Practice Report

Practice last night was good. I had a couple more realizations about New Sword Magic. I've finished writing two blog posts on the subject, except that I need to create photos and animations to describe the concepts involved.

I fought pickups against several people. The purpose of my pickups was to see how this different way of thinking about opposition is applicable. A note: I use the term "Sad Zone" in this post. This is the ideal place to push against someone's sword for opposition. I will not go into how I determine the location of the Sad Zone here.

As a note, I was literally bouncing this practice, that's how happy and excited I was for the pickups portion. As the tournament happened, I slipped into tournament headspace. That was good! It means I am able to switch between headspaces as needed.

My first set of pickups was against a buckler fighter. I ended up getting touched when he was able to isolate my sword and grab on to its location with his sword and/or buckler. I ended up touching him with a cutting thrust over his arm, directly through the Sad Zone of his sword. Additionally, I was able to perform several single-tempo passing-step dagger-pushes into the Sad Zone of his sword, when I moved my sword to the far outside line. I wasn't able to capitalize on it like I thought I should have been. Perhaps I should have gone for arm cuts or leg thrusts during the tempi in which I completely owned his sword.

My next set was against the Doctor. He was not feeling super well, and even so I think that the fights went more than 50% in his favor. He uses two long swords, and using my knowledge of principles in New Sword Magic, I was able to determine that the Sad Zone of his swords was much farther back than I had previously expected. As such, I was able to perform many cuts and pushes which actually gained good opposition against his swords. I feel like there is quite a bit of room for me to improve my execution of the principles of New Sword Magic, so that's pretty exciting to me.

After that, I fought another buckler fighter. She used her buckler more offensively and kept her sword much lower. I had trouble applying my principles of opposition to her, because she kept doing all these really good things that I didn't expect. Eventually I settled on a tactic of getting into Fabris Plate 60 stance and letting my dagger drift around defensively, while alternating high/low and high/high fakes. I could probably have done that same thing I mention above for the other buckler fighter, to her. Oh well, live and learn.

My last set of fights was against someone fighting with a dagger and a shorter sword. She was fighting primarily in a Fabris stance that I do not think is Good and True. I have seen this stance several times, and I have never liked it. Her stance exposed the Sad Zone of her sword, and as such I was able to push through that area using Compound Thrusts. That is to say, a particular type of line-change, combined with a particular type of cutting thrust. 

There was also a tournament! I fought in it and won it.

Several people did good things. I got booped in the nose because I did not close the line far enough, which is apparently a danger when performing a cutting thrust from the inside line using New Sword Magic. I need to work really hard on it before K&Q Rapier, in order to not shoot myself in the foot with New Sword Magic by doing something like that.

The other pass I lost was one in which I had cane, and he had buckler. There was a bunch of messiness, and I got legged. Then there was more messiness, and we both thought that we might have hit with thrusts, so we re-fought from the point at which I was legged. Eventually he took the pass and I don't even remember how. I think it was a thrust from his left side, using his right hand? Not sure.

But yeah. It was a good practice. I learned a lot.