Not all fencers are equally talented, technically or tactically. If they were, running competitions would be absurdly easy. Any fencer could be assigned to any group or to any position in an elimination table, and the organizers could still be sure that the fencer who was the best of the identical athletes would win. But reality doesn’t work like that. As a result, there has to be some method of dividing the shooters so that the result reflects the level of skill present: entering the ranks.
The goal of seeding is for 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 it is to your advantage, the seeded fencer, to maximize the advantage that the top seed can give you.
The initial ranking lists the fencers from strongest to weakest based on their competitive history before the competition begins. This list may be based on the fencer’s ranking or on a division or on the United States Fencing Association’s national point system. It may even be based simply on the best judgment of the final committee or for administrative convenience. Regardless of how relative strength is determined, it is in your best interest to achieve the best result you can in each competition, as past results may influence your ranking in future competitions.
The planting determines the distribution of shooters to the pools. For example, if there are 24 shooters to be spread across 4 pools, the goal is for each pool to be relatively equal in difficulty. The shooters are distributed in groups in their order of strength based on seeding. This process is sometimes skewed by the need to separate fencers from the same club, and some groups may seem stronger than others due to the way the distribution works, but when done correctly the cumulative strength of the groups 1 and 4 should be about the same. same.
What happens in the groups determines the next round of seeding. What this means is that you want to leave your pool with (1) the best possible winning percentage and (2) the best possible metric. The number of wins is not the measure because you can have groups of unequal sizes, but in practice you get a better win percentage by winning more matches.
In any competition there will be several shooters with the same winning percentage. Their seeding relative to each other is determined by indicators (the number of hits scored minus the number of hits received). This means that every hit in the pool round counts. When you win a match, you want to win by the largest possible margin. And when you lose a match, you want to score as many hits as possible. If you can deny the opponent 5 full hits, that’s to your advantage as well. Because 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 fight your way into the first full round. Pools are a game of winning as many matches as possible and scoring as many touches as possible.
Seeding based on the results of the groups determines the initial ends of an elimination table. In this case, the strongest fencer is paired with the weakest, the next strongest is paired with the slightly weaker one, etc., until the two ends in the middle of the table are nearly equal in strength. You want to rank as high as possible in this ranking, as the higher you are, the weaker your first opponent will be. And this ranking also determines your overall result among the shooters in a round where you are eliminated before the semi-final round of 4. It is important to note that the scores of the single elimination table bouts do not influence your placement. in a normal direct elimination. competence; now a win is a win, and tactics that accept one hit as tactical trade-off (such as the double sword strike) become useful.