Giving your all

My knight yelled at me at this last fighter's practice. I was fighting this one gentleman I hadn't fought in years. And while he's a nice enough fellow, he comes across as a bit arrogant and I was having fun tearing him to pieces. Afterwards, my knight came up and asked me what I was doing. I think I said something about winning. You'd think my knight would have been happy, right? Wrong.

Oh, he wasn't upset that I was winning. He was upset because I was letting my opponent control the fight. I'd been reacting to my opponent, rather than forcing him to react to me. And what was worse was that I was using the same style as my opponent. I did manage - in my own defense - to come up with two passes where I'd taken control. Two passes in a half hour of fighting.

According to my knight, I was resting on my Laurels. Especially when he compared it to my sparring against one of the more experienced fencers present. While I didn't have quite the kill ratio in that set of passes, I spent the time maneuvering my opponent to where I wanted him to be: forcing openings, baiting attacks, and just being a pain in the posterior in general.

Looking back, I can see what my knight was getting at. I'm lazy. So I tend to put forward the bare minimum to achieve my goals. What I need to start working on is giving everyone the same fight, from the newest fighter to the best. If I can do that, well it might suck for the new fencer, but it might just give me that extra edge against to more experienced ones.