The Hurt Heal Times: Week 1
Introduction
Hello there, and welcome to the first edition of the Hurt Heal Times, I’m the writer for the paper which is about (if you haven’t already figured it out) Hurt/Heal V run by Forsaken. I am BermudanPM, playing H/H for my first time but proud to bring you the scoop on the game, as well as some interviews.
In case you don’t know…
Hurt/Heal is a signature CVC (Chess.com vs Chesskid) Forum game which consists of two things, hurting and healing. It is a game of alliances, betrayals, spies and more. F1 explains it in better detail here.
We also have the rules for your information
Now that that’s out of the way let’s get into the game this week
The current leaderboard
This is leaderboard as of the time of posting this. Note that this is based on the standings in the first comment in the Hurt/Heal forum. Done by SpaceChess
Hurt/Heal Week 1
So the game started fairly interesting with the clear favourite player being carlsen when he got a lot of lives from everyone in his alliance and more. This also led to whenever carlsen was hurt, everyone would pretty much kill that person or do their best to (except Marie who was for some reason an exception). This was soon rivalled by mjtcan and his strategy which used his organisation skills to get a common (But very successful) “Heal me and I heal you back" program. We will have an interview from mjtcan later so stay tuned for that. This strategy ended up working for him as he stayed independent as alliances started forming. This strategy was adopted by Space, Noah (but he had a more immediate strategy) and Cosmic but Cosmic ended up developing some new ideas to come with the strategy. This led to them all doing fairly well.
Then Cosmic enacted his plan which was very interesting and has gotten him into second place.
This was him trying to build a network of people and in the process, get a lot more heals and it did work. He also announced his perks and his idea of his strategic circle. This strategic circle has given him strong allies especially with his new list of deals
But all these allies have caused the unfolding of a conflict between cosmic’s team and mjt, deflection and cactus, which was caused by cactus hurting tricks. Cosmic asked for an apology but tensions were rising and deflection and cactus were unhappy with him. We’ll see where this leads. Cosmic was and still is playing a very good game. Obanai is playing with a similar strategy playing with perks and strong alliances. Both are playing a good game.
Others had similar ideas but a few other people went with the more traditional alliance strategy. Toast and Tarbo are examples who both had alliances, as well as carlsen who suggested an alliance for the top 5
(This was posted by Cosmic)
In the end we’ll see how this all plays out but this should be a very interesting game. We may see a clear top 10, carried through by alliances, or we will see absolute betrayals and chaos, who knows?
Hurt/Heal From the Stands
With FreeFriendlyDove
Soooo in my opinion, kinda seems like mjt is winning 🥹 (yay a fellow mafia player). I feel like he is quite experienced in all types of forum games, so that's kinda obvious. What hit me by surprise is Cosmic being 2nd, cuz he doesn't seem to be the most popular nor most liked 🙃 He seems to have many allies though, so that's a great strategy play. I would bet my chances on mjt winning and I hope he does. Betrayals still could happen when they start reaching the top 20, so yep. What am I supposed to say lol all I do is unofficially help Rage update and rank 😝
The Interviews
This week we had four interviews, one with Marie, Bestor, Sandy and Mjt. I will be showing you parts of interviews, as well as the one question interview with Marie and we’ll also see what Mjt had to say. I also fixed some grammatical errors in the interviews
Marie_Hoa
I gave Marie 1 question and that was, as she expected, asking her why she hurt Carlsen. This is what she had to say
“The reason for hurting carlsen on day 1 was because I had the intention to hurt him ever since forsaken announced H/H 5 and it was just one of the things on my bucket list of H/H 5 since this is not any ordinary Hurt or Heal so we gotta do what we gotta do folks hah-”
She then added
“Also you know how popular @carlsen is and how that’s his main advantage in H/H so uhh yeah its rare to see someone hurting Youssef because I quote Toast “I withdraw from H/H = I hurt @carlsen” And just saying, I have no intention to withdraw just yet.”
Bestor0028
Bestor is one of the many first time players and he had a very interesting interview. I was interested to see what his plan was and how he’s doing with it and he gave some good answers. One thing he said was:
“I’m doing great with joining an alliance on day one and having 8-9 lives bc of accepting good trades”
He also said:
“Well I haven't expected this definitely but my strategy is to play quality heal trades and carefully choose who to hurt so i dont hurt the wrong person”
I enjoyed his interview as it didn’t have much but good insight on his strategies as a first time player.
SandyDanger
Now Sandy had some nice insight on his opinion on the game so far saying:
“I thought I was just going to get destroyed on day 1 just LIKE LITERALLY EVERY OTHER HH. But now I'm doing well. I believe I'm in the top 15 so I'm feeling pretty good” He also was talking about a similar strategy to Bestor but also had an interesting prediction
“carlsen will hit 100 lives”
This was another fun interview
Mjtcan
Finally Mjt, who gave some insight from the first placed player. I asked him about the game and Hurt/Heal in general and he said “It's very strategic which is why I'm pretty good at it in my opinion. This round certainly isn't peak Hurt/Heal but it's still enjoyable.” He also decided to talk about his strategy in this game compared to last games “This is a similar strategy to some of my previous games, but I've also done other strategies in the past. “My 3rd place in Round 2 was due to a 4-person alliance between me, Qoi, Flame and Starflight and we all got top ten with it.” And finally he gave us a look at his endgame ideas and a message to the players. “I've started building alliances with people. “I'm hoping Carlsen and I will be strong allies going into the endgame. If that means I win, great, but I'm ok with a second place and him winning in the end. I'll eventually stop doing my leaderboard system but I'm going to keep it going until we get down to the endgame.”
“Please don't fight amongst yourselves yet. Save it for the endgame. For now, we should work together to eliminate the inactive players so we can all make the top 40 at least. Additionally, I'm happy to ally with anyone for now.”
Conclusion
Well thank you to everyone who’s read this far and I hope you’ve enjoyed it. If you have any tips for me or want to be interviewed just dm me and I’ll consider it. Good luck to everyone and credit to everyone who helped and was interviewed. Goodbye 
