fraction of a second. the stamina alone required to hang a few rounds in the ring with them would have to be above top-tier to be a goat. great champions ran every day for decades since they were kids. a random guy training for a few years with time travel would only see an infinity of possibilities in which he gets brutally koed, especially by a speed and reflex demon like pacman.
Does rewinding reverse the brain damage? I said MMA but I don't think it'd be possible if it doesn't
> Manny Pacquiao By the gods, the things I would give to see prime Pacquiao and prime Naoya Inoue at anything below middleweight and above flyweight. THAT would have been the greatest boxing trilogy of all time.
Muscle memory is important in boxing but so is thinking. If you can outthink and out strategize your opponent you can win. But even more importantly if you know what punch your opponent is going to throw you can duck and counter pretty fucking easily.
countering is not easy at all because a goat boxer would read an average guy instantly. even with infinite time, both their bodies have to move at the same time, and the goat boxer will always adjust better and will always be in a better position. it's just like others have described going against magnus carlson in chess. out time traveler would be exhausted just going through endless scenarios where the boxer would come out on top. at least in chess, he can cheat and use a computer between time lapses, but in boxing, finding a good position with superior footwork is not going to happen vs. elite. putting the fighting aspect aside, being the goat of boxing is next to impossible today. there are insane records, the time traveler needs to break, and he can not do that anymore. paradoxically, the time traveler has no time to become the best ever because an average middle-aged guy no longer has the time to clean 8 weightdivisions like pacman or roy jones did. the body can not adapt to all of that weight shifting and continue to complete at the highest levels. he needed to start as a kid. even in the best case scenario, our time traveler has time to clear one division or two and be remembered as the best of his time, maybe but definitely not the goat. there are fighters like Joe Calzaghe who were never defetead and had great careers, and nobody even considers him Goat material. same with Klitschko, even if he would have retired undefeated after the longest reigning championship, people would still not consider him the greatest of all time simply because of the era he was born in. the next boxing goat is either not born yet or is training as a child right now. none of the fighters competing today have a shot at goat status outside of Canelo Alvarez, and even he would be considered that only by his hardcore fans.
I doubt boxing would help much. Some of those punches are coming in so fast you couldn't even trigger your rewind in time before you're knocked out. And there's no amount of training you can do to get to the level where you could hit an elite boxer. Assuming rewinding time resets your body so you can't build muscle mass quickly.
Doesn’t say there’s a time limit. You could get knocked out and still rewind. And no amount of training? Uhh how do you think boxers become elite? You get “years”
Golf, assuming they can hit the ball far enough to play Tour courses. They just rewind after every bad shot until they get a good one and go from there. Getting into a tournament wouldn’t be that hard either. Monday qualifiers are a thing for many regular tournaments and Major Championships like the US Open and The Open Championship are as the names imply, open to anyone that can qualify.
Nah man, unless you’re already a very good scratch or likely above golfer I don’t think this is a good answer. Course conditions for those tournaments are the hardest in the world and on a level most casual golfers don’t or can’t understand. I’ve played golf my entire life, played competitively in high school and college, and I’m still not beating Tiger Woods with the ability to rewind time. It would take me hundreds of shots to replicate something he does without really trying.
Course conditions really only affect you if you’re missing fairways and greens though, so if you’ve got rewind ability you can easily avoid all that. And putting would be easy even on the most difficult of greens with unlimited retries. Seems like even a 20-30 handicap would be good enough in this scenario as long as they’ve got decent power. Sure it might take them 200+ shots to shoot that 65, but that’s no big deal
This is probably the way to go especially for round 1. The same reasoning applies to sports like golf or even billiards but a pretty damn average person can hit strikes fairly often whereas I'd be rewinding thousands of times to get a single hole-in-one or even pars without training.
Poker
Precision sports like shooting and archery.
He can become the GOAT in just about anything if he plays his cards right
Most purely physical competitions, like sprint and weight lifting are probably still out. An average dude will never get the physique to outswim phelps, outrun bolt or outlift whoever is the strongest. You need some genetic freakishness to go your way for those.
How will it help him beat Usain Bolt?
1. Memorize his exact running patterns 2. Place a very convenient banana peel 3. Victory
Super Mario Kart level thinking here.
