Another Practice Report, Containing a New Bulleted Flowchart!

Practice Monday was good.

I continued working on my Left Plow guard. It seems to fulfill a similar niche to the Silver-ish guard I was using, but it's safer. I think I have an effective flowchart for using that stance, which is nice.

• Get in Left Plow Guard
• That is to say, a guard in which your hand is in quarta and your blade is low and to the left, pointing at something between their face and their gut.
• Your sword is on the Inside line (your sword is to the right of theirs)
• Your dagger position should be based on their sword position. If their tip points toward your left, you want your dagger to be married to your sword hilt and vertical. If their tip points to the middle or your right, you should raise your hand and have your dagger tip pointing somewhat diagonally up-and-right.
• Face-Thrust: If you are on the inside, and your blade covers theirs enough, and your tip is pointing at their face or chest, lunge! Possibly with a slight amount of rightward movement, rather than a perfectly straight lunge.
• For this lunge, your dagger should be married to your sword hilt. Your sword-hand should remain somewhat to the left, because your sword is your defense. Your dagger should be pointing to the up-left, to prevent them from wrapping their tip around your hilt and stabbing you. Body coverage should be provided by your sword.
• I could be wrong on this. Instinctively I want to pull my dagger away from my hilt, to leave a two-foot gap between them. This would prevent my opponent from yielding around my sword for a head shot. More study is necessary. I actually think this one is the correct one, but I'm leaving the other one there for posterity.
• Dagger-Sweep-Thrust: If you are on the inside and your blade does not cover theirs enough, you can probably perform a lunge with your dagger sweeping their sword out of the way, driving them back.
• If you are on the inside and your blade does not cover theirs enough, you can also disengage to the outside and begin fighting like you are on the outside.
• Your sword is on the Outside line (your sword is to the left of theirs)
• Your dagger position should almost universally be mostly horizontal, pointing to the right. Your dagger-hand should float above your sword-hand, to catch any sudden thrusts. If you catch a sudden thrust and your timing is good, you can perform the Yielding-Around-Thrust.
• Push-With-Tip: If you are on the outside line, begin pushing their sword to your right with your false edge. This might require you to rotate your tip such that your tip is pointing more upwards, in order to gain better opposition.
• Flip-To-Strong: If they let you push them really, really far across their body, rotate from seconda to quarta, switching from using your false and a middle part of your blade to pushing them with the true edge and a strong part of your blade.
• If you do this, your dagger should be extended, your two hands together, and your dagger should be pointing downwards, to prevent a disengage-counterthrust from below.
• Your opponent's most common choice is to disengage. If they disengage, this will place your sword on the inside line. Ideally, this will mean you can perform the Face-Thrust described above. In this particular flow, this is what will happen most often. If your opponent lets you get away with a Flip-To-Strong, that's great. They usually won't.
• There is a blade position that is bad for both the inside and outside line. If your opponent adopts that blade position, you need to use the Dagger-Sweep-Thrust described above, or the Yielding-Dagger-Sweep described below.
• Yielding-Dagger-Sweep: If you are on the outside line, and your opponent has your sword pushed pretty far to the outside, you can perform a yielding-around thrust. In this case, scissor their sword between the false edge of your sword and your dagger. Ideally this will place them on your hilt and your dagger-blade, with your tip in their chest or face.
• You need to raise your hands and duck your head, so they can't roll through to counter-thrust you in prima after you scissor their sword.
• Yielding-Around-Thrust: If your opponent has their hilt high, or their sword pushing you very very far to the outside, you can perform my favorite action. Extend your hand just enough that they think they need to parry. This feint carries no real intent. Then, perform a mid-blade disengage below their hilt, duck behind your sword, and thrust them in the belly.
• Here, your dagger should sweep forward and a little left, to catch their tip if they try to counter-thrust. Your lunge or step should carry you forward and slightly to the right, and you should duck your head behind your implements.

So, that's a brand-new flowchart. I imagine that it will continue working well for a while, until people learn to adjust to it. Until then, I won't know if this is an actually-good set of actions, or if it's just a set of actions that is good because people don't expect and understand it. Ah well.

*****

And now for the part of this practice report that makes me sad - having to work on my calibration.

I also continued to work on my calibration. It really seems like the times when I stab people harder than I want to are those times when I am almost there, and I try to slow down my sword but inadvertently rotate my hand against the curve of my blade. This means my sword doesn't bend when it impacts my opponent. I'm not saying that it would be better for me to continue forward - it's still possible that my blade won't bend if I do that.

I think that my recent calibration issues are born in part from a thing I used to do. I used to perform a lot of thrusts that sort of "cut in" along my flat. They would land in the ambiguous zone of my tip - that is to say, they would land between 30 and 45 degrees from a straight shot. Usually I would then push forward after they landed, to cause a large amount of blade-bend, and then pull out. Because of how the shot was landing, it would bend well even if my opponent was jumping onto my sword.

Two things then happened. First, I ran into a spate of non-local opponents who didn't want to take that shot or similar shots. The fact that it didn't land straight-on meant that they didn't understand that yes, that shot did land appropriately, if we were using sharps then you would have new ventilation in your chest. Second, my favored, super-flexible blade broke. And while my new blade is pretty flexible, it's nowhere near as floppy as my old one.

So, I trained that shot out of my repertoire. I was landing straight shots for a while, but then after my floppy sword broke, I was still used to how it would bend. My new blade bends in different ways, so when normally I would expect my sword to continue to be bent with the curve for say, 1/4 of a second, my new blade bends with the curve for 1/6 of a second and then against the curve for 1/6 of a second. This means that sometimes when I expect my blade to bend, it doesn't. Or when I expect to tap someone on the face with my tip, I blast them in the face.

For someone using a longer sword, knowing when the blade is going to bend is super-important, since usually my opponent is the one moving forward. And I want to be sure that if my opponent is in a position where they could possibly move forward, my blade will bend if the tip hits them.

The different sinusoidal motion, the different shots, and with the fact that my calibration was already a little high, has meant that some of my shots land much harder than I want them to. My current sword also reversed its C-curve at Gulf Wars, and I wonder if that has something to do with it as well. I reversed the blade in its hilt, so that the curve would go in the correct direction, but I wonder if the blade is bending less readily now.

The current answer is more at-home drilling of shots with my practice dummy, paying special attention to whether my sword bends after the shot lands. The other answer is to just not fence as intensely, which makes me sad. The thing that's going to cause that sinusoidal blade-wobble is movement not in-line with the true or false edge, which is a critical part of how I fence. Sigh.

Part of me wonders if using a less flexible blade would help - it would mean that my tip's location is more easily predictable, but if something happens, I couldn't rely on flex at all. But given that my blade's flex is being the reverse of reliable right now, I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Maybe I should go back to landing shots at 45-degree angles and then pressing them in again.We'll see.

And just as a note - I'm not claiming that my recent issues with increased calibration aren't my fault. After the thing that happened at Mudthaw, I want to figure out how to make that never happen again. The length of this section of this post should serve as proof of the depth of my feelings on the subject.

*****

Practice was good otherwise. I'm starting to realize that there are several particular qualities that make people hard for me to fence. One is "does not go for offensive opposition".

I need to figure out how to consistently deal with a same-tempo counter-thrust in prima. That's how I double-killed out of the tournament, so I need to figure out better ways to not get stabbed by it. It's difficult, because the angle of the blade follows my dagger-arm up toward my face. Unless I'm windshield-wipering my dagger back and forth, I don't think there's a good way for me to parry that with my positioning. Maybe the answer is to understand where my opponents can throw that shot from? Who knows.