Modern Sabre Fencing: What's Going On.

In this video I'm going to show you how to watch a modern sabre match and understand what the hell is going on. I don't want to do the giant wall of text thing, so I'm going to talk you through it. I love this sport. It's dramatic, it's emotional, it's just freaking sexy. Wild upsets happen all the time. It's great theatre. But it's also got a reputation for being super complicated. I don't buy that. I love live sports from ice hockey to cricket to American football, and the rules of sabre are right down there on the simple end of the spectrum. In this video I'm going to teach you enough that you can heckle and throw stuff at the TV when the ref gets it wrong, because we all know that's where the real fun is. Let's start. If you've never watched a match before, this bit's for you. If you already know how scoring works, you can go to part two. Let's start with the absolute basics. The aim of the game is to hit the other player with a sword. You can hit anywhere from the waist up. When a player hits, a light will turn on. Red for left, green for right. If only one player hits and there's only one light, then that player scores and there's no arguments. If both players hit, the ref decides who gets the point. This will be based on who controls the momentum or initiative in the fight, or the priority. Priority can be roughly understood as possession of the attack. You win priority by taking over the momentum before your opponent. Once you've got priority, you'll get the point even if both players hit. Just make sure you hit something and you're okay. You lose priority by making a mistake, any mistake. You miss or you get parried or blocked, you lose priority. Your opponent gets the right to pick it up and they probably will. The same applies if you hesitate, you stumble, you trip, you make any kind of mistake, you lose priority. Once you've lost priority, it's up to you to do the same thing back to the other player, and this is where the really flashy stuff happens. But there's also a technical limit. Once you've been hit, you have a limited time to hit back and still get your light to turn on. That window is 170 milliseconds, and in practice this forces players to be fast and decisive. If you hesitate, you lose. You've been hit with a counter-attack. This is, frankly, my favourite part of Saber. There's also one more way to score. If you get the other player properly on the run, you can just chase them off the back of the strip. Saber's super fast, but you get used to it. Exchanges in priority can happen multiple times in a second or two and it takes some practice to learn to follow, but it's conceptually super simple. It's really not rocket science. Where things can get intense is how players establish priority in the first place. The bulk of actions in Saber take less than two seconds. Both players go immediately forward and try to hit. Frequently, drama happens. This is the four meters, or the box. It can get gnarly, but it's not conceptually hard. When the two players face off on the start lines, nobody has priority. The first order of business is usually trying to grab it. There are two core concepts here. You win control of the priority by making a clear, decisive attack before the other player, and once you've got priority, you keep it unless you make a mistake. So players are trying to do two things when the ref says go. Attack before the other player, or make a trap so when the other player attacks, it ends in a mistake. When your goal is to show the ref you're in control of the attack, the simplest way to do that is to just attack. If you do this faster than your opponent, you win, so the incentive is to push pretty hard. Because nobody knows what their opponent is going to do, and nobody has the advantage, it's super common for both players to make a simple short attack at the same time. Assuming both players hit, nobody wins here. It's a draw. Actions are simultaneous. You're going to see a bunch of these, and the most common sort is when both players legit just attack at the same time. Simultaneous actions can also happen when both players make a similar sort of mistake. Both hesitate, or both try and block. It can also happen when both of them make different types of mistakes. These ones can be a bit confusing because the actions look different, but the effect is the same. Both of them have made a mistake, so nobody wins. Now let's look at what happens if one player actually attacks first. If they make a clear, decisive attack faster than their opponent, they'll win, even if both people hit. If the gap between the start of these attacks is big, these are pretty easy to see, but professional referees are trained to split these really fine. If you let players get away with hesitating, it makes setting traps much more difficult, so nobody makes defense, and everything degenerates into just running forward every point. Splitting attacks properly is super important for the rest of the game to work. Pro refs will split things with a razor. The fencer on the right here is only slightly ahead, but it's enough. But what even is an attack? Is it just going real fast? No. You actually need to be making an attempt to hit. The rulebook calls this threatening target. If you're not doing that, nobody really cares