It would’ve been cooler if a lute had a Teutonic knight design.

Good match and great final exchange. I would mention that I think you showed the tempo you were acting on one too many times with those feint attempts, so he was able to latch on to your timing and track the feint to get the parry riposte. That’s a hard adjustment to make though because when the match is tense like in a sudden death situation, it’s so hard to be conscious of each movement, and most people start ticking like a clock. Had you been just a smidge more present in your timing and changed tempo on your final attack, it would’ve been yours I think

Rob Childs has a similar take. He proves through his performance that his methods work, and they are based strongly in physics and physiology. Thanks for the video!

I was WAITING for this video since the event! Also, again, sorry about really busting your chops about this loss.

Thank you! Your channel has some of the best hema analyses on RU-vid

I loved that Schielhau of yours! Attack on prep is great to learn. Ansetzen is one version from the sources of Attack on Prep. So it is absolutely not just a MOF thing. I train it a lot, because I, very much like you, fish for parries a lot and want to change it. Your opponent would have been a perfect opponent for this. I don't think they threw a single direct attack from the Vor. There was always a wind up, pulling or some sort of feint involved. I tend to fall for this. It's always easier said from the outside. Adapting to attack on prep is extremely hard and you managed with that Schielhau. The last exchange was amazing. We could say you made him bite on your feints or he was really confident in his ability to parry and it worked out.

It’s the best action in fencing. Defining it in RoW is where Olympic is struggling and I imagine HEMA will too but for just the concept alone it’s great and what epee is basically based around.

Of course it is a Priority Tournament, go figure

suicidal attacks are bad hema!

I couldn't possibly disagree more. I appreciate that everyone approaches this subject from different places and your opinion is as valid as mine. But I'm afraid I see both HEMA and self defense in general in an very very different way than you. In my experience with people that have long term training in HEMA, I don't think ANY of them fall into that category of Kyle Wall-puncher. I've also never seen anyone personally that tried to sell HEMA in such away, convincing potential students that they can be a "bad-ass". That's not to say it doesn't happen. Who knows? But I've never experienced this. In fact I'd say the first few months training HEMA is generally a gauntlet of humility inducing struggle and self-doubt which almost universally results in humble people that recognize their own insufficiencies. Not to mention that people who teach it or lead groups are generally some of the most humble people when it comes to their own skill. It tends to weed out those wall-punchers when they see that they're not already good at it and their violent fantasies will not be fulfilled because they're NOT a badass. Sure there are situations that no drill or art can prepare you for but I would argue that there are many that they CAN prepare you for. In fact most any martial art can't prepare you for such a specific scenario. The power in Martial arts isn't a specific technique that can be applied in a specific scenario to accomplish a specific goal. Martial Arts and no less HEMA is about teaching physical competency, an understanding of distance, timing, aggression, psychology, self control, and many other things that may not be a guarantee of safety or a fantasy level of power over your fellow humans, but certainly experience and strategy and direction that could prove useful in some capacity were the worst to happen. Not a guarantee of an easy victory but a better chance of escaping with your life. Another aspect of that physical competency is the look of someone that knows how to move their body. Studies have been done to determine how criminals pick their targets and they almost universally avoid accosting those that look and move like they may be more trouble than they're worth. I think we also need to look at the scenarios that are most likely to occur. It's not someone blind siding you with knife in hand. It's usually some kind of argument or disagreement that ramps up slowly and has very particular signs of incoming violence. Now, I'm not advocating sticking around to fight someone with an knife when you're unarmed or armed for that matter, but if you see the signs and you're ready and someone attacks you, knowing a little knife defense and understanding your measure could be the difference that gets you home that night. On the subject of HEMA as self defense I'd have to say it most definitely is. I've taken courses in knife defense in the modern martial arts context and I found everything in there far less applicable than what I've learned by studying and fighting in HEMA. In HEMA we pressure test techniques in ways that no other martial art does. You quickly learn what's possible and what is simply not going to happen. Most modern knife defense is simply not going to happen. But an astute student in HEMA can learn valuable lessons that can actually be pulled off against a resisting opponent. And not just with knives. Sure we are unlikely to be walking around with a longsword these days or to find one laying around in our moment of need. But a stick? Yeah those are around. Can we not use principles of longsword with a broom handle? or those of saber with a stick? Add to that a pocket flashlight and a little situational awareness and I'd prefer that to a knife. Again, not arguing that we should be going into this fight thinking we're safe, as anything can happen BUT it's a hell of a lot better than just not training anything because "it can't prepare you". Anyways I disagree entirely with the idea of it just being a power fantasy and I also disagree entirely with the idea that HEMA is just a bunch of nerds having fun in their little game. The Martial Arts that are studied were some of the foundational martial understandings of our species and cultures. The principles that are learned apply to much more than just the exact weapons that they involve and shouldn't be looked down upon or trivialized. There are certainly some bullshit martial arts out there and no doubt some bullshit HEMA instructors (not that I know any personally, but I'm sure there must be) but I think it's a mistake to deem them useless just because they're old or use weapons that are no longer in current usage which unfortunately seems to be the attitude of most people both in and out of HEMA. Sorry for the rant. Cheers!