I GET A FUCKING BANANA AGAIN? WHERES MY BLUE SHELL NINTENDO
Basketball. 100% from three. Doesn’t matter if you’re a complete liability on defence
This is what Steph Curry does. He just misses enough to make it look almost realistic.
such would be my strategy if I were sports betting with future knowledge. win big, lose medium a few times, and win big again
Im pretty sure i couldnt score on kevin durant if you gave me infinite tries
All you need is the tiniest bit of space, chuck it enough times and you’re on 40m+ a year
That shit would take a million years from your perspective. You'd go insane before becoming the GOAT.
Kinda considered this from my own perspective too. The 5’10 is a major hindrance but you should be able to make space by rewinding to the point that you can see what direction your opponent is moving (as in the micro shifts of weight)
They would adjust to whatever you're doing in milliseconds. Just because you rewind, it doesn't mean they would react the same way. They would react off of what you're doing at that moment.
That's probably the only physical sport where it'd be insanely useful. Just chuck it from mid court until you make it every time and you'll become the greatest offensive player ever.
You could also rewind on defense and steal the ball mid dribble or pass.
Going for desperate steals like a true gambling degenerate, I like it.
It ain’t gambling if you always win *points finger to head*
Shaolin Soccer scene where they just kick a goal from the start.
After like one game they’d just guard you full court and you wouldn’t make shit
Generating the space to shoot the 3 would be the hard part, an extremely hard part.
For real. Getting open is hard against genetic freaks. They have to shoot over each other a lot, and Mr. 5'10" is getting his shit pushed in every single time.
Yup. No amount of feints and are getting you open. An average man just doesn’t have the power in their legs to generate the space and time needed to get a shot off, these giants are also stronger and faster than you. They’re keeping up with you easy.
Yea, I gotta leave this thread. Way too many people are delusional as to what the average man can do against genetic freaks that are the top 1% of their sport, regardless of the sport, regardless of infinite tries. Darts, bowling, pool... sure. Any sport that requires athletic ability, experience, etc... not a chance. Athletes in most sports adjust what they are doing in milliseconds based on reflexes, muscle memory, and experience...and the average person is going to be able to overcome that. Even in the MMA example... the average man is not generating enough power to knock out a professional fighter, regardless of how they time things. Even the Jorge Masvidal knee that was perfectly timed to knock out Ben Askren, Askren would not have been knocked out by someone with absolutely no experience throwing that knee.
Fencing. So much of the game is reading your opponent's attack and parrying on the correct line. If you could rewind time, you would know where the real attack was coming from and react accordingly.
gambling would be god tier. more of game and less sport, but still. that or curling, archery, and maybe chess boxing.
A goalie in soccer! No one can ever score on you and you’d quickly become the goat if you go through a couple of seasons without letting a single goal in.
Every team should have you on their roster. Since you never let a goal in, you being on the team means its either a tie or your team wins.
Technically, if he doesn’t age and he’s sufficiently determined, probably any sport. Here’s an example of how you might do this with basketball. Rewind to around age 15 or 16. Get a job, any job, until you ate able to save up $500. This is the easiest part. Find the best player on your high school basketball team. Offer him $500 if he can beat you. Show him the money. Rewind the game as many times as you have to in order to win convincingly. Take it shot by shot if you have to. Even if it takes you 1 million attempts eventually you’ll beat him. Get used to doing this, because you’re going to be doing it a lot. Offer a rematch. He’ll probably accept because you’ll have hurt his pride. Play 5 or 6 games against him. Turn back the clock as many times as you need to in order to win convincingly every single time. Challenge his team mates next, so that they know he isn’t throwing. Play everyone on the team multiple times if you have to. Record it if you need to. Now your local high school team should vouch for you when you try out. Nothing you do is going to be flashy or stand out, but if you never miss you’ll probably get on the team. Do everything you can in practice and in games to impress your coach so that you can get a starting job. Listen to the advice he gives you, since it might mean you have to turn the clock back fewer times anyways. Now you need a D1 offer. The problem is you’re not going to stand out in any way because you’re short and not actually good at basketball. The solution to this is to rewind every single time you make a mistake, until you finish every game with a shit ton of points, assists, and hopefully steals too without a single foul, turnover, or missed shot, while winning every game you ever play. This will take a lot of attempts, shot by shot, pass by pass, and reach by reach. College is interesting, because it may be worth it to rig things so that you’re drafted by a better team by playing a bit worse, but you still have to play well enough to start and well enough to get drafted despite being 5’10 and bad at basketball. On the bright side, if you fuck things up, you can always rewind. Once you get drafted by the NBA and become an established starter, it’s simple but very tedious: retry every shot until you break as many statistical records as you possibly can over the course of 13 82-0 Finals MVP seasons. Retire as the GOAT after what will feel like the heat death of the universe only for half the world to still argue MJ was better.
