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Often historical fencing is taught in a very ‘technical’ way - the focus is on techniques (particularly blade actions), and the tactical layer is relegated to a rock-paper-scissors style approach of “action Y will beat action X, action Z will beat action Y, etc”. This is often how plays are presented in the original treatises, so it’s natural to approach teaching this way. However, as students start to spar or compete in tournaments, this approach to tactics starts to fall apart. Choosing the ‘right’ action doesn’t make up for mistakes in distance, time, or execution. Fortunately, there are better ways to approach tactical thinking - my preferred introductory one is based on four main questions for the student to ask:

What are you good at? And what are you bad at? Using actions you’re good at will tend to go well - using actions you’re bad at will tend to go poorly. This self-awareness is critical to any sort of tactical planning. Once a student knows what they’re good at, they can try to shape the bout to support those skills: for example, someone who is better at cuts than thrusts will probably want to try and keep the distance in the bout closer, so that they can use their cuts more easily. By trying to favour actions you’re good at, then you reduce your chance of making unforced errors and giving your opponent a free opportunity to touch.

What are they bad at? And what are they good at? The more I can shape the bout to make my opponent do things they’re bad at, the more likely I will be to succeed in the bout. If my opponent is good at parrying on their left but bad at parrying on their right, I should almost always be trying to attack their right side. Once a student recognises an opponents weaknesses and strengths, they can try to shape the bout to target those weaknesses and force the opponent to use them. This increases their chance of making unforced errors - actions might become slow, late or badly structured.

How can you match your strength against their weakness? The first two questions are for understanding - these two are for implementation. Find ways to match your strengths against their weaknesses, which will maximise your chance of succeeding at the action. Taking the two previous examples together, I might suggest that my student try to set up situations where they can attack with cuts against the opponent’s right hand side, which pairs my student’s strength (cuts) with the opponent’s weakness (right side defence). If their first attack is parried, for example, they might want to make a second attack to a new opening on the right instead of changing to the left.

How can you deny their strengths? This is one of the most powerful tactical tools in a fencer’s arsenal. Say that my opponent is great at attacking under my guard - I might try to mitigate this by dropping my guard lower, so that there’s no longer an opening available underneath it. Even if it’s now harder for me to parry in the high line, I’ve prevented my opponent from using their favoured action. They’ll probably be less practiced at making effective attacks to a higher opening and that likely gives me new opportunities to employ my own strengths.

Equipping students with a tactical structure like this will make a significant difference to their effectiveness as fencers. Even if absetzen ⊕Absetzen is a German longsword term that means 'off-setting', and describes an action that's some form of counter-thrust with opposition or parry & riposte with a thrust. is a good technique against a descending cut, if their cut is really good and my absetzen is pretty bad, I’m going to get hit when I try it. Taking it out of my repertoire and focusing on an action I am good at instead (perhaps collapsing distance with a simple parry, to exploit my better wrestling skills) will lead to great improvements in results. If nothing else, just helping your students prune down their own personal decision tree by discarding actions they don’t use effectively will make them quicker at thinking and acting in the ring.

Of course, sparring isn’t just about winning. Particularly in club sparring it may be worth spending time working on improving weaknesses. Taking this approach to understanding fencing will help with identifying what those weaknesses are, and can even suggest some ways to help correct them. For example, if I’m talking with a student and we notice that they’re great at absetzen against a thrust but bad at absetzen against a cut, that indicates the difference in those situations is exposing the weakness in their action. We are then able to examine their problem further and identify approrpiate

I welcome questions, comments or feedback on this article. You can reach me by email:

tea at fechtlehre dot org