Practice Report

Quick practice report, go!

*****

First off, I fought a guest from Ansteorra. He's super good, and I'm also relatively sure he was fighting down to me, which is not unexpected but is frustrating. He managed to hit me with the same shot twice in a row after I had attempted to prepare for it, which made me sad. I settled down in measure, which I need to not do. He complimented my voids afterwards, which was nice.

***

Then I fought against the Doctor. He is learning to deal with my newest strategy, and I think we've arrived at the point in our respective meta-games that I need to just start trusting my fight and go from there, instead of Just Doing A Specific Thing Because Nothing Else Works. Basically, refusing cuts with my sword makes it so that his best move is to apply opposition to my blade. This brings things back to a game which I know how to play. This pleases me. I was not able to capitalize on it though, because my brain was stuck in that one strategy.

***

After that, I fought our local premier of the Masters of Defense. He didn't seem to be fighting it super-seriously, even though I was. He's learned exactly what situations lead to me controlling his sword in my middle-guard, which allows him to step backwards. I either need to move forwards more quickly as advised by Fabris, or I need to do something more deceitful. The only thing which worked at all was a deep thrust in 4 to his lower-right line on the inside of his sword. Which of course lands hard, because it's a deep and fast thrust to the gut.

I need something new here. Either to be more careful, or to have better guards, or something. Maybe practicing better stringere without blade contact? Who knows. This particular fighter uses complete counter-guards to great effect, more than anyone else who I fight. So instead of just letting me adopt a guard to counter his guard, he will switch guards. Then we play footsies for a while, and I lose patience, come in, and either I die or we double-kill.

I did some interesting blade-opposition and barring-out things here, but couldn't capitalize on them because we were too close. There were many times that I actually felt like a shorter blade would have been to my great advantage.

***

I then fought a fighter who pushes me hard and gives me trouble. He has lowered his sword's tip in his default guard, which means I can't get my good 45º angle on his sword with my dagger very easily. I managed to compensate for that by contorting my body very low, popping my hand outwards, and bending my wrist a little bit, to complete the 45º angle. This worked fantastically for me. I need to do more guards in which I contort my body low and have my dagger out forward.

I also fought him in an imitation of a particular class of fighter, with my blade refused and using my dagger for cross-parries. We pretended that I had a sail guard for this exercise. It was a frustrating exercise for all involved. My shirt ended up getting torn to all hell because of the shots I threw from a low outside line, and his counter of hitting my arm. I need to do this last thing more, because we do not have many of this class of fighter here, and they are hard to deal with. Also I think I need to have someone do this for me, if possible.

*****

After that, my shirt was torn up and had lost a button, and it was late, so I didn't get a chance to fight anybody else who I wanted to fight. Oh well!