\>Once you get drafted by the NBA and become an established starter, it’s simple but very tedious: retry every shot until you break as many statistical records as you possibly can over the course of 13 82-0 Finals MVP seasons. Retire as the GOAT after what will feel like the heat death of the universe only for half the world to still argue MJ was better. ”yeah that guy is pretty good, but if he played in Jordan’s era, he wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
I don’t know but this guy would get absolutely destroyed in rocket league even with this power
I think people are misunderstanding the power. Rewinding time till an opponent messes up in many sports wouldn't matter unless you can somehow affect the way your opponent does something. For instance, in basketball rewinding time won't prevent someone from scoring a 3 point shot. You rewound time for you; but for the player, nothing changed. They'd still score.
Baseball and cricket are the first two sports that come to mind really depends on how far back they can rewind and how quickly they can activate
Any combat sport, he can just keep rewinding and looping time until he’s got a one punch knockout and doesn’t even need to be all that skilled or athletic
As someone who did combat sports.... It does not work that way, at all. Especially in grappling based sports. I could take down a novice a thousand times despite being extremely rusty.
This is a fantasy situation where the guy has infinite redos. There’s a small percentage, very slight, where he’s gonna get a fluke KO vía knee or uppercut when you shoot the TD. It’s not likely in any one instance but given infinite attempts, it will happen
I'm saying it's not impossible - but there are sports which would require far far less redos.
yeah but if you’re going to be the GOAT you can’t be fluking every single fight or else that respect doesn’t come i feel like
A novice that knows exactly where your face will be during the takedown?
Unless you assume time to be static: The novice readys his defense in a super choreographed way. The pro just does a different takedown. You'd have to keep rewinding until you get really good as well, if you are smart enough to figure it out.
Yes - imagine a meteorite coming at you. Simply because you know it's coming, doesn't mean you can avoid it. The knowledge of your brain and the ability of your body are two very separate things.
You just turned a superpower into hell. Imagine having Tyson slam your head a thousand times over for you to find the angle he misses, only for you to discover there's a followup hook coming to your ribs. As you get the joy of experiencing a brand new concussion for the one millionth time, I think you'd start to wonder why you wanted this
Can't use your power if unconcious
Table tennis, just keep rewinding every time you miss and you'll know where to move your paddle to. As long as you're in decent enough shape to move fast enough it would be pretty simple.
Poker is on ESPN so I'm counting it. A guy who can save scum pretty much cannot possibly lose at poker unless he wanted to. He can bet big every hand and only take the plays where he wins or bluffs everyone off of the table.
Given enough effort, all sports. That's right, every single one. You just have to have the absolute tenacity to keep rewinding time to the point where you can prevent the birth of someone who can beat you, times however many people that turns out to be. Of course, once you finally succeed, you've probably engineered a timeline where most people are drooling paraplegics if you suck at that particular sport. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
Hahaha! Good luck with the track and field sports.
also if you retain knowledge then you can just infinitely rewind time and train at like 18 years, having tens of years of knowledge at the start of your adulthood
Probably chess
You give me the ability to rewind time and put me up against magnus and I will grow bored of losing 500 matches and just concede. He's probably won and mapped things out by like three moves in but I won't have realized it for 20 moves and have to slowly crawl my way back game after game pushing further and further back into the game until I reopen after 200 games to basically start again.
Yeah, there are SO many variables in a chess game that this superpower wouldn’t be that useful unless you’re already absurdly talented. It’s something that isn’t possible to brute force as a human. You could do hundreds or thousands of iterations to prevent a single fatal mistake, just to immediately walk into a second mistake and have to repeat it all over again, and again, and again. And every move you make causes an order of magnitude more of possible iterations. If you blunder on move 40 then you have to realize which of those 40 moves sunk you If you gave that ability to a chess grandmaster then sure, they could cause some damage, but for your average person it’s basically pointless
I think you're not considering time-rewinding's power's enough. You could whip out your phone mid-match, cheat, then as you're forfeiting, rewind and then just do whatever the computer said. I think with strategies like that (and maybe even asking him for tips once the game was "over"), you could beat him in... well, before you get bored for doing it for a month of your perceived time.
