Tournament rulesets: an alternative proposal

I have a few HEMA tournaments coming up, and as such, the formats of these kinds of tournaments have been on my mind a lot. It ties into a lot of things I probably want to write about in the future: the growing 'sportification', for lack of a better word, of HEMA, how I see and use tournaments for my own specific purposes, and how any fighter needs to be very conscious of what they are trying to achieve by competing, and how it fits into what they are trying to achieve by practicing HEMA in general. For now, however, I want to focus on the rulesets being used.

A few days ago, Lee Smith of Blood and Iron posted a critique of the ruleset used at Longpoint 2014. His comments were mainly focused on what in his opinion was too great a value being placed on the afterblow, or the strike delivered within a tempo of being hit. In his opinion, it basically rewarded a fighting style that the early masters would describe as that of a 'buffalo'. Mindless flailing without regard for the opponent's weapon, because a hit is a hit, and if you get struck, might as well try to hit the other guy as hard and fast as possible to negate his advantage, right? I'm (over-)simplifying here, but it does point to an important problem in HEMA.

Generally, HEMA tournaments want to simulate combat as it would have been practiced back in the day as much as possible without actually dueling to the death with sharp swords. There are other basic premises, such as historical formats like the Franco-Belgian rules, but for the sake of clarity I'll omit these outliers for now. This rules out any fencing type stuff such as right of way or that thing where only the first tippy-tappy hit counts (I don't know anything about fencing). The basic guidelines for a duel to the death are usually employed to create a ruleset. These are as follows. First and foremost, do not die. This can be expanded to 'do not get hit'. Killing the other guy is very much a secondary concern. But, since statistically speaking, the longer the other guy remains alive, the greater the chance becomes that he'll eventually kill you. So usually, killing the other guy increases your chances of remaining alive, provided of course that you don't die in the process.

These premises have resulted in two extremely controversial concepts in HEMA, namely the double hit and the afterblow. The double hit occurs when both fighters focus entirely on killing the other guy, ignoring the 'remain alive at all costs' bit. As a result, they both hit each other at the same time, making them both losers in the most absolute sense of the word. This situation is often discouraged during tournaments. For instance,in the only tournament I have so far participated in, three double hits resulted in a disqualification.

The afterblow is a bit trickier. It takes into account that very few strikes are instantly fatal. Even a thrust straight through the heart does not necessarily cause the victim to immediately collapse; there have been plenty of recorded instances where people missing an arm or having their guts hanging out have continued fighting. This means that a fighter needs to be able to continue defending himself even after dealing a blow to his opponent. Usually, the fighter that has been struck has a short amount of time, roughly a single tempo, to deal the afterblow.

How this afterblow is dealt with varies quite a bit. The general theory is that they're bad, and should be avoided if at all possible to improve the quality of fighting. Some tournaments therefore penalize the fighter who 'let himself get hit' with an afterblow. Apparently Longpoint 2014 was an extreme example of this. If I recall correctly, the tournament I participated in sat on the other end of the spectrum, awarding no points to the afterblow but otherwise attaching no consequences to getting hit with one. Both types of rulesets seemed to encourage mindless flailing.

The problem, to me, seems to be translating what I believe is a general agreement on what constitutes good fighting into an objective ruleset which would properly reward fighters for this type of good fighting. Most fighters, organizers and judges know what good fighting looks like, but if it seems more likely that one can win by fighting sloppily, the sloppy fighting will prevail. I believe this problem seems to be inherent in a point-based system, which is what the vast majority of tournaments uses. trying to quantify what constitutes good fighting seems a hopeless task.

I therefore wish to propose an alternative. Instead of using a point-based system, like most martial arts competitions seem to be using, I suggest a panel of judges be used to determine the overall quality of a fighter's swordplay during a single fight. The referee determines when a hit has taken place, and separates the fighters. This I feel is still necessary to prevent endless mauling, which is not what a historical fight would have looked like by any means. Following this, however, instead of allotting points, the referee immediately restarts the fight, only to break up the fighters again after a hit has taken place. This goes on for a predetermined amount of time, after which the panel of judges determines which of the two fighters was the more proficient one. how exactly this is determined can vary. Like I implied earlier, I'm not a fan of trying to quantify an opinion, so holding up signs with a grade from one to ten on them á la gymnastics is not something I would prefer. The two options I see are either a short discussion to consensus or a simple vote. There is of course always the problem of objectivity here: one panel of judges could have entirely different criteria than others. A set of guidelines that the judges are to follow, with priorities of what would constitute better fighting, would hopefully minimize this, and making these guidlines public would also help with transparency.

An alternative method would eliminate the panel of judges entirely, leaving it up to the pool of fighters themselves. I once saw this method being used in what I believe was a Polish tournament; I can't recall which one right now. I don't remember the details, but the basic structure was like this. Fighters fought a predetermined group of opponents, and were then asked which of their opponents they thought was the best. The one which would ultimately receive the most votes would be deemed the winner. Now, there would probably be some issues with this system as well, but I am just in love with it's simplicity.

These are merely some very general suggestions, but the main point I wish to bring across is that there might be a need for something of a paradigm shift in the way HEMA tournaments are judged. I feel that a move away from trying to quantify performance, and embracing abstractions like 'good fighting' would help the level of technical skill being displayed during competition.