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As with any athletic competition, the first step towards being an effective swardsman is mastering the fundamentals. None of these tips are worth bothering with if you don't have your shoeshow pivot down cold, or if you are still ramming your two by four into the ground halfway through your basic swing. A good way to judge how well you have mastered the basics is to play a friendly game game with an evenly matched opponent WITHOUT JIGGING. If gerbil mortality is under fifty percent, it is a good sign that you are ready to learn some advanced techniques.
In general it's a bad idea to kill gerbils on purpose, since you will be penalized and your oppoent will have a chance to jig the gerbil and score a point. To this end, when striking a gerbil with his two by four (as opposed to simply swinging it to frighten the animal), it behooves a swardsman to be fairly delicate. This gentle batting of a gerbil is called bunting. However it is sometimes a good strategy to 'bunt' a gerbil hard enough to kill it. This is because malicious killing in Gaufqwi is judged according to a principal called proximate cause. What this amounts to is that takers attribute the death of a gerbil to the event closest in time and space to that death that is likely to have caused it. Thus, if you can strike a gerbil and propel him so that he lands and is immediately crushed under your opponents showshoe, your opponent will be penalized for the kill.
Depending on the kind of snowshoes you wear, it may be feasible to scoop up a gerbil onto the shoe, advance towards the goal with him, and flick him in when you are in range. When it works, this strategy is great, but it is frought with peril. The gerbil may fall off and under the snowshoe, and then you are hit with a malicious killing penalty. If you have the target gerbil on your shoe, your oppoent has no choice but to swing his two by four in your direction, and most takers are far less likely to call an attacking penalty if the attack can be justified as an attempt to move a gerbil. The gerbil may get stuck in the mesh of the snowshoe where no amount of flicking will set it free. This situation is especially bad if the gerbil is trapped close enough to your leg to gnaw on it, because trust me, he will. You have no choice to endure until you or your opponent manages to knock him off.
Jigging is a lot harder than it looks. Most beginners
assume that their spear will sink into the gerbil like a
toothpick through a cocktail weenie, but this is rarely the
case. Most spearheads are fairly large, and proper jigging
technique must be observed to avoid reducing a gerbil to lots of
little nonscorable bits. A good jig is nearly perpendicular to
the gerbil's broad side and must be made in a quick, stabbing
motion. Then the spear must be held nearly vertical as you make
for the taker to avoid dropping your prize (Occasionally someone
will attempt to use a barbed spear to make it easier to keep the
gerbil on during transport. They generally realize the folly of
this the first time they try to extract their spear from the
beartrap.) A expert swardsman can insert deliver the gerbil, trip
the trap, and recover his spear in one fluid motion. Beginning
and intermediate players may wish to catch the gerbil on the
trap's teeth and trigger it from below to avoid getting their
spear caught. Of course, the cost of this caution is lost time,
which is always of the essence in a heated Gaufqwi match.
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