I traveled to Half Moon Bay for this years Best of the Best tournament. Last year I had a strategy of matching my opponent’s style, i.e. if they were fighting with a two handed weapon, I did too (bastard sword), or if they fought with two weapons, I did (sword + dagger), or they fought one handed so did I. It worked okay, but I had a really poor overall win/loss ratio. This year I decided to just stick to my original, primary style, two handed bastard (aka hand and a half) sword. I’ll edit once I have stats, but I believe I did better than last year, at least.
Tag: event
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I hosted a Day of Combat at the Mt Hood White River East SnoPark at 4200ft elevation. It was a just about as perfect as it gets, with mostly overcast and a fresh couple inches of snow from the night before on top of a deep base. The around 20F degree temp meant no rain, just some occasional light snow flurries.
Sparring participants were myself, Honorary Kaiden Dalton, Jesse B, Ferocitas, Bryce, Rakta Nadi, Chris, Miriam, and Aaliyah. Anne was an immense help in support capacity, logging matches and helping with gear.
All sparring was bokken.
We logged 9 last-standing melees, a couple 3v3v3 team melees, a 3v5 upper vs lower melee, a 4v5 with trainees as captains, and a 4v5 VIP protection melee (myself and dalton as non-combat VIPs).
We wrapped up with 45 1-on-1 matches (best-of-3 format).
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I donned my white gi today for the first time in several years and travelled to Eugene for the 2025 Winter edition of the Pacific Martial Arts Conference. The 5 hours of instruction were split into 10 segments led by sensei and masters in multiple karate styles, eskrima, judo, aikido, capoeira, katana (unsure which style), and hand to hand defense against western european dagger. It was an excellent day of training.
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Attended the Best of the Best at our usual Arata Farm location. There were 18 competitors.
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Attended the annual Best of the Best tournament, held in Half Moon Bay again as typical. There were 18 competitors including myself. Master Gemini took first again, Kaiden The Severer took second, and Daniel took third. I had made some adjustments to my armor so I had some better mobility, but I still need more work, particularly on my grill and bevor. As usual, I had some good matches, and some matches where I should have done better, but in general I felt reasonably good about the day.
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Day two, we got up at a reasonable hour, Kaiden The Severer and I prepared breakfast, then we held a training session. Kaiden The Severer started us with Refined Strikes, then I covered one of my favorite mantras, basic stance and combat movement followed by 50 continuous full circle cuts, after which I had us do machine gun drill with head or neck attacks, and Kaiden The Severer finished up with (blunt) steel cutting of overgrown zucchini gourds (kindly provided by the farm).
After we wrapped up, all the gourd bits were collected and we fed them to the farm boar and met their ducklings before packing up and heading out.
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Kaiden The Severer set up our first PNW event. I drove up with Bryce, arriving at the event site with plenty of time to spare. Set up the sword wall and my personal camp, then got ready for the day of sparring. We had a number of bokken melee, followed by bokken one-on-ones, each attendee holding a circle where they faced the other competitors for three matches each. We took a break for some lunch and finished up bokken one-on-one circles, then did a series of melee scenarios. We had some 4v4 team matches, some 4v4 Royalty Protection matches, and some 3v5 and 5v3 VIP Escort matches. Last, I had 5 steel 1-on-1’s with Kaiden The Severer and with Fanaticus, and gave Amanda and extra 5 bokken matches so she could experiment with naginata (myself using 1 handed sword).
Participants were Kaiden The Severer, myself, Ross, Fanaticus, Christy, Bryce, Amanda, Patrick, and Chris.
Afterward, we took a dip in the nearby creek and had dinner prepared mostly by The Severer, Chris, and Amanda. As we sat around the camp fire, we had smores and played with some light sabers I brought.
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I attended and competed in the 2021 Best of the Best tournament today.
The new arm and leg protective gear that I have fashioned worked well, they did not hinder my movements that I could discern and protected me well enough, though the thighs need additional work (they were incompletely padded and the sports shorts I used have padding only in area targeted for their original intended sport).
