Tournament opinion

[Aidan Cambel]

Many years ago, our barony hosted one of our annual events and it was themed - everything had something to do with Iron (feast was Iron Chef feast, a special Iron category was in the a&s competition - etc.) I was KM at the time, and was tasked with coming up with an Iron Man tourney. I thought what I came up with was an ok idea, and the fighters seemed to enjoy it. What do you think?

Open weapons style, No shields allowed. I counted the number of fighters, and drew out half that many rings with flour ( i think they were like 20' diameter, maybe 15, can't remember). I then randomly assigned numbers so that the fighters paired were completely random. If they stepped out of the circle they lost immediately. All shots were called in accordance to standards, but a kill was not a win. The only way a fighter could win the ring is when the other fighter could not go on, and yielded the field. As soon as the first two to win a ring would match up, and so on. The only pause in fighting was when a fighter had to wait for his next opponent to win his respective ring. Marshals at each ring insured that no one was "resting", but were also there to call a hold if a fighter was fatigued to the point of becoming dangerous to himself (which never happened, everyone understood they had to be in control, and they all did well at assessing their own status). Eventually it worked down to 2 fighters, and when one finally yielded - we had our Iron Man winner. When all was said and done, that fighter had fought pretty much continuously for nearly 2 hours.

I thought this format was interesting for a few reasons. By not winning from a kill, fighters looked for various strategies to win. You had to maintain your awareness of the ring, while trying to position your opponent to a yield. Rhino'ing didn't make a difference, because "not dying" didn't do you any good. As a matter of fact, rhino'ing would have been somewhat counterproductive because getting beat on eventually would tire you just as much (theoretically i guess, we had 100% clean fighting so it was a non-issue).

The fighter who finally won was a talk, lanky guy who used a different strategy. He realized that a death was not as tiresome as -say losing a leg. Losing a leg required dropping to your knees, getting back up after the fight, etc. If you die, you hit the ground and use your entire body to get back up. So he would leg his opponent, then arm him, then kill him. If he himself was in a position to get hit, he would choose to protect lower body and accept the head shot, hit the ground and rebound. This strategy worked for him.

Like I said, I thought it was an interesting tournament, but it hasn't been done again. What do you guys think of it? ever fought in anything similar?

[Odawara Taro Yoshinobu]

It does indeed sound very interesting. As a fighter, I would see it as a worthy challenge

[Murdock]

it was cool

do it again

[Sean Powell]

Sounds cool. I want my 16th century demo suit though. It's WAY over protective by SCA standards. I could probably take a defensive stance, throw an occasional shot and let my opponent tire themselves out. If I took a leg shot it would just be easier for me to sit there and take a beating. I never feel any pain in the suit unless it's by me moving in it. It's too damn good.

Then again the suit is a whole lot of stainless and I expect the suit to be more "iron" then I am... assuming the marshals don't think I'm resting. I usually fight a slot-shot tactic anyway.

Sean