One Fact of Tall Versus Short

As a long-time tall fencer, tall-ologist and tall-ographer, I have opinions on the tall-versus-short fight. We recently, at my practice, ran an exercise to demonstrate the differences in mechanics between being tall and being short. This inspired me to write down some thoughts I have had for a while.

Behold this beautiful drawing I have made.

Here we have Doroga, with his arm in a sling, versus Remy, with abs and a swole arm.

I have drawn many lines on this drawing. The rough sketch is of two fencers, a tall fencer and a short fencer. The teal line connects their shoulders - it is the line around which all blade engagement is centered. We’ll get back to that line in a bit.

The pair of red lines are the lines on which Remy could attack at full extension and hit a vital area. Any farther outwards and he will not hit Doroga in a vital area.

The pair of orange lines are the same for Doroga.

The orange and red arcs between their respective lines are an arc showing the relative distance gained or lost by raising the blade from the shoulder, with arm and blade fully-extended. The arcs assume that Remy and Doroga have the same arm-plus-blade length, which will be important later.

The dark blue line is the shortest line for Doroga to hit Remy. Similarly, the light blue line is the shortest line for Remy to hit Doroga.

If one is approaching, it is important to cover those lines first, because those will be the lines that your opponent will plan to attack first from out of measure. Anything deeper requires more time, and thus will give you more time to plan a defense.

As such, it is important to cover those lines first. One way to do this is to attack through the line, in such a way that at the point of contact with your opponent’s body, your blade will still be crossing the line of shortest ingress.

The rest of this post assumes that you accept that the above is true. Or at least, true enough.

For Doroga, this means attacking at just about any target below the teal line. For Remy, this means attacking at just about any target above the teal line.

This presents several difficulties for Remy. Doroga has a lot less head than he has body. This is simple human anatomy - the area above the shoulder is smaller than the area below the shoulder.

Doroga is fortunately attacking Remy’s body. This means he has much more valid target area to hit than Remy does, both in terms of width and length. He can afford to be sloppier.

This partly explains a trend that I have seen. People who practice Destreza and other styles which involve standing straight are usually taller humans. Given that most “true” attacks in Destreza involve pushing through your opponent’s sword to attack their body, it makes sense that taller people would have more success with the style, given the above.

I have also noticed that, with some exceptions, most people who practice the Fabris’s fencing style are shorter humans. Given that the Fabris stance leans forward, refusing the lower body, this makes sense.

Perfect Practice and Fencing

This post is a comment I made in response to a question someone had on Facebook about "perfect practice" and how to get feedback about if an action is correct. This was my comment, after thinking about it for a day or so.

*****

tl;dr: I engage in minimax, and constantly work to improve the accuracy of my model of positions and of possible moves. "Correctness" of a drilled action can only be defined in those terms. "Perfect practice" is the improvement of one's theory and execution of that theory.

*****

I'm vaguely sorry about this, but I wrote a bit of a novel.

Most of my work in rapier has gone into my ability to classify positions, my opponent's possible options from a given position, and the optimal move for a given position. This lets me figure out if a position is good or bad, aside from the Boolean of "they hit me", "I hit them", or neither.

There are an infinite number of positions that two fencers can be in, with respect to each other, in rapier. Many of the differences between them don't matter. So what I try to do is find the boundary conditions among the set of positions which actually matter.

In terms of fighting - this gets boiled down to half-conscious rules and mnemonics. "If their sword is near the center-line, their tip's position means more than if it's way off-line", that sort of thing.

So, I have developed that list of positions. It is imperfect, which is fine. From that list, I develop the list of actions that a fencer can take, and the list of positions that it can result in, with special focus on positions that I recognize as leading to their victory. And my victory, too, but theirs is more important.

Once I have the list of positions and possible moves, I can observe and decide what the correct action is in a given situation. This context defines whether an action is "right" or "wrong". This is why, when drilling at home, I generally visualize an opponent with a sword, because their position dictates whether my move was "correct".

Every time I lose, it's because I misjudged what position my opponent was in, or misjudged the valid moves from that position. Or I physically failed to do the right thing, which also fits in the category of "misjudged the valid moves" because if I can't get my body to do a thing, it's not a valid move.

This is why my concept of "a tempo" being the minimum amount of time it takes for someone to perceive their opponent and begin to execute a response is so important. Without it, the game can't be formalized in this fashion.

In fencing, as with any real-time game, we are acting with outdated information. We act, and we act, but the fact that the brain takes about 120ms to intake information and another 80ms to output a response to our limbs means that we are always acting with information that is at least a little outdated.

But this allows us to formally isolate moves into atomic units. That allows us to separate out positions. From there, we are able to anticipate our opponent's possible movements from a given position, based on their possible moves.

Keep in mind that our information about what we are doing is always a little more up-to-date than our information about what our opponent is doing. We know our current position, but we only know our opponent's previous position because we haven't perceived their current position yet.

This is further complicated, because even the brain isn't one unit - frequently my body will do correct things without "me" telling it to, and I'll have to suss out whether what I did in a situation was correct or not. And if it wasn't, I have to suss out why I did it, in order to figure out how to communicate to my hind-brain that a different action is better.

I could go even deeper, but I'll spare everyone the essay.

This whole structure is what allows me to dictate if a move was "right" or "wrong". If I don't understand everything here and have full positioning context, then "right" or "wrong" is meaningless. Sure, there are some things that are universally good or bad - rolling one's ankle is just a bad way to take a step. But beyond very a very simple set of things, we need all of this to determine if a movement was "correct".

...I think I should probably copy/paste this into my blog as a post.

Further Destreza Work

Greetings!

At practice yesterday, I decided to work something completely different from what I have been working on. Previously, I had been working on Playing My 45-and-Dagger Game. That has been getting a bit stale because I am messing around too much.

So, this practice I dropped back to my 37 and started trying to work my one-shotting people game. This is important because if someone expects that they could be one-shotted, they will approach more carefully than they otherwise would. This allows for more opportunities in the "ok we're fencing now" part of things, rather than my opponents knowing that my first action will always be defensive.

I didn't do this amazingly well - I think that I strayed into the second intention far too much. I really need to work on my attacks into people's guards, to provoke the correct reactions.

My even-more-offensive-than-usual game also led to an interesting insight about how cuts work, when stepping through. Essentially, you want to maintain middle-to-middle blade contact until you can put your hilt behind their hilt, with respect to their body. This will allow you to "snap" your blade around theirs.

This also has led to a thought that perhaps, out of all of the arbitrary Destrezesque guards that I do, I should be keeping my hilt toward the side of their body that their sword-hand is on, because the way that one executes a cut while passing to that side allows one to defend better than when attempting to go to the other side.

Explicit outline:
-Attack immediately more often. MORE AGGRESSION.
-Snappy winding/unwinding cuts. MORE CUTTING.
-Hilt to the left, tip to the right, against right-handed opponents. MORE... uh. SOMETHING.