Tournament 2016 thoughts

-


Initial thoughts on tournament:

It definitely appears to work better to have judges call all hits, not because they are good at it but because at least it's a level playing field of incompetence that affects all participants equally. Therefore we had a lot of grumbling about the judges but it didn't progress into outright whining because, well people whos hits weren't called also had hits against them not called. This also, as we thought, tended to favour fighters who gave clean, decisive blows over scrappers and snipers. Having said that, all the training had paid off and the standard of judging was much higher than in previous years.

As per usual, a lot of the outcome was determined by the luck of the draw. Many of the better fighters were paired up and went out early, whereas many of the newer fighters were paired up and went into the later rounds. I think that is part of the charm of a tournament but I think that some kind of experimentation with a seeding process would probably be a good idea.

I noted again that people with simple strategies tend to win tournaments. A lot like Dal'aggochie's "how to train someone to win a duel in a week" or all of Di Grassi. Pick a max of two high percentage combinations that you can do really well and fast and then do them really well and fast. Conversely people who go in for "good fights" tend to go out early. I think this perfectly exemplifies the historical dichotomy between the True and False Arts, people who are all business and people who want to play.

I also noted, for the steel competitions, that there was a direct correlation between sword weight and success: the fighters with the lighter swords definitely came out better.

We had all our scoring and matching run through an excel spreadsheet, all programmed up to calculate everything from randomly selecting matches to calculating who was winning etc. We projected this onto a wall. While there were occasional technical hiccups with this, mostly centred around people dropping in or out of competitions, this worked really well. Fighters could see on the display how they were doing, who was winning and what their upcoming fights were in real time. This made the organisation super smooth.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HEMA games

-
Image
I've spoken about this before  but I feel that one of the key pillars of successful swordsmanship is developing a good mental attitude. Being relaxed and adopting a playful mindset allows you apply your knowledge gained from study and drilling to successful sparring. Like with strength or technique there is training you can do to develop this. Training for a good mental attitude is partly about training to reduce stress and reducing the likelihood that you will freeze under pressure. It is also partly about encouraging you to understand the linkages between techniques, how to apply the technique in different situations and how a technique fits into the bigger strategic picture. So, what's a solution? Games. Here's a list of some that I like to use with descriptions (I'll keep updating this list as I come up with new games): Without swords Slappy facey / tag -  based on a childhood game from my upbringing in Scotland, slappy facey in it's natural form is
Read more

Kit Review: Superior Fencing "16th C. HEMA Jacket 800 N"

-
Image
Kit Review: Superior Fencing "16th C. HEMA Jacket 800 N" These jackets have become pretty much the standard jackets of my club and, at the last count, I think over half of our club members now use them. As far as I can see they also seem to be very common throughout the Australian clubs as well. However, most of the orders for our Club have taken place as collective efforts and one observation is that it definitely seems like Superior Fencing handles these larger orders better than an individual order (see below). One thing to observe about Superior Fencing is that they seem to have designs that are surprisingly similar to other designs on the market but better made and with better touches. Possibly this is an advantage of making each one individually, they can better incorporate upgrades and improvements as they go. This jacket reminds me of a Neyman Fencing Renaissance jacket but it has improvements like ventilation grommets etc. Finally, I've had this jacket fo
Read more

10 simple tips for improving HEMA sparring

-
Image
Shamelessly inspired by this article: 1. Game I agree that relaxation is important. Being tense means you're thinking about being tense and not smiting the other guy. One of the simplest ways I've found to do this is to play more. This means treating sword fighting more like a game than a serious life and death situation because the only thing in danger in our pretend sword poking is our egos. Here are a whole bunch of games to help induce a relaxed mindset. 2. Train fast and get faster Not many sword fighting sources have ponderous complex actions but rather lots of simple actions done at the correct time and measure very, very fast. Want to be fast? Then recognise that what you are doing now is actually slow and do specific drills to improve your explosive speed. Just try this and see what I mean: Throw a glove in the air and do as many cuts as you can before it falls. Go as fast as you can while maintaining good body mechanic s. If you're loosing good mechani
Read more