Fencers Refused to Fight. Then Came the Rule That Changed the Sport

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fencers-refused-to-fight-rule-change-epee-11627457900

by CaliforniaKarl • 5 years ago

71 86 5 years ago

wsj.com

pmoriarty2• 5 years ago

Does anyone have a link to the full article that doesn't require a login or javascript?

rnd0• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/MDqrj -possibly with javascript, however (for the captcha)

scubbo• 5 years ago

Thank you!

smitty1e• 5 years ago

That’s why FIE introduced the Unwillingness to Fight rule in 2019. It dictates that when a minute elapses without a point, the fencer who is behind receives a yellow. Repeated offenses lead to a red.

Incentives matter.

trhway2• 5 years ago

they should have made a rule that a counter attack point wouldn't count if the attack was initiated within the first say 3-5 seconds after the signal.

dmoy5• 5 years ago

counter attack point

The rule was primarily aimed at epee though, where there is no such thing as "counter attack point", since there's no right-of-way rules.

Unless I'm gravely misunderstanding your idea.

justinc-md• 5 years ago

This is exactly the kind of behavior that you'd see with reward hacking in reinforcement learning.

grp000• 5 years ago

I think humans are pretty good at finding the optimum strategy. It's only really recently that bots have overtaken us in a lot of highly environmentally complex games.

bfung• 5 years ago

Similar article topic w/o the paywall, googled “fencing unwillingness to fight rule”

https://academyoffencingmasters.com/blog/new-unwillingness-t...

pmoriarty2• 5 years ago

Now if only they could eliminate draws in high level chess.

powera• 5 years ago

Well, there are two separate problems here.

The first is that top-level classical time-control matches are draw-ish; there's really no solution to that other than playing some other game. If neither player blunders, often chess is just a draw. Top computer chess engines of equal strength draw even more often.

The second is "grandmaster draws" at shorter time controls; the Champions Chess Tour has had dozens of draws with the exact same 14-move Berlin opening repetition. The solution there is pretty simple: 3 points for a win and 1 point for a draw.

hyperbovine• 5 years ago

There is an inherent asymmetry in chess which afaict is not present in combat sports. Drawing as black is considered a decent outcome.

publicola19902• 5 years ago

When situation is draw can't they award the match to who ever is ahead on time? This would reduce draws by a lot.

Or some different timing control that will force victories by timeout.

megablast• 5 years ago

Chess boxing solves this issue.

megameter• 5 years ago

Competitive judo has grown a plethora of rules of this type - restricted holds, stalling penalties, 20 second timers for the ground game. My teacher participated in some of the conferences leading to those rule changes, and he said it boiled down to getting the bodies to fly for the TV cameras. A lot of combat sports end up being slow and passive without rules propelling them into action.

throwawaysea2• 5 years ago

It’s also other sports. Basketball has a shot clock for a reason. American football also forces a play to begin within a certain amount of time. In fact I would say that football’s rules are almost a contrived set of constraints that force engagement and exciting action continuously.

cafard• 5 years ago

Except when football's rules force delays to allow TV commercials.

Now, if we could just enforce some speed in baseball, and bring the average game length down nearer two and a half hours.

unishark2• 5 years ago

I don't know, it's a sport that's supposed to test athletes against each other in certain skill sets. Finding ways to win with less exertion and less athletic (i.e., less risky) moves is sort of hacking the game and losing the point. If a guy came at you with a sword in real life (not sure how often this happens but still), you can't necessarily count on being able to get them to agree to rest for a round.

tiahura• 5 years ago

This is also why professional wrestling is fake. Originally it wasn’t, was too boring, and changes were made to liven it up.

lmilcin2• 5 years ago

Wrestling originally was an exercise. And it wasn't an exercise in staring at your opponent.