Just pitching in to stress out that while one can broadly divide most rulesets into AB and ROW rulesets, the details in the implementation and the mixture of the two can make or break a ruleset. There can be inhibitions to AB, ROW subordinated to point value, penalization of doubles, and many more details that can radically change the outcome.

The ring is too small

After an extensive 3 minutes search online, I couldn't find the ruleset for this event, could you please tell me where I can find it ? Cheers

God I watch your videos and wish I had slow motion review at event's when directing

So I do hate afterblow and want to write a paragraph, but I really don't wanna yell at you, so I will restraint myself.

One of the wisest videos I have ever seen.

Ramsey and you are big fools. You don't know nothing about Budo

Yer a good egg, 'Jay-Dub'. I appreciate this and you.

Kendo doesn't have these problems.

I'm going to make a few suggestions for tournament organizers and competitors as someone who has a fair bit of experience with both. For judges/organizers: 1) Limit the complexity of your scoring system. Identifying who got hit in a given exchange is already pretty hard; layering multiple extra levels of complexity over that is grounds for line judge unionization. 2) Train your whole club to be judges. In the lead up to the tournament, don't let anyone spar unless they can find someone to judge the match. If the person dragooned to judge the match has no idea what they're doing, have the fighters talk them through it. Expand the pool of people who *can* judge and you will expand the pool of people who are willing, and good at it. 3) Fence in tournaments yourself. See how other clubs do it, and take note of your experiences as a fencer. Try to identify which decisions improved your experience and which made it worse. Put yourself in the position of someone who drove for hours and spent hundreds of dollars to come fence in your tournament by being that person in someone else's. 4) Trust the judging you've already done. Don't throw out exchanges if you have a sense of what happened but aren't 100% sure. Don't write rules where one fencer can endlessly filibuster a match (through doubling or whatever else) when their opponent is in the lead. Be confident, be decisive, even when you're uncertain (because you always will be). For fencers: 1) Practice sparring with a judge. Get your club mates, who you are (presumably) friends with, to judge your matches. Get used to them making mistakes, because they will. Understand that it doesn't mean they're idiots or that they hate you. Get used to matches where there's an explicit winner and loser, and to that loser being you. 2) Judge matches yourself. Learn how the match looks from the other side. Ask the fighters for feedback on the accuracy of their calls, or even film the match and watch it after to see how well you did. Get a sense of which techniques, tactics and behaviors on the part of the fencers most reliably led you to award points. 3) Compete in more tournaments. Competition is stressful and "tournament jitters" can make a good fencer fight very badly, so desensitize yourself to the stress through exposure. When stepping onto the piste becomes a frequent, familiar occurrence, it will also become a comfortable one. 4) Learn to be patient and observant in your fencing. Notice your opponent's body language. Notice how the judges react to what you and your opponent do. Notice when you're two points ahead with 15 seconds left on the clock.

I figure if any individual referee can get 70% of their calls right, it's a good day, with multiple referees that efficacy definitely gets higher, but overall I think that's pretty solid. Reffing ain't easy, and we as fencers don't tend to make it easier for them.

"Lee Smithing"...? Oooo, that sounds like some good gossip! Dish, dish, dish!

I would like to see a video that discusses the major styles of tournament rules along with commentary on pros & cons, as well as strategies to maximize one's advantage within the given rule sets.

