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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, one of my strong convictions is that you can reasonably expect HEMA judges to figure out which fencer scored a hit (or both), plus *one* other layer of complexity. Generally, this boils down to either identifying attack order (as in simpler forms of ROW) or identifying hits to shallow vs deep targets (as in Nordic rules). You can play around with this a little bit, but expecting your judges - who you probably didn't train very much - to correctly identify both, or to make very complex distinctions in either category, you will be disappointed. Modern foil and sabre can get away with a bit of extra complexity because they have electronic scoring that takes the responsibility for figuring out who got hit in the exchange away from the judges and lets them concentrate on right of way. Most MOF clubs also train their judges a lot better than their HEMA counterparts. Without those advantages, we *really* need to learn to keep our rule sets simple.
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.
Yes there is such a thing. But judging is not easy either.
3 месяца назад
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.
The problem with self-calling is that it can be gamed, and if you want to win tournaments, you must learn to game it. Stuff like self-calling early in the match to build credibility with the judges so they will defer to you later on when it counts, or even calling off your own hits to avoid penalties for a double. Sometimes a well-timed self-call can disrupt a judge's mental picture of what happened in an exchange, causing them to throw it out. Tournaments that don't allow self-calls can be frustrating if the judging is bad (and this is HEMA, so it often is), but it at least takes these mind games off the table. And even speaking as someone who is pretty good at these mind games, I would *vastly* prefer not to have to think about them.
