Stats in Golf Article

[Mr Epee]

Well buenos dias to you. I would like to point out that asking for clarification is a good way to gain clarity and not misinterpret the meaning of what you are trying to comprehend. All that to say, you are missing the point.

Firstly, i'm confused by your silly use of punctuation and twisting of idioms, so I've unsure what you think i'm saying, and what you disagree with.

To be frank, it's unfair of you to assume that I should do the mental lifting for both of us.

I did not intend "Fairly well established" to imply right or wrong or good or bad. My use of "fairly established" was simply to say people have been thinking about how to use syndicated data. They have been thinking about it long enough that you can make a living by taking the same old data, combining it in different ways, and then new conclusions. Are these conclusions valid? Some people specializing in data get paid more than others (read: a lot more than most people get paid to coach fencing). More importantly, some people get paid more than others to look at the same data everyone else looks at. Further, no matter how you feel about the stats collect over time, there will be some results that you cull out that will be valid, ableit very conditional and possibly trivial. My stance is they are not as trivial as you think.

This was the wrong move. Further, you already knew that.

A question i have is how to determine if someone has a reflexive parry?

An answer I have is to watch them.

If so, what is it? Some individuals may simply say "well, which parry was most used? That would be the reflexive parry." Many of you here would be able to poke holes in such an answer. Then again, it MIGHT. Depending on what you see, and how well you know the fencer, and your understanding of the fencer's coach, maybe "which parry was most used" might be exactly what you need to make a confident decision. Confident enough that you'd give that as advise to the opponent of the fencer you're analyzing.

So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.

More creative individuals might try to get it differently. They might say "reflexive parry is probably performed under stress, the parry after a failed attack would more likely to be the reflexive parry. let's try and see what parries were made after a 'failed' attack". How coaches and fencer's think is not exactly standardized.

Right on, nor can it ever be.

Now, here's the red meat. These things are highly situational, the writing of explicit rules for recognition is irremediably problematic, and recognition in everyday life is none-the-less possible for practical purposes - in fact this is the lived-work of the embodied practitioner. So why not focus on the practices of situational recognition over the trade in thread-bare reductionist abstractions?

Let clarify the how I'm "invoking" "information". I'm saying information may help stimulate you to do the actions or put you in a situation that promotes winning. Just because you know this guy favors a circular six parry doesn't mean you'll be able to get over it. I'm not arguing that. That's a trivial point. "we'll sven, if you can't do it, you can't do it." But what if you could do it? Would it be nice to know? If you knew, and you were able to do it, and then you did it, how would that affect your mindset? Would that be enough to put you in the zone? Would that sense of self efficacy put you in a state that'll help you win? Don't bother answering that because it's different for everyone.

And to think, all that time it was your cup that was poisoned.

If you would care to know, you can ask me for my name. i will give it to you. You can then go on askfred and look at my results and all the people i've fenced. Then you'll know the answer to whether or not i am correct in saying you clearly terrible at reading between the lines.

You're a very important person. I have no doubt of that, but I'm not looking for a relationship.

No. The point is that you aren't wearing suspenders. The point is you've got these pants and you don't know if they're going to fall off and make a scene when you're dancing at a wedding. As a result, you don't go on the dance floor, or you go dance but you don't give it your all. As a result you don't have a good time, or as good of a time as you could have, and then you dont' have the confidence to talk to that girl, which you otherwise could have had a really good time with. But if you had suspenders, would that have made a difference?

Superficially entertaining but soulfully specious.

Italian fencer Tagliariol through Coach Cuomo under the bus by saying : "When it's my fault I take the responsibility but Cuomo can't nail the tactics, is wrong in preparing the bouts, and does not give advice. He is there as a cheerleader and that's it. We stepped on the strip without a clue on how to fence against the Swiss..."

How embarrassing for Italy? Sandro probably thought he was coaching the men's team.

