How many 5 year olds can you take on at once?

Taken from some forum (via Waxy.org)

The question: How many 5 year-olds could you take on at once?

The specifics:

• You are in an enclosed area, roughly the size of a basketball court. There are no foreign objects.
• You are not allowed to touch a wall.
• When you are knocked unconscious, you lose. When they are all knocked unconscious, they lose. Once a kid is knocked unconscious, that kid is “out.”
• I (or someone else intent on seeing to it you fail) get to choose the kids from a pool that is twice the size of your magic number. The pool will be 50/50 in terms of gender and will have no discernable abnormalities in terms of demographics, other than they are all healthy Americans.
• The kids receive one day of training from hand-to-hand combat experts who will train them specifically to team up to take down one adult. You will receive one hour of “counter-tactics” training.
• There is no protective padding for any combatant other than the standard-issue cup.
• The kids are motivated enough to not get scared, regardless of the bloodshed. Even the very last one will give it his/her best to take you down.

I set my magic number at 30, but upon reflection, I think I could take on a few more. How many could you take on?

I loved one of the replies which stated:

damn, this is going to require much reflection. Someday when I’m uber rich I’m gunna buy a $#!tl04d of 5 year olds on the black market and try this out

Anyways, taking into account every bit of detail in that list, here are my concerns:

• Kids nowadays are getting bigger by the moment. Try finding a younger cousin or even nephew/niece, chances are they’re bigger than you right now… they sure as hell are bigger than me. Though 5 year-olds hopefully aren’t at that magic phase of growth yet. American kids seem to be bigger than the average asian regardless.

• Using a basketball court and some running would mean you can probably easily avoid them. Unless their training included tactical strategy which allows them to act as a unit and not independently, then you only have to deal with their stamina. You would definitely be faster than them, but how long can you hold out?

• It would be easy to knock them out cold one by one by a series of hit and runs. Just let them chase you (they’ll never catch up) and deal with the person closest to you… one at a time. If someone happens to be in front of you waiting, you can probably just knee them – if they’re not that tall that is. Your “counter-tactics training” will probably be useful only when they start surrounding you, in which you have to find a way to break free from such a position and continue running.

So the real question here is how strong are you? If you have a single kick or punch enough to knock someone out cold, then knocking out 5-year olds one by one and running could possibly even beat that magic number quoted above. Notice that there is no rule from killing the kid, so you can make sure and just snap his neck, even a weak adult has the capacity to do that to a 5-year old one would think.

You could also probably shove a bunch of them to the wall (unless the no touching the wall clause only applies to you), or push/throw one at them to achieve the same result.

A lot of replies to that thread are rather erroneous since they’re assuming you don’t have enough room to work with. A basketball court is pretty big, you’d have to be really tired, slow, or stupid to get caught before clocking a bunch of 5-year olds. Also, they forget the age you’re dealing with: the age from 5-10 is tricky since this is where most of the changes that can affect this exercise occur. I think 5 is still safe. Now if that were an 8 year old, there could be a considerable increase in their performance… if they were 10 and above, then you could be in trouble.