A few points: 1. I recently had my worst tournament to a large degree because I got grumpy. So very timely for me. I will try the fight +1 exchange, but it feels sporty in a mildly negative way. 2. Saying just fence clean and beat people in an obvious way is theoretically good, but is not great in practice. Landing 7+ clean blows on an opponent will usually only against significantly inferior opponents. Against more or less equal opponents, things will likely be messy. 3. Self calling leads to animosity between fighters (coming from 24 years of SCA self calling), ref calling leads to animosity towards refs. The later does a lot to minimize excessive power between grumpy fighters.

Fighters fight judges judge. I find their mistakes wash out in the long run most of the time. For every time I have lost a point to judging I have been given one.

Good video, good insights, valid discussion points. Now here's your essay ya dirty sport fencer 😉 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Thank you for this video. I had a similar thing happen to me, and like you once I got into that mindset, the rest of that tournament went downhill fast. I am glad to hear that I am not the only one to experience this.

I generally suscribe to the belief that, generally, judges calling stuff wrong will even out. This does require accepting points that I'm not sure I earned, but again, that what will make the points I believe I did earn even out. Throwing out your own points should absolutely be allowed in tournaments, but not something that is necessarily encouraged. Some people are too quick to give their points away. As you said, feeling you owe your opponent to call off iffy points is a bad tournament habit. Only throw away points if you are obsolutely confident that was a miscall because, at the end of the day, it's not your job in a tournament to beat your opponent. It's your job to convince the judges that you beat your opponent. What helps me not spiral is not keeping track of my points/wins at all and remembering that I don't go to tournaments to win. Winning is all well and good, but I go to tournaments to fight new people and old rivals to the best of my abilities. It's easier to fence well when you're 'playing' and having fun, and not overly concerned with if you're doing as well as you think you should be.

Mixing target priority and right of way seems to be causing some of the confusion from directing and doesn’t seem to add anything helpful here. “Judge screw” can certainly be real but the most important thing to remember is it is very rarely malicious and yes sometimes one’s own fault for not presenting it well. That said a few of these do look like a lack of comfort judging within the rules. But, learning to fence to the director is really important.

Great Video!!!!! I just came to the conclusion after a previous tournament that HEMA is not an objective sport... its a subjective sport. The judges perspective and how they interpret the rule set is completely out of my control. If its out of my control I just need to just stop worrying about it, fence as well as I am able and if I do that then who cares about the score. I judge my own performance and grade myself on did I do the things I set out to do or work on in this environment. Going into Rev Rumble with this mindset made it just so much fun for me and such a positive experience overall. It was a real paradigm shift and one I hope to try and continue.

Watching this channel I’ve learned 2 things: Most hema bouts are very close and competitive unless there is a big skill gap and the longer the bout goes on the more mistakes get made and harder it is to judge

Yes there is such a thing. But judging is not easy either.

Regarding judge screwing - all judges make mistakes, and it is generally not worth whining about them. However, there absolutely are good and bad and terrible judges. And when you get one of the latter two, it is a pain to fence, and it sucks all the joy from the sport. Regarding self-calling - I disagree, kind of. It is totally true that you can enter the negative space you talk about, but you totally don't have to, if you are focused. I, personally, if rules allow (sidenote: I hate rules that do not allow), and I am 100% sure I got hit or did not hit, I just tell it. If it is questionable, I keep my mouth shut, or I say something like "I felt a contact here, I don't know about the quality". Literally just giving info (not convincing) the judge(s). If I think I landed but it was not called, again, if rules allow, I ask the judge to re-evaluate the decision, or ask for an explanation why the decision was what it was. I don't agree about not trusting the judges just by self-calling (if it is to a reasonable degree). Either the judges are really bad (which can happen and happens from time to time), and then self-calling helps to find the truth, or the judges are good, and they can handle self-calling just fine.

At around 9:00, I don't think you can really call it "suicidal fencing" if it worked. A parry isn't somehow morally superior to a dodge, and both have a decent chance of failing if you don't properly read the situation. A counterattack may be riskier in right of way compared to nordic, but if you can make it work then you get the points you deserve.

Little has improved my personal tournament turnout than the mental acceptance that, "if the moment was truly more skillful than the other opponent, you would've gotten the point even with the worst judges. you'll earn what you deserve." Crap happens here and there, but ultimately I'm there to swing swords and see my progress. If I don't score as much as I thought I should, it's a lesson that I should be clearer and cleaner. As you mentioned I feel like the mental side should be discussed *way* more than it is. The subject tragically gets blanket-swept under traditional mysticism by too many.

