Fencing Competitions - A Guide to What Happens and Why
By Rodney Francis
It is easy for organisers of competitions to forget that many young fencers and their parents may not understand how competitions are run. This information sheet is aimed at explaining some of the details involved.
Usually competitions will consist of one or more rounds of pools followed by direct elimination.
What are Pools?
A round of pools involves dividing all the fencers up into small groups, usually of 5, 6 or 7 fencers.
It is rare that every pool will contain the same number of fencers and more often than not, there will be pools of 5 and 6 or pools of 6 and 7.
In every pool, each fencer fights every other fencer. The fights take place in a pre-arranged order shown on the pool sheets. The winner of each fight is the first to score 5 hits against his/her opponent.
If the fight lasts as long as three minutes fencing time, then the score at that time stands unless there is no winner. If there is no winner the fencers draw lots (e.g. by a coin toss) to decide who has the priority. They then fence for a further 1 minute. The first to score a hit wins and that is the score for the fight. If neither fencer scores a hit then the fencer with priority is declared the winner but the scores remain equal and are entered as such on the pool sheet.
At the end of the pool every fencer will have the following achievementsin his/her pool:
- Percentage of victories (expressed as a fraction of 1) (V/M)
- Number of hits scored (HS)
- Number of time they have been hit (HR)
- Hits scored minus hits received (HS-HR)
For a fencer who had won 4 fights out of 5, scored 23 hits and received 15 hits, this information would be displayed as:
| V/M | HS-HR | HS | |
| Smith, John | 0.8 | 8 | 23 |
Whilst each fencer may be interested to know how well they have done in their own pool, the more important fact is how well they have done in relation to all other fencers. The organisers will establish this (or rather the computer program will) by calculating the information shown in the example for every fencer and then arranging them in rank order. This rank order is based, first of all on the percentage of victories. Those fencers with the same percentage of victories are further sub-divided according to who has the highest difference between hits scored and hits received. If that method fails to separate them then the number of hits scored is included in the calculation. After that fencers are declared to be of equal rank. For example, consider the following fencers and their scores:
| Rank | V/M | HS-HR | HS | |
| 25 | Ashley | 0.667 | 4 | 22 |
| 26 | Hilary | 0.6 | 10 | 22 |
| 27 | Kate | 0.6 | 2 | 17 |
| 27 | Jennifer | 0.6 | 2 | 17 |
| 29 | Sarah | 0.6 | 1 | 20 |
In these cases, Ashley was probably in a pool of 7 and won 4 out of her 6 fights. The remainder were likely to be in pools of 6 and won 3 fights out of 5. Kate and Jennifer are equal 27th because their scores are equal. Sarah is 29~ because her difference’ score (HR-HS) is only I although she scored more hits than Kate or Jennifer.
Why do we rank the fencers?
Basically fencers are ranked so that we can move on to the next stage in the competition in an orderly fashion. If we have another round of pools then the ranking from this round will decide the way the next pools are drawn up.
Direct Elimination (DE)
This stage of the competition is exactly what it sounds like, i.e. sudden death so to speak, as in the FA cup, Wimbledon etc. The number of fencers in the direct elimination will dictate how many rounds there are. For a small number of fencers e.g. 8, there will be 4 fights followed by two semi finals followed by a final. For a large number of fencers e.g. 128, there will be 7 rounds. Notice that the number of fencers is a multiple of two. The display of who fights whom from the start to the finish is called the tableau. Although there might not be exactly the right number of fencers for multiples of two, the tableaux are always known as a tableau of 64, tableau of 32 etc.
Let us say there are 40 fencers promoted to the DE, then there would be an incomplete tableau of 64, in which the bottom ranked 16 fencers would fight each other in pairs so that the next round would consist of a complete tableau of 32 (24 fencers having a bye in the tableau of 64 plus the 8 winners from the tableau of 64).
For all fencing competitions the arrangement of fencers in the tableau is fixed. The top ranked fencer will always appear at the top of the tableau; the second ranked fencer will always appear at the bottom of the tableau (so that they meet in the final if everything works out —which is rarely does). All the other fencers fit into their appropriate place in the tableau according to their ranking after the pools.
After that the completion of the competition is fairly straightforward with the winner of each DE fight being the first to 15 hits. Their fights are for three periods of three minutes each, with a one minute rest in between each period (Younger fencers may have the winner as first to 10 hits with shorter periods). If the hits scored are equal after the end of the last period, the fencers continue for a further minute with the same conditions described earlier in the pools.
Why not try running a mini competition one night at your fencing club between yourself and a few friends?