I don't understand? This scrub seems to think it might be important (or at least is a legitimate enough reason to hide behind) that it is nice to have a clue how to fence against an opponent. Why didn't Cuomo not give the right advice? Maybe if he had some stats he might have.

You might want to familiarize yourself with the concept of Italian epee fencing. These aren't the examples you are looking for *waves hand*

[darius]

2. This is probably obvious but still deserves mention - but the grounds for inferred causality between this particular task and demonstrated improvement are quite weak. That said, having students actively watch bouts and provide accounts of what happened and engage in analysis is precisely the sort of exercise that would develop the sort of domain expertise (seeing 'what's going on') upon which competitors draw upon in the course of making fencing-time performances.

It hadn't escaped my notice. It forces the athletes to watch bouts thoughtfully. Two birds, one stone.

3a.. Given the well documented phenomena that the adequacy of an account is inextricably bound to the occasions for which it was produced*, I would suggest having students 'free-hand' their accounts and analysis of the match. Obviously this is a more difficult task, but I believe the pay-off to be more than worth the effort.

I actually think that it's less effort to free-hand their accounts. It may be that following a coding system will speak well to some, and freehand will speak well to others; writing an essay would be a challenge for some athletes, but they'd be all about the Xs and Os. The thing I do like is that there's an immediate visual representation of who-scores-where. Even just adding with-what-action to that brings up enough information to be actionable for a second bout.

3b. If someone were looking for a good research project, I'd suggest the following. Record some conversations between top fencers as they discuss various aspects of the game. Listen for the 'things' that they produce and reference in the course of their conversations, and how those 'things' are mutually recognized and handled by the sport's production cohort. I'm certain that there are some pretty valuable notions that are common currency in the discussion of fencing by fencers that are relatively unnoticed and rarely (if ever) deliberately taught to developing practitioners.

That would be a pretty cool research project.

Thanks for that list. All good things. Now, which would be more valuable for a fencer on the strip, a) having access to a database that somehow includes this information, or b) possessing the know-how of seeing the match into the categories described? I imagine that everyone agrees that option b) lies much closer to the work of making sense of the unfolding live match in which they are participating.

Those categories aren't mutually exclusive. Clearly, I want my fencers to be autonomous. But again, looking at a database might prove useful - the human mind is notoriously good at creating patterns, even when none exist, and I've definitely found that fencers are pretty good at misrepresenting what happens in bouts. The data itself might not have much value, but representing it in different ways may.

1. Referee: Attack, Parry, Riposte
2. Coding Observer: Attack, Circle-6, Indirect riposte to flank
3. Fencer's report: Trying to draw the attack, yep, sweep, looking for open target, etc...

All are equally adequate accounts of the interaction, and if you were to swap the accounts with the situations for which they were produced the whole thing gets goofy.

If you're talking about data integrity, you have to agree on the rules, whether it's one person who codes the data, or multiple people all on the same page. That's hardly a domain-specific concern, although it'd be a problem if one wanted to develop something for the sabre folks.

We've reached something of an impasse here: I don't know what the data might or might not tell us -- it's hard to say without asking it. It might confirm the patterns that domain-specific knowledge has already planted in our brains. It might not. Really, unless somebody has the right question and motivation to find out, we're unlikely to see data of that detail be collected.

darius

[Dev]

The baseball metaphor actually carries pretty well here.

Statistical analysis in baseball is for nerd managers and front-office goons--they can page through three sheets of data before ultimately making their decision.

Better to teach the hitters how to observe the guy on the mound and see how, and if, he tips his pitches.

Greg Maddux wasn't the Smartest Pitcher Who Ever Lived because he memorized everybody's stats; Greg Maddux was the Smartest Pitcher Who Ever Lived because he could notice a small shift in a batter's stance and predict that the next pitch would get lined at the first base coach--and he could see it from the dugout.

(I like Darius' system of analysis, because it does teach fencers basic observational skills; however, the utility of recording their observations and building a database out of it is dubious at best.)