Practice Report and Intentional Rambling

Monday practice was good. I feel like I blinked or something, and literally every single person has improved relative to my skill level. Every single person, without exception. I haven't been drilling at home, so I guess I'd better start that back up so that I don't fall behind. However, in order to be motivated to drill at home, I need to have a Thing to be working on. Some bit of theory or something. So today, I plan to ramble until I figure out some things to specifically work on.

I started off practice with my short sword. That sword is super light in the blade, despite being kind of heavy in the hilt. I was attempting to play my basic Capoferro game. It worked okay, but not great. I kept needing to revert to my largely speed-and-trickiness game. In theory, throwing thrusts in third toward the arm should be safe, which was my primary go-to action. It was not safe - in particular, there was a type of hilt-high disengage which dropped the tip toward my gut which forced me to back off every single time.

I eventually moved to fighting with my long and super-tip-heavy sword. It went pretty well - I like the fact that my opponent has to commit super hard to push it offline, even with rigid parry devices. My game with it tends to involve just sort of dangling it out there and disengaging until I can take a long step or two. I am tempted to take a hacksaw to my spare Darkwood Pappenheimer hilt in order to remove the plates and reduce the weight, so I can have a real ricasso and reduce the danger of getting thwacked in the finger. This is instead of using my dagger hilt for that particular blade setup.

*****

We eventually fought the tournament. I was trying pretty hard, but wasn't correctly in tournament headspace. Usually when I fight in a tournament I have a "game" that I play with people. In particular, the "game" usually has the following aspects. I have also included an example of each of these aspects.

• Uncommon situation
• Keep my blade on the far outside line no matter what
• Opponent has a relatively obvious response
• They strongly take my blade to the outside and thrust
• Strong counter to that response which is hard to counter
• Yielding disengage with hilt used for defense
• Knowledge of other responses, and counters that at least won't get you killed
• Opponent maintains distance
• Edge forwards slowly as possible
• Opponent weakly takes my blade to the outside
• Countered by pushing through and thrusting with opposition with a diagonal passing step
• Opponent takes my blade to the inside
• Maintain distance, counter-disengage

Shallow games are useful because it's easy to retrieve your go-to responses quickly, and you are far less likely to get caught with your brain-gears turning. There is an aggregate paper which contains information on various topics which affect reaction time, such as the number of options you need to choose among. The more things you have available as choices, the slower you will react. As such, a shallow game will let you react more quickly than you would otherwise.

I think that if your objective is to win tournaments, creating a somewhat shallow game like this is an effective tactic. You will only lose if someone else plays a game that happens to have a hard counter to your actions, or if your opponent has knowledge of these obscure portions of the game. Unfortunately, people gain this knowledge bit by bit as they fight you, if they are fighting mindfully. As such, it is necessary to mine for new secret knowledge, and to be able to plumb the depths of your secret knowledge quickly when your first-line techniques fail.

I think that writing up several prospective shallow games like that would be an interesting exercise. The shallow version of Capoferro which I wrote would be a good example of such a writeup.

*****

As I said above, this practice was fun. It felt aimless though, which means that it wasn't really satisfying in that way that practices are frequently satisfying. I think I need to start dividing my practice time up ahead of time, so that I don't end up just messing around all practice. Something like the following:

• 30 minutes: Practice a secondary style.
• This should probably be first because warming up is important.
• Case, bargain-basement Capoferro, ridiculously tip-heavy sword.
• My interpretation of Fabris 60, Dagger-forward stance.
• If I am trying to decide between two tournament-styles, might practice one here.
• If I need to do R&D, do it here.
• 30 minutes: Practice my current tournament style.
• Far outside line is currently my best.
• Compound thrusts are a close second.
• 30 minutes: Teaching/drilling with anyone willing to listen to me talk at length.
• 15 minutes: Socializing, drinking water, changing, etc.
• 15 minutes: Pick a fight with one or more people to work on some specific particular things.
• "Oh hey, you are doing something interesting I don't understand. Let's violence at each other."

This might get mixed together. I might switch among these while fighting someone. But keeping things divided in this way might be good for me to retain focus. Because focus is hard, and it is easy to just mess around with a wide variety of things during practice.

Next practice I intend to work on:

• Shallow version of Capoferro, with long and short weapons.
• "I <3 the Outside Line" style, with particular focus on situations which kill the disengage.

YAY PRACTICE.