How to use Analytics and Observation to Evaluate Opponents

The Lehfeldt Evaluation Framework (LEF)

It took a number of years to refine this template and really get to a place that I thought painted a full picture of opposing fencers in a way that I could take hundreds of thousands of fields of metadata and distill it down into a one page scouting report that a fencer could pick up, read in two minutes, and have a general idea on how to approach the bout.

A few things about this framework for your consideration:

It is a compass, not a blueprint— The best way to describe analytics and scouting, is that these profiles provide a general direction for how to approach a bout. More specifically, it boils down the opponent in such a way that you will be able to manage their risks and reduce the panel of possibilities enough to have solutions and options.

When you’re providing advice to high level athletes, they’re often coming from different schools of fencing with varying styles. Athletes all receive information differently too. Some of them might want the full gamut of data while others simply might prefer you dig in on the qualitative side and leave the data out of it. Always know hot to tailor information to the specific athlete you’re working with.

It Doesn’t Guarantee Success and it Doesn’t Always Account for Curveballs—To make this framework successful in the field, it obviously requires a good fencer/athlete with good technique. If for instance, I pitted one of my inexperienced junior fencers against Cannone and he followed the advice of the LEF to a tee, could the junior fencer win? Hell no.

It also, admittedly, does not account for unpredictable curveballs. For instance, if you tried to create a profile around Max Heinzer, good luck, because that dude had so much YOLO energy and wild ups and downs that you never knew which Heinzer you were going to get on a given day (so much so that I labeled him as a “WTF Wildcard” rather than have him tied to a primary and secondary archetype. He’s the only fencer I did that with).

You might also encounter a fencer like Yannick Borel whose data was such an exceptional outlier that it really didn’t identify glaring vulnerabilities, and required leaning in far more on the qualitative analysis than the quantitative one.

A more specific example of the curveballs—At a recent event I was asked by Jonas Hansen and his coach Julian Rueda to prepare a profile on Austria’s Josef Mahringer. We had a great strategy based on the data and qualitative analysis that was working well…up until Jonas had a 12-11 lead. Mahringer, who typically fences at a two-tempo distance and never played a tight pressure game in the 120 touches I analyzed, all of a sudden…started playing a tight pressure game and keeping the tip and distance extremely close, suffocating Jonas in the end to win 15-13. It was a risk not managed, not prepared for, and it came out of nowhere from all the bouts I’d watched.

It’s Best Done as a Collaborative Effort—In my opinion, there are three legs to the table of successful tournament preparation: the fencer’s lens, the coach’s lens, and the analytics picture. They cannot work independently but must work interdependently and collaboratively to give three unique lenses of opposing fencers.

What I often captured from a third person perspective watching YouTube and capturing analytics did not necessarily account for the feel of the bout and what the fencer experiences firsthand. When I’d present the LEF to the team in preparation for an event, there was always room for team input because the guys saw and felt things with the blade, distance, and mental game that watching tape doesn’t account for. For the coaches who bought into the LEF, I always enjoyed working with them to understand their qualitative perspectives which were far more refined than my own. When done as a collaborative triad, the results were consistently awesome!

It Takes a lot of Work to Build a Complete Profile—What I generally found is that I needed to analyze about 80 touches of a fencer before I really understood who they were and what they were bringing to the piste, and I wanted to understand that fencer with the familiarity of an old friend, I needed 150+. That takes a boatload of time, and the week of an international event I’d find myself often pouring over tape for 40+ hours to pick up on every small detail and nuance and then of course relay that in a compelling way to the athletes.

Bouts required multiple views—the first time watching in real time to understand the fencer’s strategy and general tactical approach. The second time, slowed down to understand the detail of each action, intent, and tempo. The third time, to double check my work and ensure it was as accurate as humanly possible.

Each bout took roughly 1.5 hours to watch and record in this framework (and about 8 hours for a team match). So, if you’re going to do this, prepare for a lot of rolling up the sleeves and doing the work.

Box 1: Scoring Archetypes

The scoring archetypes box is a summation of how the fencer uses pressure to score. As discussed in the pressure archetypes post, there are four ways to hit:

• You push and attack (Offensive)
• You push and defend (Swarming)
• You pull and attack (Counteroffensive)
• You pull and defend (Defensive)

The % line shows what % of their single light touches are scored in a given archetype, and the success ratio shows how often the scores when attempting to hit in that archetype vs. how often the fencer gets hit. 

Box 2: Strip Traits

The strip traits box paints a picture of the Fencer’s behavior and how effective they are at attacking vs. defending.

• Push/Pull: How often the fencer exerts pressure on their opponent (push) vs. how often they suck the other fencer in (pull)
• Receiver/Attacker: How often the fencer initiates the attack vs. how often they defend
• Aggressive/Patient: The average seconds per touch of the fencer. In men’s, it takes on average roughly 17 seconds per touch, so in Cannone’s case, he’s on the aggressive side!
• Offensive Misses vs. Offensive Hits: How often the fencer scores a single vs. double touch when attacking
• Defensive Misses vs. Defensive Hits: How often the fencer scores a single vs. double touch when defending
  
  

Box 3: Closing Actions

This box indicates how often a fencer is scoring a single light with each action.

