At the AG Open I did something that I’ve been thinking about for a while: a HEMA teams tournament. By this I don’t mean a multiple-person melee, these have been pretty well explored by reenactment and bohurt groups (and are of questionable safety in HEMA gear, which assumes you are facing the opponent.) Instead this was a series of progressive matches, taking initial inspiration from the Kendo format. But before that, we have to understand exactly what I’m trying to accomplish.
| Full rules, if you want to read for yourself: http://hemascorecard.com/infoRules.php?e=215&r=11 |
Goals
When you are designing or tweaking the rules for any tournament you should have a clear idea of your goals. Mine were:
- Make every match count; it isn’t over until the last hit. No matter the hole you are in it is always theoretically possible to win.
- Make sure people fight others of comparable skill levels, and avoid the “best vs worst” as much as possible.
- Make the contributions of the worst fencer as meaningful as the contributions of the best fencer.
- Make it so when your team loses, it always is the best fencer who loses it. (The newer fencer doesn’t have to be the one in the ring with the pressure of losing it all.)
- Bias in favor of teams with three solid fencers, over one team with a really good fencer. (Parallel structure was not, in fact, one of the goals of this list.)
Kendo essentially does a “best of 5” series of matches, with each of the five fighters on a team facing an opponent from the other team. Let’s see how it matches up with what I wanted to accomplish:
“Make every match count, it isn’t over until the last hit. No matter the hole it is always theoretically possible to win.” The format has a series of matches, so if your team has already lost 3 out of 5 it doesn’t matter what you do anymore. Definitely needs to be changed to meet my requirements.
“Make sure people fight others of comparable skill levels, and avoid the ‘best vs worst’ as much as possible.” Teams can select their own order, but traditionally fall into the same pattern. So not so bad.
“Make the contributions of the worst fencer as meaningful as the contributions of the best fencer.” Yes and no. If your worst fencer wins a match it is completely meaningful. But when you are just going by the final win/loss it doesn’t matter so much about how close the match was. If you lose in a tight match it isn’t that much different than if you lose in a blowout.
“Make it so when your team loses, it always is the best fencer who loses it. (The newer fencer doesn’t have to be the one in the ring with the pressure of losing it all.)” While it may be traditional for the best fighter to be last, you can have someone effectively lose it for your team in match #3 or #4. So not completely.
“Bias in favor of teams with three solid fencers, over one team with a really good fencer.” Complete success here.
So I’ve got a good structure to work with, but it needs some minor tweaks.
Make Every Match Count
One big thing I wanted to eliminate is the feeling of having lost before you’ve even started. Under my rules it should (in theory) be possible for a single individual to wipe the entire opposing team. So rather than have a number of distinct matches I instead switched to a rolling counter of points. (In retrospect it brings it closer to the FIE Olympic Fencing version of teams, but that didn’t factor into my thought process at the time.)
So it worked as follows:
“A match shall consist of a series of 1v1 matches between the team members. Team members must compete in the order based on their final ranking in the individual longsword tournament, from lowest to highest ranked fighter.
Each team will start with 0 points. At the end of every exchange the points a fencer is awarded will be added to their team score. Once a team exceeds 5 points they will force their opponent to switch to their 2nd fighter, and after 10 points the opposing team will switch to their 3rd fighter.”
This way even if you are down 0-14 you still have a (theoretical) chance of winning. You also don’t get kicked out until you actually are defeated. This does mean that a team can go through and win a match without their ‘top’ fighter actually getting a chance to fight. But I also judged that this top fighter was probably doing pretty well in the bracket for the individual tournament, so it was ok. (And they can be happy their team is kicking ass.)
Rubber Banding
Switching to a running point total is good, but it also makes it so there is the possibility of one really good fighter sweeping a team of average fencers. I would like this to be possible, but not make it easy. Hence the goal:
“Bias in favor of teams with three solid fencers, over one team with a really good fencer.”
This is how I decided how I wanted to score the individual matches. In the end I went with a fully weighted no-afterblow system, and not taking the net points.(Think Nordic league, but only the double tempo and not the afterblow tempo.) Which means that if fighters A and B strike each other for 2 points, we see two points added to the score of each team and bring them both closer to the switch.
This could probably come as a surprise to anyone who knows me, as in general I’m very critical of systems that allow both fighters to wail on each other without negative consequence. However the context for this tournament is a little bit different, so I embraced the ability to double strategically and used it to my advantage. In just about all cases a straight up double is not a ‘tie’ so to speak, because the overall considerations of the relative fighter strength and the current score will make a difference. If you are ahead on points and facing a much stronger opponent it is to your advantage to be more reckless. However your opponent also knows this (and is better than you) and must tactically fence around it.
