First of all, keyword: Overall Behavior. If you thought that this was going to be an article where Sean spins his fancy book learnings to tell you that beginners fight differently than advanced fighters, you will be pleased (disappointed?) to know that this is not what this article is about.
In my previous article, How Much Does Initial Point Value Discourage Safe Attacks?, I addressed the question: does having a high value target with a low deduction afterblow lead to people attacking it unsafely?
The result was clear: no it does not. The 4 point shot (as you will see) had the lowest rate of afterblows. The data used also shows that other factors, such as ease of defending/throwing afterblows against different targets, appear to be more important.
After I published one of the questions raised was how much participant skill would affect this; which made me curious. In this case I’m fortunate. The tournament data sets I have access to always have multiple longsword tournaments running at an event. So we have the ability to do a rough sort on the basis of skill.
I separated the tournaments into two groups:
- Higher Skill Tier – Fairly simple to understand.
- Lower Skill Tier – Occasionally there were 3 skill divisions, meaning I had to decide where to put the middle one. I mostly followed my gut, and they could conceivably go either way.
- Women’s Group – Because there are less women there is only ever one women’s tournament. As it has to bridge the gap between all skills, it can’t be classified as either one. So it gets broken out all on it’s own.
Afterblows and Target Points
After separating the values based on the tournament type, we see that (drum roll)….
There is essentially no difference:
This result honestly didn’t surprise me a whole bunch, but it’s always good to run the numbers to check that our gut feeling lines up with reality.
Afterblows and Opening Height
Similarly, we don’t get much of a surprise when looking at the same opening height graph I presented in the previous article.
The only thing that is interesting is that the lower openings appear considerably safer for women than for anyone else. However the pool of women fighters is very small and homogeneous from event to event, leading to only a few women who are very adept at throwing lower openings shots to significantly skew the average.
Conclusion
Well, we didn’t really learn anything exciting here. But sometimes no news is news in and of itself. We can clearly see that the overall patterns of afterblows don’t change a whole lot based on the skill/experience of the participants.
Remember that this is not to say that they are fighting the same way. I have watched these tournaments and can verify the difference between the more and less skilled fighters. If anything it is stronger reinforcement that the target area of the initial strike is very important to the safety from an afterblow.
Full Data
For those of you that care. 😉
Higher Skill Tier
| Target Points | Afterblow % | Afterblows | Clean | Total |
| 1 | 10.3 | 109 | 948 | 1057 |
| 2 | 15.9 | 88 | 466 | 554 |
| 3 | 16.8 | 121 | 598 | 719 |
| 4 | 5.6 | 52 | 882 | 934 |
Lower Skill Tier
| Target Points | Afterblow % | Afterblows | Clean | Total |
| 1 | 10.7 | 98 | 820 | 918 |
| 2 | 14.2 | 46 | 277 | 323 |
| 3 | 21.7 | 117 | 421 | 538 |
| 4 | 5.7 | 40 | 661 | 701 |
Women’s Group
| Target Points | Afterblow % | Afterblows | Clean | Total |
| 1 | 10.2 | 31 | 273 | 304 |
| 2 | 10.6 | 18 | 152 | 170 |
| 3 | 14.4 | 27 | 160 | 187 |
| 4 | 5.6 | 16 | 268 | 284 |
Events Used
| Higher Skill Tier Tournaments | |
| Longsword – Advanced Steel | Combat Con 2016 |
| Longsword – Steel | Combat Con 2015 |
| Longsword – Steel | Rose City Classic 2016 |
| Longsword – Advanced Steel | PNW HEMA Gathering 2015 |
| Longsword – Invitational | SoCal Swordfight 2015 |
| Longsword – Open Steel | SoCal Swordfight 2015 |
| Longsword – Advanced Steel | SoCal Swordfight 2017 |
| Longsword – Open Steel | SoCal Swordfight 2017 |
| Longsword – Advanced Steel | Combat Con 2017 |
| Longsword – Steel | PNW HEMA Gathering 2014 |
| Longsword – Invitational Steel | Rose City Classic 2017 |
| Longsword – Advanced Steel | SoCal Swordfight 2018 |
| Longsword – Open Steel | SoCal Swordfight 2018 |
| Lower Skill Tier Tournaments | |
| Longsword – Beginners Synthetic | Combat Con 2016 |
| Longsword – Synthetic | Combat Con 2015 |
| Longsword – Synthetic | Rose City Classic 2016 |
| Longsword – Beginners Synthetic | PNW HEMA Gathering 2015 |
| Longsword – Open Synthetic | SoCal Swordfight 2015 |
| Longsword – Beginners Synthetic | SoCal Swordfight 2015 |
| Longsword – Open Synthetic | SoCal Swordfight 2017 |
| Longsword – Beginners Synthetic | Combat Con 2017 |
| Longsword – Synthetic | PNW HEMA Gathering 2014 |
| Longsword – Intermediate Open Steel | Rose City Classic 2017 |
| Longsword – Beginners Open Synthetic | Rose City Classic 2017 |
| Longsword – Open Synthetic | SoCal Swordfight 2018 |
| Women’s Tournaments | |
| Longsword – Women’s Steel | Combat Con 2016 |
| Longsword – Women’s | Combat Con 2015 |
| Longsword – Women’s | Rose City Classic 2016 |
| Longsword – Women’s | PNW HEMA Gathering 2015 |
| Longsword – Women’s | SoCal Swordfight 2015 |
| Longsword – Women’s | SoCal Swordfight 2017 |
| Longsword – Women’s | Combat Con 2017 |
| Longsword – Women’s | PNW HEMA Gathering 2014 |
| Longsword – Intermediate Women’s Steel | Rose City Classic 2017 |
If you are nerdy enough to want to pore through this kind of thing, drop me a line! I’m always looking for analytically minded people to collaborate with, and expand the size of data sets the community has access to.