It only became boring when the stakes got very high and your entire career could be decided on a single engagement and people started overthinking it.

lmilcin2• 5 years ago

Like it or not, most of modern sport is for media. Almost all people at Olympic level are paid by media and marketing to perform for media and marketing. Some are paid by states to perform for their media and propaganda.

epistasis• 5 years ago

I think this is largely the point of competitive sports, the performance for a crowd. Sports which are done purely for those doing the actual activity are great, but tend to be more recreational than competitive.

NullPrefix2• 5 years ago

Professional sport is entertainment with extra steps. Same reason why Norwegian women's volleyball team was fined for wearing shorts instead of bikinis.

ummonk• 5 years ago

I think it was beach handball

hash8724• 5 years ago

Great! Let's do judo next, seeing as the constant penalizing of almost every attack has made the sport semi-unwatchable. It's rare to see any scoring before overtime in international-level judo- why take the risk? Judo pretty desperately needs a rules upgrade

stormcode2• 5 years ago

It's a really great rule change that has made top tier epee fencing a lot more interesting to watch.

dmoy5• 5 years ago

Here's a decent rundown that isn't behind a paywall: https://academyoffencingmasters.com/blog/new-unwillingness-t...

Epee fencers refused to fight

Because yea, for decades an epee bout was like watching paint dry. Just bouncing around in place for 9 minutes, and then finishing with nobody getting above 10 touches.

For a fencer’s fourth P-card sanction, the fencer receives a P-black card.

This is quite severe. It means that if you do nothing for half the match (or have other infractions), you are disqualified.

I have mixed feelings about the implementation of the rule, because as I understand it, it penalizes the person who's behind, which in epee can be tactically not great. Less of a problem in foil with the right of way rules.

It's worth noting that saber bouts used to finish in under one minute. Consistently. This is like pre 2000 I forget when. They had to change the rules in the opposite direction - by allowing a viable strategy other than "RUN STRAIGHT AT THEM AS FAST AS POSSIBLE RAAAAAAAAAAAA" (I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not a whole lot).

Foil had the non-combatant issue, but not nearly as bad.

Foil was not without its own brand of silliness too. A couple decades ago, top level foil was all about flicking people on the back. They changed the rules on that too. Probably a good thing, because it was truly ridiculous

stormcode2• 5 years ago

Watched some Saber bouts this Olympics and they still seem so fast as to be unfun to watch. At least for more than one or two in a row (so 5 min). Maybe I'm just used to watching Epee and Foil. I totally get why they changed the rule.

Reminds me of anime where two swordmasters do their super special move and you don't find out who won until the loser levels over. Except over and over.

throwawaysea2• 5 years ago

I had the same impression. To the untrained eye it is hard to appreciate what’s going on or what makes one fencer better. All I see is a blur and then the winner screaming in a fury. The broadcasting is terrible - they should show slowed footage with annotations (like in football plays) explaining what’s going on.

mhh__• 5 years ago

To really appreciate sabre you have to have done some refereeing yourself unfortunately. It doesn't help that Olympic coverage is usually diabolically awful i.e. fencing is done with the feet but they always focus on the blades.

dmoy5• 5 years ago

they still seem so fast as to be unfun to watch

I mean... yea I could see that, if you haven't fenced a lot.

It used to be so much worse though. Like a bout would literally be over in 45 seconds of match time, with a score of 15-10 or something.

The routine would be:

1. Allez!

2. Both fencers charge full tilt at each other, running

3. Some sword stuff as they pass like jousters

4. Both fencers turn around, look at the ref, and yell loudly

5. Ref tries to piece together what they think they saw

1-5 used to happen in like 1 second every time

Now 1-5 happen in like 5+ seconds, and importantly there's a rule that prohibits actual running.

amanaplanacanal• 5 years ago

This seems like a common problem in all martial arts. We saw the same thing in the early UFC too. The best way to not lose is to stall forever, essentially. It makes for terrible television, but it seems to be built into the nature of fighting.

crazydoggers4• 5 years ago

It makes for terrible television, but it seems to be built into the nature of fighting.

