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Notes -
Put me down team bat.
As others have pointed out, you get one chance with the knife, because the only winning move is to rush and pray you hit something vital. Otherwise the superior range and speed of the bat carries the day.
If you factor in these are inexperienced fighters forced into the situation, the greater lethality of the blade might actually be a psychological hindrance to it's wielder.
Of course the knife fighter can win, but if you do this 100 times I'd expect the bat fighter to win ~66 times.
To get really off in the weeds, how fat are these equal contestants? The fatter, the more I go with the bat fighter. Supposedly gladiator's in ancient Rome carbed up so they had some extra padding. This let them get cut up a bit, sometimes even kind of deep, and put on a good show, without the cuts being lethal.
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