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Fair enough. If I think Yammar's plan is kinda dumb, it does behoove me to explain why.
So. As near as we can tell, Yammar's policy for hostages is
Which, ok, fair enough! Precommiting to not let hostages work on you is one of the archetypal forms of precommitment. The problem is that Yammar doesn't know what he's doing, because the way he set things up gives him almost all of the downsides to precommiting without giving him many of the benefits; rather than a potent tool that exchanges flexibility for feats that would be ultimately impossible, he instead created a strategy which hurts his own interests.
To explain, here is what we know about yammar's stance in detail (aside from the parts seen in story):
and
Yammar's anti-hostage trick is simultaneously so strong that he's willing to kill the person he's rescuing, rather than let them be used against his rescue (which is in itself a clear sign that his precommitment is broken), but also not strong enough to actually stop people from using hostages against him. Now, it's arguable that he was mind controlled into giving this reasoning, and that actually the sole reason he doesn't act is mind control rather than hostages; this solves that problem, right?
No, voice inside my head who I'm expositing to, it doesn't. The main lever of precommitting is "being seen to precommit." It's why (in theory) organizations like the US government announce that they "won't negotiate with terrorists" or people tie blindfolds or take out their steering wheel if they're serious about winning games of chicken. The more credible you can make your commitment, the less you get called on it. The issue is, Yammar didn't do any of that. Not only has he not even made sure Kakara was aware of said policy, she's actively seen examples of him violating it, which reflects in her actions. The precommitment holds no force to prevent his opponent from using hostages, and leaves him with the unenviable position of "follow the precommitment to its stupid end and kill the person that is literally the sole reason he's having the fight and is his sole goal" and "abandon the precommitment, leaving you weaker than if you hadn't even tried in the first place."
You can't even make the argument that "it worked out, so maybe he just knew kakara" because those were, in fact, options we could have picked. Bear in mind that that update was the one where poptart cut off voting and just picked the choice with best chance of sucess; rather than "voters as kakara wouldn't choose to use dandeer as a shield to heal allies" it's "voters as kakara didn't get the choice." In short, the decision that got yammar the result he was aiming for came from an entirely different source than the one that all of Kakara's previous actions allow him to model, so there's just no way for him to have done so. It's definitely likely that we would have picked this anyway, and from kakara's PoV the results aren't that different, but the same isn't true of Ymmar's PoV, and it's nowhere near enough of a sure thing for that kind of a gamble to work from yammar.
This isn't really complex stuff, from a game theoretic PoV, and I hardly credit the possibility that you can have Mathematics of even modern levels without game theory this basic; if anything, I would consider saiyan!garenhuld's game theory to likely be better than ours. This leaves the only real possibilities that Yammar is too stupid to figure these out, or so arrogant and foolish he didn't even bother to learn the basics of what he was doing before blindly leaping to cripple himself by precommitment. Neither one of these speaks well of the intellect he's applying to the problem at hand.
I still like my takeOkay now THAT is a hilarious way to exploit the well-documented tendency of Dandeer's mind control victims to suck at Deceit checks.
I... may actually be able to come up with something more glorious than this, but I can't possibly come up with something funnier.
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