Randomness and Consistency

Fencing is incredibly random.

So there’s idea out there that certain sports are more random than others when it comes to determining the winner and the stats back it up. For example, it is harder to predict which side will win a hockey game than it is to figure out who’s going to win the next basketball match. Fencing has this issue in spades. The fact that a bout can be won with just a single touch means the odds of it going either which way are incredibly high. Ask any high end fighter the last time they accidentally walked on to the sword of someone far newer. They can probably give you the answer in terms of weeks.

One of the trends I’ve noticed since we’ve come back to this post shut down is that more and more tournaments seem to be single pass, one and done. Instead of making it feel like a high stakes competitive venue, the feeling I’ve gotten is more, “We need to hurry up and finish this quick so we can get to the next thing.” With very few exceptions, the reason I showed up to an event was to compete. As a result I’d far prefer to give a tournament the space it needs to breathe and to do less total things throughout the day.

Something else to think about is, what are you trying to test for? If you want to best simulate what it was like to get into an actual duel, then go right ahead and swing all the way to one end of the spectrum with a single-elim, wounds retained tournament. If what you’re interested in finding out is who’s the best overall fighter that day, then the randomness of only going one or two passes means that your results are going to have a lot of noise.

One way of solving this would be to follow our friends in Olympic fencing and have fights go to the first fighter to get to fifteen points. That’s perhaps a bit far for what we do in HEMA/SCA combat. However, the last several tournaments I’ve run I had people fight five total passes and it still seemed to go pretty smoothly.

Another thing this brings up is how do you evaluate fighters when tournaments themselves produce such random, noisy results. Right now we do a lot of, “Here’s the one big tournament. The winner is now considered the best fighter for the whole next year.” Now there’s definitely something to be said about being able to turn it on for the big day, but it’s also all too easy to focus our attention on a single spike on the chart.

What scares me more than the person who won the big thing last year is consistency. If someone can do just as well in a round robin as they can in a double-elim, if someone places with both rapier and longsword, if someone turns it on every time they step on to that tournament list, then that person is a force to be reckoned with and you best bring your A game when the two of your names get called.

I’ve got two upcoming workshops for all of you. The first will be at the Longsword Symposium just outside of St. Louis on November 9th. https://midrealm.org/events/longsword-symposium-midlands/

After that I’ve been invited to teach at Tempered Mettle’s event in Urbana, IL the weekend of December 8th.

Photo credit: Rachel Kerner