Tactical Wheel

[d0gz|song]

I'm sorry if I'm asking a lot of questions, but I've only been fencing for a year, so... Anyways, I have yet another one. I've read the articles on the Tactical Wheel, as Webmaster suggested. Can someone further explain the ideas in the article? Maybe create a clear outline of the bout? Thanks for your time!

[a517dogg]

First spoke is straight attack.

Three options for the other guy now - parry, counterattack or run away. The next spoke is parry riposte.

The first guy now has two options starting from the beginning - attack, get parried, counter parry riposte, and feint attack. Feint attack is the next spoke.

The second guy now has three options - counter attack, run away, try to parry riposte anyway, or attack in preparation. Attack in preparation is the right choice.

Now there are two options for the next spoke. You can go back to the top, turning your feint into the real attack, making your opponents attack in preparation a counterattack, or you do countertime, where you draw a counterattack and parry-riposte going forward, basically just taking the blade.

Ways to deal with the countertime are to run away instead of offereing a counterattack, or do a compound counterattack, called a feint in time, in which you deceive the countertime, your opponent can not take your blade and you hit him as he is searching.

[mfp]

Originally posted by d0gz|song
Anyways, I have yet another one. I've read the articles on the Tactical Wheel, as Webmaster suggested. Can someone further explain the ideas in the article? Maybe create a clear outline of the bout? Thanks for your time!

The Tactical Wheel articles on this site suffer from using thousands of words to describe a conceptual system using the analogy of a wheel without including a single diagram of ... a wheel.

The diagrams in the link below might be worth a thousand words:

http://garnet.fsu.edu/~dcarver/discuss.html#Wheel

A point often missed is that the "Tactical Wheel" really isn't a (necessarily good) prescription for a bout, but rather the spokes are actions/tools for one's fencing toolbox. It's up to the fencer to know where to start on the "wheel" and when to spin it.