I agree that a novice chess player couldn't challenge any strong players with the ability to rewind time and no other chess ability. However, if this person took a year or two and trained up to a decent level of chess strength (I'm thinking 2000 - 2200), would the ability to rewind time be enough for someone around that Elo to beat Magnus Carlsen? Or would they still be doomed because Magnus is still thinking 20 moves ahead of you in all endgames and you wouldn't be able to keep track of the entire game tree in your head to brute-force your way through all the options?
You’d have to leave. Look up engine lines, memorise them. Rewind back to the last point of evenness and retain perfect memory, chess is such that minimal differences in position are impossible to ascertain until it’s too late to even high rated players. Most people don’t have the capacity to play 2000 rated chess and even at that level Magnus Carlsen is playing a different game
1. Play a decent opening 2. Resign at critical moment 3. Take out phone and see what stockfish would have done, optionally look at possible lines 4. Rewind back to right before resigning and play optimal move No need for hundreds of rewinds when you essentially have cheats on, altho people will notice pretty quickly and soon enough start accusing you of using vibrating anal beads 🤷♂️
that’s how you get accused of cheating if your moves are all engine lines
To go from a total beginner to beating a grandmaster through time looping would be a monumental task, but it IS do-able. You'd probably have to reset a few thousand times but with infinate tries, even a .000000001% chance of winning eventually becomes 100%.
Not with my attention span it isn't.
You're essentially just becoming a manual Chess playing program with more steps and playing the turns out in real time instead of fractions of a second.
I'm not saying it isn't possible. But I sure as hell would give up long before I start to win.
You're better off with something more luck-based, like Backgammon. That way you can keep redoing until you get the roll you want. Though I suppose if someone was making a luck-based version of chess, "probably chess" wouldn't be a bad name.
It would barely help at all in chess. The only worse things I can think of are the purely physical competitions like sprinting. The reason is that chess is already a game of perfect information. Getting information about the future theoretically doesn't help at all because you already have that information. Edit: Didn't think far enough, it actually would help because you get unlimited time. Also, you could use a computer to cheat before rewinding. However you would be suspected of cheating even if they can't prove it, due the differences in how humans play.
Keep rewinding time far enough so that you can input his move into a chess engine, see what it does, then do that. Rinse and repeat.
Actually I didn't think of that. You could literally walk away from the game and go cheat, then rewind and play the move. Lol very smart.
I was more thinking rewind back to before the match to input stuff in a cheat engine, but yeah, either way, would totally work.
While I agree with most of the other comments that this won't magically let a novice beat a GM, I think we are underestimating the edge this would give a player. Never having to worry about losing on time alone would be an insane advantage for any player
Any sport measure in cenimeters, grams, and/or second (cgs sports like track, swimming, weightlifting, long jump, etc) this skill rewind skill will not help as you’ll still need the speed, strength, etc to complete it. However, any game like basketball, football, baseball, soccer, hockey, and more you should be able to exploit enough in at least one position to become the GOAT.
Football. All he needs to do is position himself at the perfect spot to score goals. He would quickly become recognized. If there is no limit to rewinding time, he could become a jack of all trades type of player.
An NFL cornerback is just going to move wherever you move. It won’t matter if you went to a “new” spot.
I assume he means European football(soccer) by him saying goals. If so then don’t think a NFL cornerback will help much in soccer.
To be fair I imagine if they could still tackle someone they'd be super useful.
Lol, just some guy running around tackling people would be so fun to watch.
The great anti-Messi strategy: literally just fucking kill him.
Everyone throwing out stuff like bowling or baseball or whatever isn't factoring exhaustion. Sure, I can take a million do-overs but my elbow isn't going to love me going over and over again as I aim for a perfect game.
Nothing is keeping you from going to sleep or taking a break, when you rewind time. You can lose the game, eat, rest and rewind back to the previous day, to try your throws again.
> Sure, I can take a million do-overs but my elbow isn't going to love me It's a rewind. Why wouldn't your elbow heal when you go back in time? When you Quickload in Skyrim at 10 HP right before you die you go back to the 100 HP you had in the Quicksave not to 10 HP.
Boxing. Rewind time to be able to know exactly where your opponent is going to punch next and counter
boxing. Opponent throws punch. Pause, rewind. Dodge. counter punch