Commenting at 6 min mark before watching the whole thing, but only the first "cheeky" thrust was of quality and the others missed so far. I think he clearly missed the overhau to your head on the 2nd exchange, and his counter zwerch at the 3rd exchange was flat. However as for judging, there will always be some poor calls made by the judges either for you or against you. Happened both ways in my limited experience in tournaments. But if you've ever judged, judging is hard, and I don't blame the judging either which way.

I used to whine about judging. But over the years I’ve come to focus on the quality of my fencing rather than the judges calls. I figure if my fencing is clean and unambiguous, it should be easy for judges to make the call. If it’s an edge case I don’t get upset when calls don’t go my way because I wasn’t fencing cleanly enough. Heck, sometimes I’m not happy when an edge case goes my way because I didn’t think the exchange was clean enough. Worst case, if a judge is biased and you have a lot of ambiguous exchanges, I figure I have only myself to blame. If the exchanges are clean and the judge is still calling against me, I never need to say anything because in my experience it becomes obvious to everyone, including the rest of the event staff. PS, sorry for the paragraph!

Yup

Very similar ideas in sabre, grappling whilst holding the initiative is an extremely good idea.

I don't understand why anybody's pretending like we don't already know exactly what meta style evolved out of RoW 😂

Here we go, branching HEMA off into foil vs epee. RoW vs doubles matter. As an epee fencer turned HEMA fencer, I like that there’s no RoW rules because priority exists in fencing no matter what rules you use. Your priority in a sword fight is not to die. If your opponent poses a threat, you must deal with the threat first before you become the offender. If you’re on the attack, you must land your attack and not die in the process. RoW tries to solve this but ends up creating a lot of new problems. Unless you really punish afterblows, RoW doesn’t solve much.

In fie the foward movement of the feet is not a written rule it is extension of the attacking arm. The refs needed to reference the feet as athletes became super quick and the game sped up. You can gain a ref's attention and therefore row by a very fast half retreat advance lunge into the box even though your first movement was back and not forward. Is that what hema people want? I like them being different so I have variety in hobbies. Both are fun games.

Right of way is an interesting concept to train under. In competitive Olympic fencing, it's also a way to get immunity in sloppy aggressive plays. Very imperfect, but still not the worst rule.

Did a lot of foil fencing decades before I picked up HEMA. It was good times. I don't mind experimenting with right-of-way but I don't want it to be the only thing tournaments ever do

So I've only fenced ROW once but in my limited experience it did the opposite of disincentivising doubles and I ended up fencing a lot messier. After my first few exchanges, where I did not win priority and could not parry my opponents feinted thrusts, I just decided to advance first with cuts and feint cuts. In the end I lost because of the initial points I had lost during the first few exchanges and almost all our exchanges would have been doubles without ROW. I felt like ROW gave too much power to the feint as if you attempted to punish a feint by hitting your opponent instead of parrying, they could continue their initial feint into an attack, forcing a hit on you and win the point by ROW. The only alternatives are to attempt to parry (at which point you fall for the feint) or attempt to attack and defend at the same time, which usually ended in a double that our judge awarded to who ever moved first. Maybe we were doing it wrong as it wasn't an official tournament with a experienced judge but I would like to know if there are special rules around feints within ROW as it just encouraged doubles in my experience.

RoW, especially with target priority, is not as problematic as allowing flat blade hits to count for a tournament rule set IMO. For example, the so-called "double" at 7:56 should not have counted as a double in the first place since your opponent hit you with the flat of the blade on the shoulder. Even if he used proper edge alignment, I'm not sure he would have had enough momentum to cut you well . . . maybe a slice?

That's it, nerds that want to be bullies but never be hurt have won. It's all gone to hell. We managed to convice our selfs that artificial rules can recreate "proper" combat that by definition has no rules or a definite outcome.

What happens if you use a Meister-Hew and the double occurs? It's supposed to be an offensive and defensive action all in one, so how are the judges going to figure it out?

I was at this tournament as well. My take: Fence cleanly. Be aware who is attacking and when you should be defending. The specific ruleset shouldn’t matter too much if you keep that in mind.

I, unfortunately, attended a school for 6 months that had such a bad mindset for tournaments. It was never "what can I do to win", but "what can I do to not lose?" Their whole thing was studying the rules for tournaments to find how to best take advantage of the rules. It didn't matter the system, they just worked on bending the rules to their favor.