This could, of course, lead to a scenario where a team with a significant point advantage could win by throwing a double to the leg while they were hit in the head. Which is extremely difficult to defend against, and no one wants to see a match end like that. So I added a little band-aid patch to the rules (which never came up in the tournament).
“A team may not win on a losing exchange.
– If the score is A 10, and B 14, and an exchange ends up as 2-1 for A, it will not put B above the 15 point threshold to win. In this case A will be awarded a single point and the match would continue (11-14). Should a tie exchange (1-1 or 2-2) occur then B will have exceeded 15 points and have won the match.
– If the score is 14-14 and a 2-1 exchange is recorded, it will be a win for A.
– If the score is 13-14 and a 2-1 exchange is recorded, the match will be tied and continue until a point advantage is reached by one of the teams.
– If something else crazy happens we’ll have to figure out a rule on the spot. This is the first time anyone has done this format, so bear with us.”
Edit: I’m now informed that this did actually come up once.
Team Composition
There was another secret goal of the team tournament: to build some school pride and cohesion. Which is why I made an additional composition rule:
“All entries must be from the same school.”
This was to prevent a few of the top fencers from forming a school with their buddies and rolling through the tournament, instead of working together with the less experienced students from their own school. This seemed to be working as intended, people enjoying the opportunity to represent their school. And some groups were exceptionally stoked.
Of course I didn’t want to say “you can’t play” to everyone not fortunate enough to have 2 others from their school competing. The original rule was that all individuals without a same-school team would be put in a random draw for team selection, to allow people to play but not in predetermined teams*. This would also (hopefully) make it less intimidating for someone to participate if they didn’t already know a bunch of available friends from other schools.
My original vision was for 5 person teams like Kendo, but that size is still a bit prohibitive for a lot of HEMA teams traveling to a tournament. So it was a 3 fighter tournament, and I’m hoping at some point in the future I’ll be able to bump it up.
Logistics and Scheduling
But the big and unforeseen logistical hurdle was the number of fighters to deal with. Originally when booking the venue we were expecting that we would be getting ~40 fighters. This was the first tournament in Michigan that had really attempted to draw in outside fencers, and we weren’t sure how many wanted to make the trek. Apparently quite a few, since we ended up with 22 fighters in women’s longsword and 93 in open longsword. Which makes for quite a long day!
This caused the Longsword Teams to be bumped to 6-8pm. Which is not the greatest slot for a tournament, especially as a lot of the people competing showed up at 8 am. We definitely had our share of people drop (or not register) teams because of the late start time.
In addition we had some drops due to general beat-up-ness from the Open LS tournaments. Which wasn’t unexpected – I deliberately scheduled teams later so that people wouldn’t be afraid to enter teams, lest they not be in top shape for the individual.
But in the end we had 13 teams competing, which was about what I was hoping for.
*Due to aforementioned scheduling issues I did eventually acquiesce to letting pickup teams self-select on the day-of. We only ended up with two pickup teams, so it wasn’t a big deal. Next year I will be able to plan more accordingly for a high number of competitors and won’t be so lenient.
Execution
Due to aforementioned schedule constraints, I elected to do a direct to double elim format. Between tournament explanation and run time we finished just under the two hours scheduled. And with 13 teams in the tournament it made organizing the double elimination bracket a breeze. 😒
I’ve been involved in a lot of tournaments which ran really long and late. In general there is a gloomy sense of “I’m tired and I want to go hoooooome”. I myself was once involved in a teams style challenge tournament that ran quite late; for the first match of the gold medal round we challenged the opposing team to the prestigious rock-paper-scissors weapon set so we could get it over with because none of us cared anymore.
While this might have been the atmosphere at the start of the teams tournament, I was pleasantly surprised that the teams really quickly got into the swing of it and were soon having a really good time. Which means that if we didn’t have to be fighting at close to 8pm (and had spectators left to watch) I anticipate that we could get a lot of hype going from the crowd too.
Final Evaluation
So after all that what would I change? I really don’t think I want to change anything significant. Even more shockingly I didn’t get a single negative comment or suggestion on the feedback form (aside from the time it was run at.)
It’s rare that everything works basically exactly how I intend, and I’ll take the win. And I want to re-work the schedule and event organization to push this idea to the forefront! Bottom line, if you can fit something like this into your event I highly recommend it.
Editors Comment: “This would be a great place for you to volunteer your services at other events who can bring you in to run a team event. 😀 SwordSTUFF is all about shameless self-promotion, right?”
Sean: “Well, it will be now.”
Actionable Stuff
- Run your own teams tournament.
(A minor detail is that I named all the teams “School Name + #”, which I liked because it kept the focus on the school and not some silly name that everyone came up with. But once I added the number (many schools had multiple teams) it was harder to skim in HEMA Scorecard with [Score] School [Number]. Maybe A/B/C is better for next year.)
