Old Stuff - Lying
I just read “The Liars’ Dance” in Crown’s book. Wow, that chapter struck me as so fundamentally true that I think I will base my next training period on it. I had to come in here and write about it to help myself internalize it.
Crown begins by reminding us that if when you attack, your opponent is “centered” (ready for the attack) you have no chance of hitting him. Therefore you must first uncenter him. The best way to do so is to lie to him, feint. Actually as I think about it now there are other ways to lie besides the feint. You could lead your opponent to believe that you are vulnerable with an invite, for now I am going to think about the feint.
It is not sufficient to lie. According to Crown you have to have two things in order to lie efectivly. You have to have “credibility and believability“. Credibility is the likelihood that your lie is in fact truth. As Crown correctly points out, someone who lies all the time will not be believed. In order to establish credibility it is necessary to tell the truth most of the time. This is where I am failing. I always feint for the first 1-2 attacks. My first attack is never meaningfully accept as a pick for an extended peripheral (primary hand or leg).
In retrospect I have faced opponents who at the time I perceived as unresponsive to my feints. I would attack them with a two or three shot combination and about shot two they gacked me in the face. In the past, I thought that they were just not interested in my attack. That they were so focused on their attack that they neglected to notice mine. In some cases that may have a glimmer of truth, however, I see now that the fact is they were not threatened by my attack. They did not believe my lie. They did not believe my lie because I lacked credibility. I had not first established the menace of my attack.
So, I learned to deal with that sort of opponent by letting them attack (playing the rock). That is what they wanted to do, so let them, then beat them on the counter attack (let them run screaming onto a line that I just closed because they didn’t bother to lie to me before they attacked). This tactic only works for so long. After you have done it for a couple of times your opponent begins to catch on (Hey every time I commit to my uberattack (TM) I get gacked in the face). This makes them more cautious, more random in what they might do, more dangerous. I was stuck with this sort of fighter. Now I see that I should try to establish credibility. This sort of opponent wants to believe that the uberattack is the way to win. So, I should feed them a couple of committed attacks. Let them think that I to believe in the uberattack, and then what have we here on the fourth attack Logan didn’t commit to the body but instead changed lines and delivered a perfect touch to the mask.
Also, I see that my fighting with other types of fencers has suffered because of my poor credibility. In general I need to work on delivering more committed single attacks to help establish the idea that you had better parry that first attack or it will certainly hit you!
The second part of the lie is believability. Believability is making your lie look as much like the truth as possible. In the case of a feint it is making your feint attack look so much like a real attack that your opponent parries. I understand this. I got over it a couple years ago. At the time I was in the habit of just sticking my sword out and moving it around expecting my opponent to believe I was attacking them. On some people that worked, however it was not enough. Many opponents saw that I was not threatening them, that my feint sometimes even didn’t point at their body, and that it did not move with intent. I was just sticking my arm out. I see a lot of scola fencers stuck in the same place. Since then I have learned to point my feints at threatening targets, to move the feint fast (giving the impression that I intend to continue on that line and that they must parry now or be to slow), to move the hips, shoulder, or feet (try making a small, 1 inch lunge) a bit or even to suggest a committed attack. I may come back to this later but for now I am going to say that my believability is much better than my credibility.
I think that believability has impact on my defense. I need to work on being more skeptical of other peoples attacks. I need to weight longer to defend. I need to force my opponent to make such a believable attack that in fact it becomes a real, committed attack. I will endeavor to not let people lie to me. To force them to tell the truth. To quote Crown directly by forcing my opponent to tell the truth I “become the locus of control of my opponent’s behavior”. That has a good ring to it.