Anniversary Duel: Update

The anniversary duel turned out to be as epic as the billing promised. As reigning first session champion, Allison got to select the terms of the fight: 7:00pm, first to 15 (win by 2), on the strip, under the covered basketball court outside Lincoln Elementary School (the premier fencing domain in Corvallis).

First I'll give a quick glossary of fencing terms, then a prelude in which I discuss our brief history fencing each other and how it influenced our strategies going in, and finally a description of the action. It should be pretty excitingly long-winded.

Glossary

beat - To strike the opponent's blade in an attempt to put them out of position.

deceive - Any move in which you attempt to avoid the opponent's parries prior to an attack.

disengage - To drop the sword slightly to either break blade contact or as a deceive while moving from one attack line to another. A double or triple disengage is to do this action two or three times quickly in succession.

coupé - A deceive in which you attempt to pass over the opponent's parries.

fleche - A risky running attack.

lunge - To lunge forward while you attack.

parry - A defensive move intended to block an opponent's attack. There are many different types of parries which are usually numbered, e.g. parry 2, parry 4, parry 6, etc. If a parry includes a circular follow-through, it is called a "circle parry" e.g. parry circle-4.

riposte - A quick thrust after a parry. Usually an easy way to score after a clean parry.

Prelude

In the first session championship Allison was getting me over and over with flamboyant double and triple disengages. "Flamboyant" meaning that they were much larger movements than you would normally do. Supposedly this is a bad thing against an experienced fencer, but against me it was extremely effective and she absolutely slaughtered me.

In our matches last week I was finally able to counter these consistently with parry 2's (a low-line parry not really intended to block that sort of attack), and I scored a lot of points on ripostes.

Going into the match I was planning on being much more aggressive than usual. My lunge and reach are longer than Allison's and when we free fenced the week before, I noticed that she was caught off guard a bit by my aggressiveness.

After the duel, Allison told me that she had been planning on playing more defensive, since I scored so many points on ripostes off of her aggressive attacks the week before.

The Action

My aggressive play paid off big in the early going as I jumped off to a quick 3-1 lead. At least one, maybe two of those points were on really clean circular deceives with no blade contact at all.

I could tell that Allison was caught a bit off guard by my aggressiveness so I only pressed harder, extending the lead to 6-3. I think all of Allison's points up to this points were off ripostes, as she wasn't being very aggressive and I wasn't giving her any time to think about attacking.

At this point I thought I was going to run away with it, as I had both a pretty good lead and a lot of momentum. I thought about toning it back a bit to avoid any hurt feelings, but Allison quickly forced me to reconsider. Deciding that the best way to combat aggressiveness was with aggressiveness, she started attacking like crazy. She scored two quick, clean points into my preparation (basically, she stabbed me while I was doing an elaborate attack), and pretty soon it was something like 8-7.

From here it gets a little harder to describe the action as it got pretty sloppy. We were both attacking like berserkers, moving back and forth on the strip. There was a lot of blade contact as our parries got wide and we tried to make up for lack of precision with lots of beat attacks. Our blades got bound up multiple times, I lost a tip (the little plastic thingy on the end of the sword), and things were basically just messy. Lots of simultaneous attacks, tons of off-target hits, and not a whole lot of scoring for the effort.

The most egregious point I scored was after an attack which Allison deflected so that my sword was flat against her side, I went into a sort of sawing motion and managed to catch her with my tip before she got in a riposte. It was ugly.

With the score approximately 11-10 or so, I decided drastic measures were in order if I was going to get the momentum back. I saw an opening and went for the fleche. Bad move. Allison avoided it easily and stabbed me on my way by to even things up. She said after the duel that I've never scored against her on a fleche, and looking back, I think she's right.

So it's all tied up and our instructor is desperately trying to get us to tone things down a bit and recapture our form. Surprisingly, we were able to do so. The next few points were all relatively clean (for us, anyway). I scored on a coupé into a low-line attack. Allison got me with a deceive. We both scored on a parry-riposte or two.

Pretty soon it was 14-13, advantage me. We're in en garde and I'm thinking about my final attack. Allison backs me up a bit, and then I attempt to recreate my beautiful coupé-to-low-line from a couple points before. Allison lunges as I coupé, a bold move and a really nice, clean point into my preparation.

So we're 14-14, about a half hour into the duel and it looks like it could go substantially longer. But I score a point relatively quickly on a double disengage to bring me one point away from victory for the second time. On the next restart, Allison goes into full attack. She had me pressed all the way back into the last couple yards of the strip and I'm frantically defending with nary a chance to think, let alone attack. We had to restart at least four or five times as Allison hit me off target or I bound her up just to slow her down.

Finally, there was a lot of frantic action that ended with us both standing there stabbing each other and it came down to the judge's decision. After some deliberation, the ruling was that I successfully parried the first attack and scored on the riposte, giving me the point and the duel. We took off our masks, shook hands, and Allison vowed vengeance.

Conclusion

All in all I'd say it was a wildly successful duel. It was definitely our most fun, long, and strenuous fencing match to date. And since we're both still kind of bad and sloppy, it's really fun to try to find the holes in each other's game. I think we may have an anniversary tradition on our hands.