My win to loss ratio was pretty standard for me, which is to say, not particularly improved despite all the additional training. I anticipate this will be an issue in my Silver Chain test. After two decades of fighting largely defensively, it is very difficult to change my patterns and responses, it will take a lot more work, and a lot more sparring.
In addition to my 38 tournament matches (19 opponents twice), I got in another 25 bokken matches afterword before I had to stop due to finger injury. Unfortunately, 20 of the matches (10 with Danny, 10 with James) are unlogged and captured on camera at extreme distance, so outcomes will be difficult to determine. The last (roughly) 5 with with Requiem and I had an up close camera for record.
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I travelled to the Hayward dojo for a special event to give both Kaiden Ravenstar and Requiem their 60 Minute Non-stop Battle, and there was boken melees (10) and steel melees (10) and some more one-on-one matches, too.
I also used the opportunity to get some clarification on draw cut targets (in particular, the vertical draw cuts are envisioned to be to something like the collarbone in application).
I additionally provided reviews and feedback to Requiem, Jesse B, and Christy.
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I traveled to Redding, CA to participate in the gladiator style fighting exhibition event for the Shasta Renaissance Faire. I was only able to attend the Saturday portion this year, unfortunately. We fought at 11am and 2pm. I did one handed exclusively, both steel and boken.
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I journeyed to Arata's Farm in Half Moon Bay for the annual Best of the Best tournament. At final count, there were 14 competitors this year,making for a long and somewhat gueling day (about 7 hours for the tournament, which started around noon, an hour late, and I had arrived around 8:30, an hour ahead of the requested arrival time). Head Kaiden Gad won first place with over a 90% win. My final tally is TBD. Generally, I had several very good matches, and I had some disappointing matches, but over all I felt good about the tournament and marshaling. I'd still like to see the Western Circle learn more from other martial schools regarding good martialing techniques for tournaments in particular.
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For the second day of the event, the morning melees were 10 steel and 10 boken, and the afternoon was 10 steel after which we had some one-on-one boken since there was only one boken-only fighter remaining.
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I travelled down to Redding for Kaiden Sal's public exhibition event at the Shasta Renaissance Faire. For the morning melees, we had 5 steel, 5 boken, 5 steel, and 5 boken. For the afternoon we had 10 steel and 10 boken. In the evening, after the feast, Head Kaiden Gad gathered many of us to play Hide the Belt.
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I participatedin the 2018 Best of the Best tournament today. With 14 competitors, it was the largest tournament to date. My personal performance was erratic. I found myself too often falling back on old (bad) habbits, thinking too much, not applying the strategies I have been working out over the past several weeks. Over all, I had compliments on my quality of form and technique, but I ranked only middling, with both my former students Kaiden Sal and Steven doing better than I (which is both good and bad).
I did finally have my new steel helm, though unfortunately this was its inaugural debute,and I had some issues with the chain skirt binding on my neck and/or body armor and the visor binding on the bevor. However, I barely felt the head strikes, the padding work well, as did the four point harness mostly, though I may need to adjust the webbing toward the back of the head to make certain the helmet doesn't fall forward quite so much (which was contributing to the binding on the bevor). I also want to get some help bending the chin of the visor out further as I was only able to make minor improvement, and that would help with the binding, too. Head Kaiden Gad pointed out that I still need metal elbow and knee cops, so I can make that a goal for next year. -
Second day of the faire event. More steel and boken melees.
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I journed down to Redding for Kaiden Sal's publish exhibition event. There was a mix of steel and wood melees.
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Today I participated in the all-steel 2017 Best of the Best tournament. This year the rule was you may only use your primary style of study, which mine is the bastard sword (hand and a half-ish, roughly 40" overall). There were 13 competitors to start, though two had to drop out due to injury (giving and receiving). I placed 3rd, which is fine, but I'll have to strive for better next year.
