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.<\/p>\n
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<\/span>*spoiler*.) Really, metagaming rather than gaming. But it’s interesting to see how deep it goes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My round robin pool<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> to keep up with his athleticism.)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n