Rating

i was having a discussion with my friend Tim today during the meet we were discussing who was the better fencer and who is the best fencer on the team. we kinda got of topic halfway through thou. my fault. i started arguing that it is impossible to actually gauge a persons skill on wins and losses for example some fencers have a specific style of fencing AKA one trick pony's. which just so happen to be very effective against some peoples styles. for example i normally do fairly well against lefty's but today the lefty's from NFA were killing me it was like anti my strategy for beating lefty's normally i parry then do a low line attack and most lefty's are such bad fencers (no clue why) that they have no idea what to do and i just get the touch no sweet but these guys actually new how to do a low line parry and then they kept my blade out of the way while they did a low line attach of their own this screwed me over. but on the other hand you could tell from watching them that they were not all that good it was just that their strategy was something i had never encountered before and i didn't have time to learn to cope with it. so like i said we all new that we were better than their lefty's but they were giving us a lot of trouble so how can we rate ourselves against those two? but that is just the tip of the problem remember Bulldozer kid i mentioned in blind refs bluff? he beet me 5,4 but then Austin got up and bagled him. but like i said i beet Austin in our 15 point bout for varsity so how do you rate the three of us based on that? that is why i say that you cannot rate a fencer by wins and losses our even by points you just can't. you can organize fencer's into basic groups based on their form and their point control and their ability to respond to new situations. but that really isn't how to do it the only way to become a good judge of a fencer's capabilities is to get enough experiance on the strip to see the differance. it is not an exact science but it gives you a fare indication of their abilities but not unfortunatly of how well you will do against them.