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I journeyed to the Hayward Dojo and participated in the 2016 Best of the Best tournament. Top rankings went to Gad, Gemini and Vea, however I was awarded recognition for my exhibited skills and versatility.
In addition to the tournament steel matches, I did 20 or so boken matches with a few of the lower ranks, too. -
I journeyed down to the Hayward Dojo for a Day of Combat and to support Sal's 30 minute non-stop battle and Crimson Chain test, and I also was a part of Steel Wind's steel Red Rope test.
We had a good number of fighters present, six in steel and several more in wood. It started with Sal's non-stop, then the main combat event was 5 wood matches, 5 steel matches, 5 wood matches, 5 steel matches, and 5(?) scenario wood matches. -
I visited the SCA event “Sport of Kings” today and observed a few sessions on SCA fighting presented by various high ranking long time Knights. I was pleased to hear there seems to be something of a movement within their organization to better formalize training, changing from the format of “thrown into combat, learn from your beatings” to “instruction, repetitive practice, and implementation in combat”. On the flip side, however, there was recognition that the strikes they make are meant to be most effective as blunt force impact, not as cutting technique.
Some other take-aways I had were:
* Additional vetting of the mechanics of rotational velocity, arcs, and “cracking the whip” to generate maximum sword tip energy. Use large radius arcs that are then changed to short radius arcs to increase rotational velocity, or put more mundanely, stop your arm near the end of your swing but permit the sword to continue (which causes a change in fulcrum and corresponding increase in rotation).
* OODA – Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. This is something that we effectively teach in the WCoS as well, but I do not recall encountering this specific acronym, which is a good addition/expansion on what I teach to my students. This roughly corresponds to how the WCoS teaches cutting, minus the observation which we break out separately, in that we instruct to circle (or pull back), choose target, and cut.I know there were more, but at the moment this is all that I can actively recall while sitting in my computer chair. If others come back to mind, I’ll try to add them.
The final part of the day I was able to observe some of their Sport of Kings tourney, which was mostly what I was expecting, in that there was a lot of what I would consider bludgeoning and flailing. None the less, I intend to seek out a couple of the local Baronies fighter training days to see how they training and make contacts to decide whether to pursue a heavy fighter certification for next years Pennsic Wars per Head Kaiden Gad’s request.
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Second day of the Ravenswood event. For the morning session we started with 15 steel melees and then held 10 bokken melees. For the afternoon, we were down some steel fighters so we began with round-robinned best-of-three steel duals and then held a number of bokken melees, most of them being team scenarios.
Afterward we packed everything back up, including Steven, Elijah and John (from Nevada dojo) helping to load and return the straw bales. -
First day of my Ravenswood Coliseum event. Yesterday Elijah and Michael helped me pick up straw bales from a local rancher and setup our arena, and Sal brought his new structure for our enclosure. We didn’t have enough steel fighters for melees in the morning, so Kaiden David, Ryan E.B. and I round-robinned some steel best-of-three duals and then we moved to bokken melees to include the rest of the present fighters. The afternoon melees included the additional fighters from the bay area, so we started with 10 steel melees, then followed with 10 bokken melees. In the evening, I hosted a feast at my mother’s house.
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I attended the Best of the Best 2014 tournament today, taking 3rd out of the eight competitors present (Steel Wind, Brennan, myself, Kris, David, Sal, Patrick, and Blight, plus Gad fought but was not competing).
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Second day of the coliseum event, hosted by me, held at the Ravenswood Faire in Weaverville. First bout with 7 steel melee and 7 wood melee. Steven got to join as a choreographed fighter in the steel. Second bout with 5 steel melee and 5 wood melee. Third bout with 5 steel melee and 5 wood melee.
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First day of the coliseum event, hosted by me, held at the Ravenswood Faire in Weaverville. First bout with 5 steel melee, 5 wood melee, and 5 more steel melee. Steven got to join as a choreographed fighter in the steel. Second bout with 5 steel melee and 5 wood melee. Ferocitas got to join as a choreographed fighter in the steel. Third bout with 5 steel melee and 5 wood melee.