how fast you're moving. You're in preparation. Maybe moving towards making a hit, but not actually doing it yet. If your opponent hits you during this time, you lose. The same applies if you're making a giant long attack expecting the target to be far away, but your opponent goes forward instead. You were preparing to hit at long range, and while you were doing that, you were attacked. A feature of these attacks into preparation is that the blade shoots out really quick. It draws the eye. This flashy blade action is a good way of spotting the attack, but you have to have a bit of caution with it. If the big, fast, flashy extension is made by a fencer who's paused to see what's going on, then that pause will kill their momentum. No matter how fast their blade goes out, it's not an attack, and they won't win. This is called a counterattack, and even an opponent who's just kind of trundling forwards will beat it. As always, the thing is really who makes more of a mistake. If the attacker is super late, you can get away with a longer pause, but if they're really moving, you need to launch straight away. Referees are trained to split these really fine, but not so fine they can't be seen with a naked eye. Never judge an action based on frame by frame. You need to feel the flow. Remember though that players have two different options. What happens if a player starts by making a trap? The first big class of traps is parry riposte. Block and hit back. We're not going to go into this much because it's usually pretty obvious. Even if it's two lights, the player who blocked will score, as long as they took parry before the attack hit a target. If they didn't, that's a whole other thing, and the attacker will score. The second big class though is where things get messy as hell, and as of the 2018-19 season, this is the major area of contention in professional saber refereeing. This is when you try to make the attacker fall short. Obviously, if you make them miss completely, it's super easy. Now if we extend that a bit, if the target clearly wasn't where the attacker wanted it to be, but they just kept going and made contact with something anyway, the point will go to the defender. It doesn't have to be a complete miss, but there does need to be a clear miscalculation of the distance. What this looks like is usually a visible glitch in the flow of the attack. Here's the opposite though. The attacker hits right when and where they wanted to. The defender tried to get away, but didn't. You'll hear this called attaque composée. The kicker here is being able to see the difference between a smooth action that hits something at a clearly correctly estimated distance, and something that's a mistake that kind of gets lucky anyway. A single continuous action versus a broken action. A hit made with momentum, and a hit where the momentum is lost. The same applies where the defender is obviously fishing for a parry and doesn't find it. This is a mistake, and it kicks the benefit of the priority back to the attacker, even if their attack is perhaps a bit underbaked at that range. And that, ladies and gentlemen, about covers the four meters. To recap, actions are simultaneous. Attaque. Preparation attaque. Attaque parry riposte. Attaque no attaque, and attaque composée. There's also a few technical rules you'll come across. Don't jump the gun. Don't run on the attaque, it was banned for being too hilariously dangerous. Don't fall off the side of the strip. And don't fall over. I would respectfully submit that when compared to, say, baseball, that's really not a lot of rules to remember. Also, official refereeing is in French for weird historical legacy reasons. I don't speak French, and neither do most other refs. Refereeing French is about 10 words, everything has a matching hand signal, and it's really not that hard. Before we wrap up, a final disclaimer. This is intended as a primer for what you can expect to see as a spectator at a professional sabre match. It's not intended as a referee training guide. It's super not intended as a statement on how sabres should or shouldn't be refereed. I'm a licensed ref, but I'm not authorized to tell anyone how the rules should be interpreted. All I'm doing here is laying out what you can expect to see when you watch a match, and how to understand it. And yes, as a ref, I'm not a massive fan of getting heckled and yelled at, and neither are any other refs I know. One of the tricks of doing righteous armchair refereeing right is to do it from a nice safe and personal distance, preferably in a bar and not at the venue, or at least at the back of the stands. If you're using the information in this video to get up in a ref's face at a comp and tell them they're doing it wrong, you fully deserve to That said, referees in any sport can't be too precious. Mistakes will get made, and people will get mad. Crowds booing decisions they don't like is a tradition as old as competitive sport. Perfection is boring. Just go and enjoy the show. Thanks for watching! If you have any questions, requests, suggestions or feedback, you can hit me up in the comments. I also run an actual physical sabre club, so if you're in Sydney and you want to learn how to do this stuff rather than just watch it, please drop in. That's all for now. Go watch some sabre. Cheers!