*****
First up, I fought a fighter who used a crinkle-buckler. I didn't realize it, but I apparently was catching her sword with my dagger more. This is interesting, because it means I was using my dagger in the way I've been drilling the New Spanishish Thing at home. She caught me quite a bit with thrusts timed and placed in such a way that I couldn't really have defended against them on-reaction with my dagger, so I just ended up batting at them ineffectually after they landed. I kept getting placed in a dead zone where I couldn't really use my sword, especially given her Sun Chips™ buckler. I also tried and failed multiple times to blow through her buckler with my sword.
I think that the correct approach to take in the future would be to do a better job faking out the buckler and perhaps taking more leg shots with an offline step. This particular fight continues to be frustrating in educational ways.
An interesting note - usually at the distance where I would be able to use my dagger to attack, I am too close to use my sword to defend. That is to say, my sword is stuck on the ground or my opponent. This, I think, explains some of my difficulty against buckler fighters. I need to work on my ability to restrict their sword hand, while keeping my dagger hand at liberty.
*****
Then, I fought our guest from the Midrealm. It was sad because I could tell that there were many things that he wanted to do, which he just couldn't because he was using my 44.5" sword instead of his 42" sword. He maintained a straight-armed low guard pretty consistently, which allowed him to perform very effective straight-in shots and interesting blade rotation in response to having his blade taken. In the end, I was pleased to note that the things I have worked on for usage against people with a low guard tended to work very well.
After-the-fact, he noted that I vastly preferred single snap-exchanges to prolonged exchanges, which might leave me open to being set up. This is accurate - after all, if I can get in a situation that I have solved and then run my "I win" macro, why wouldn't I? But if my opponent is familiar with that particular macro, it's possible that they would be able to set up conditions that look like the appropriate conditions for me to win, but are not.
As well, I am unsure how to solo-drill prolonged exchanges at home. Visualization? No idea.
*****
I then fought Rowan and it was recorded. We recorded the first many passes. Weirdly, I felt like I ramped way up in terms of trying hard to fight skillfully when videotape became involved. I didn't even realize that my regular game wasn't as intense as I could do. Across our fights, I found that some of my "older" techniques were actually way better against her than my "newer" and "better" techniques. It's very possible that Easterners have adjusted to the principles I use in the way I used to fight, so Rowan, who came from out-of-kingdom, hasn't had to deal with that yet.
Also I made a bunch of weird noises, and I rotate my front foot a lot. (That positioning at 0:20? Ugh.) I know why I do it - it's preparation for movement to the left or the right, in order to gain more lateral stability. But it looks super awkward, and probably is not good for my bad ankle.
I really like how crisp and deliberate my blade movements look in that video, though.
*****
I also fought against another fighter. We did a bunch of single rapier. I tried some of my new stuff, but when using my New Spanishish Thing the fight sort of became "disengage around until either she takes my blade solidly, or I can connect my blade to her with a straight arm". It was somewhere between hard and impossible to get her to take her tip out of my presence to the left or the right, as outlined by the Diestros. In retrospect, I think that I could have had more success with this principle if I had taken her blade with the top of mine more often, and then performed spiraling opposition through. I was using my 45" blade though, and the length difference was enough that I never felt secure in my opposition.
Maybe pulling my hand back and/or down, to put my strong on her weak, before starting my spiral? Who knows.
*****
On the way home, I had a lot of good talking about fighting with our Midrealm guest. Apparently gunslinging is going somewhat out of vogue in the Mid, which is nice.
I ended up talking a lot about fighting, and not fighting quite as much as I could have. There are a number of techniques that I would like to think about more, including:
- Dagger-first sweep-up into arbitrary sword-thrust from a more Ansteorran stance.
- Move forward and left with my sword hilt as a fake, and then move my body and sword-plus-hilt right, in order to act as a tempo-trap to get a case fighter's right-hand thrust to miss, while parrying their left-hand thrust.
- My old shallow tourney game (nail/rising nail/yield/thrust in prima), with a particular focus on where Nail is appropriate versus Rising Nail.
- Giganti's stomp to force an action with a demi-lunge, then lunge to completion based on my opponent's response.
- New Spanishish Thing, with a focus on forcing my opponent into opposition.
- I'm coming to think more and more that there's very infrequently a reason to bend one's elbow during a fight.
- I still haven't actually fought at a practice with my 37" sword very much, despite drilling with it at home almost exclusively.
All in all, a joyous fencing practice. I wasn't thinking too hard about refining my game - I was thinking much more about new things, and about just getting out there and fighting my fight.
No comments:
Post a Comment