I think you probably mean “fighting sport” rather than just fighting. Fighting in real life is over in seconds typically. Sports have rules around them that can be gamed, hence why there’s stalling to “win”

In real life if your defending yourself you want the confrontation over as quickly as possible or to exit the situation, delays only put you more in danger. I believe on average it’s something like over in 15 seconds, after that it typically ends up on the ground and even then it’s over in less than a minute.

Probably being pedantic, but people sometimes confuse UFC and other martial arts contests with real self defense/street fighting.

Here are the things that you can’t do in UFC for instance that would otherwise end a fight quickly:

https://www.ufc.com/unified-rules-mixed-martial-arts

WalterBright• 5 years ago

I've always suspected that real sword fighting was:

1. parry

2. thrust

3. game over

BrandoElFollito• 5 years ago

The most important thing I learned across my ~30 years of training (various incantations of self defence) was to keep my 110 m hurdles skills top notch. Running away is always the best solution long term.

This is also what I insisted on with my teen children. They were training since 4 years old and the rare times they got into a confrontation they said sorry and left. 10 minutes of humiliation is better than a life long death.

There were very rare cases when either me or them had no other way than fight (a total of maybe four cases). The fight was over after 3 or 5 seconds, with the adversary trying not to choke on his teeth and looking for his testicles while hopping.

It was fast, brutal and nobody was proud of that because it could have ended with a bad strike or a knife in the stomach.

Real fighting is dangerous.

hash8724• 5 years ago

If you were in a street fight with a professional fighter, and you used some of these techniques that 'would otherwise end a fight quickly', could you defeat them? Of course not. MMA is the fundamentals of one-on-one fighting, various dirty techniques are the 'extra' on top of that but don't constitute an entire methodology. If you're interested in self defense, just learning the fundamentals of MMA makes the most sense

cweill• 5 years ago

A fun video related to this and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is this one: https://youtu.be/xeUQlXmzuZ8

Basically my understanding is that high-level competitive Jiu Jitsu (Gi) can be extremely dull to watch, because of the point system disincentiving taking any risks. So that's when No-Gi submission-only competitions became popular to watch. 20+ minute rounds without any points scorable for the first half.

hash8724• 5 years ago

'Submission only' was popular to watch for the first few contests, then competitors realized they could just stall until the end of the match and then get rewarded in overtime. The rules just became a different disincentive to not take any risks

CarVac• 5 years ago

Reminds me of stalling/camping in Smash Brothers.

Here's an incredible short documentary on one particularly notable match that's relevant.

https://youtu.be/z8llYT7KGdI

andrewzah• 5 years ago

That zoom in on S2J is hilarious.

twic• 5 years ago

Is that during the Fauxhebro vs Chango bit? I came here to say exactly the same thing. Fantastic subversion of the medium.

comex• 5 years ago

Though, with Smash Bros. tournaments using a standard double-elimination format that doesn’t care about margins of victory, at least the losing player is always incentivized to try to stop losing - unlike in fencing.

endgame• 5 years ago

Terrible title, and we should not be rewarding such clickbait with our attention.

nxpnsv• 5 years ago

Textbook click bait title.

627467• 5 years ago

Why is it terrible?

publicola19902• 5 years ago

Because it doesn't summarize the article.

jffry• 5 years ago

Was the title changed? Presently, the post title here matches the article's title: "Fencers Refused to Fight. Then Came the Rule That Changed the Sport"

That seems reasonably accurate to me given the content of the article, which describes a growing trend of mutual non-agression in epee fencing and various rule changes targeted at putting an end to it.

sgt101• 5 years ago

There was always an inactivity rule - basically the ref could call inactivity and move the fight to the last minute (as I remember it), but it was rarely done. Giving a yellow to the fencer that's behind is a good innovation. They should dump the off target element in foil and make it on targets only though.

belter• 5 years ago

Can we apply this game theory to developer salaries ? In other words, ( and as we have seen ) without forcing companies for compete for talent...They will end up under explicit or implicit ( non fighting ) a.k.a non salary compete agreements.

Fencers Refused to Fight. Then Came the Rule That Changed the Sport

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