Saturday, November 1, 2014 – I went to a fencing tournament at Salle Auriol today. And today I realized that I exploit the weaknesses of others rather than rely on my own strengths.
It’s not all that surprising. I have my roots in gaming. (The most famous example is in FFTactics, when *spoiler*I broke Gafgarion’s sword rather than face him straight up*spoiler*.) Really, metagaming rather than gaming. But it’s interesting to see how deep it goes.
My round robin pool included Robin, Rockas, Abigail, and fellow Hillsider Jason. Robin and Rockas beat me pretty soundly, but the other matches highlight the whole “exploiter of weaknesses” thing pretty well.
Some backstory: Hillside is a very defense-oriented school. Coach Wang is a very defense-oriented coach. (Defense in saber. It’s actually a thing.) SAS on the other hand is a very offense-oriented school. The fencers there are very aggressive. The referee’ing favors aggressive styles. As a defense-oriented saber fencer, this is doubly a problem for me.
Not only that, but Jason is a very aggressive fencer (by Hillside standards, anyway). I figured out very quickly I couldn’t match him on offense, but I’d fenced him enough to know his attack range and attack patterns. So I stayed on the defense and beat him on defense. (But like last time, I had to burn a lot of energy to keep up with his athleticism.)
My bout against Abigail was a more extreme example. Earlier in the day, I did a warmup bout against Abigail. Every time I went on the offense, she scored a point. Every time I went on defense, I scored a point. So during the round robin pool, during the bout that actually counted, I did something generally considered unorthodox and went on defense the whole time and won 5-4. It worked in my favor, I guess.
I got seeded 13 out of 20 in the direct elimination. My first bout was against Jack. I spent the first half of the bout scouting him out. By the second half, I discovered that Jack presents the blade while attacking, meaning I could get him pretty easily with beat attacks. So I did.
Other than that, the direct elimination rounds were very by the numbers. I took out the 20th seed, then got taken out by the 4th seed.
But the key takeaway here is, as I said, I exploit the weaknesses of others rather than rely on my own strengths. This explains why I’m able to take down higher rated and more experienced fencers (like Abigail) despite my sloppy form, and why I favor defense (which is about exploiting weaknesses) rather than offense (which is about solid execution). Of course, more skilled fencers have fewer weaknesses and are also able to exploit others’ weaknesses. So I’ll need to train up my own strengths.
Still, I think I can snag that E rating.