Not all fencers have the same talent, technically or tactically. If they were, organizing competitions would be absurdly easy. Any fencer could be assigned to any group or position on an elimination table, and the organizers could still be sure that the fencer was winning and was the best of identical athletes. But reality doesn’t work that way. As a result, there has to be some method of dividing the fencers so that the result reflects the skill level present – enter the seeding.
The goal of seeding is for the bouts to result in the best fencer winning the competition, the best fencers surviving later in the competition (rounds 16, 8, and 4 of an elimination table), and the weakest fencers being the first athletes eliminated. . This means that for you, the shooter being seeded, it is to your advantage to maximize the advantage that seeding can give you.
The initial ranking lists fencers from strongest to weakest based on their competitive record before the competition begins. This list may be based on the fencers’ ranking or a division or the national point system of the American Fencing Association. It may even be based simply on the best judgment of the combat committee or for administrative convenience. Regardless of how relative strength is determined, it is to your advantage to achieve the best result you can in each competition, as past results may influence your ranking in future competitions.
The seeding determines the distribution of the shooters to the pools. For example, if there are 24 shooters to distribute among 4 groups, the goal is for each group to have a relatively equal difficulty. The shooters are distributed in pools in their order of strength according to the seeding. This process is sometimes skewed by the need to separate fencers from the same club, and some groups may appear stronger than others due to the way the distribution works, but when done correctly, the cumulative strength of group 1 and group 4 should be about the same.
What happens in the pools determines the next round of seeding. What this means is that you want to leave your group with (1) the best possible win percentage and (2) the best possible indicator. The number of wins is not the measure because you can have groups of unequal sizes, but in practice you get a better winning percentage by winning more tips.
In any competition there will be several shooters with the same percentage of victories. Their seeding with each other is determined by indicators (the number of hits scored minus the number of hits received). This means that every hit in the group round counts. When you win a match, you want to win with as much margin as possible. And when you lose a match, you want to score as many hits as possible. If you can deny the opponent 5 full blows, that is also an advantage for you. Since tournaments generally don’t result in multiples of 2 (rounds of 64, 32, 16, etc.), even a 1 gauge difference can mean you don’t have to struggle to get into the first full round. Groups are a game of winning as many fights as possible and scoring as many touches as possible.
Seeding based on group results determines the initial episodes from a kill table. In this case, the strongest fencer is paired with the weakest, the next strongest is paired with the slightly less weak, etc., until the two fights in the middle of the table are almost equal in strength. You should rank as high as possible in this seeding, as the higher you are, the weaker your first opponent will be. And this ranking also determines your overall result among shooters in a round in which you are eliminated before the semi-final round of 4. It is important to note that the scores from the knockout table do not influence your ranking in a knockout. normal. competence; now a victory is a victory, and tactics that accept a blow as a tactical compensation (such as the double blow on the sword) become useful.