Box 4: The Measurables

This one is simple: if and when you have the information, list out the fencer’s age, country of origin, handedness, preferred grip, and listed height. You can even include the country flag (or club logo) if you want to get fancy.

Box 5-6: Look For/He Does – Qualitative Evaluation

When evaluating a fencer’s tactics and/or strip coaching, it’s easy to sometimes lead off with what the other fencer likes to do instead of cutting right to the chase and talking about how to beat them. In fact, when I presented an early prototype of the LEF to Ben Bratton, a former World Champion and American Fencing legend, it was heavy on the “He Does” side of things. “I don’t care what he does,” Ben said. “Tell me how I’m going to beat this guy.” I immediately changed the format.

The “Look For” box is a summary of the ways to steer your opponent into your Area of Excellence (AoE) and limit the opponent’s “…choices and thereby increase the predictability of the action.[1]”

Things to Call Out in Look For:

Glaring data observations (and subtle data observations): If the fencer has noticeable exploits based on the data, those are good things to call out. Perhaps there might also be things you find digging in the weeds of the data not captured by the LEF data boxes worth exploring too (i.e. in the Cannone example, the fact he gets 43% of touches against him scored in 10 seconds or less).

I generally like to call out here if the strategy should revolve around if the overall strategy should focus on entering distance and attacking, suckering them into your distance and attacking in prep, or drawing out their attack and responding.

Chinks in the Preparation: If the purpose of a preparation is to create an Oh $@&# moment on the opponent, a poorly executed preparation can also create a self-destructive Oh $@&# moment on oneself. Perhaps when a fencer makes a preparatory flick, they overcommit onto the front leg and distribute their weight 70%/30%, leaving them open to attack in prep. Perhaps the fencers invitations are way too big, and if the fencer invites in 8, their hand isn’t fast enough to deal with a direct attack in prep to the elbow/chest when the invitation is open. If you see flaws in the preparation that create openings, call those out.

Where applicable, it’s a good place to articulate suggested tactics around “counter prep” or “prepping on the prep” as Franco Cerutti would say.

Distance: The “right” distance to fence at is subjective, and relative to the height of the fencers, their speed and athleticism, the lengths of their attacks, their threats to the short targets, and how they enter and exit distance. Generally, I try to articulate this in the “look for” by using tempo as a unit of distance to articulate how close or far you’re ideally staying with the opponent in preparation, when you need to break distance and escape, and when they are a threat to attack.

Panic Reactions: If you observe a trend of a fencer responding to certain preparations with extreme reaction, it’s a good thing to call out. For instance, we referred to Rafael Tulen as “LEEEEEEEEROYYYYYYYY JENKINSSSSSSS” because the moment you made any kind of threat to his guard, he’d immediately take off in a fleche, leaving him open to a second intention parry riposte (Instinctual Folly).

As you watch tape, take note of how they respond to different preps: are they pulling the arm when presented with feints in certain lines? Do they always go when you make a false action to the foot? When you expel their tip with a beat, do they usually take off and go? These are good things to note for panic reactions.

Things to Avoid (Managing Risks): From time to time, fencers have a consistent home run action or two that you want to minimize the risk of. There might be a particular closing action that simply isn’t going to work on a fencer and amounts to a free touch for the opponent. There might be areas of the strip where a fencer consistently dominates and should be avoided. Some real examples:

• Statistically, going for a toe touch on a Japanese or French fencer is a piss poor idea. The top Japanese fencers were always mobile enough to break distance at the initiation of a toe touch and pulverize you before you recover. As for the French, much of their tactical schema is based on minimizing their own risks and punishing mistakes of the opponent and so rarely would you see fencers successful toe touches on them.
• Gergely Siklosi (HUN) had a nearly impervious defense to fleche attacks and they almost always failed every time.
• Marco Brinkmann (GER) controlled the box and if you tried to fence him there, it was a losing battle every time. Sera Song (KOR) and Injeong Choi (KOR) owned their 2-meter zone with freakish acrobatics and once you followed them there, you were doomed.
• There was absolutely zero scenario where trying to get in a blade fight with Ruslan Kurbanov was a good idea because the dude is a compact meat rack who closed with lightning speed once he had your blade.

Being an Exploitative Filthy Troll: High level tournament preparation should be treated like psychological warfare. If you watch tape and you see a fencer getting consistently frustrated and angry, find ways within the rules (or push the envelope) to play mind games and get them fully tilted. I’ll give you one of my personal favorite stories here:

When I was in college (Brandeis University), there was a Brown University fencer who had an explosive temper with a history of black cards at dual meets. Before my match with him, Head Coach Bill Shipman approached me with some simple advice in his southern drawl: “Get inside his head and f*** with him like you do best.” Challenge accepted. After I scored the first touch, I proceeded to do the Ray Lewis dirty bird as I returned to the en garde line. I saw my opponent begin to get visibly frustrated and I sensed blood in the water one touch in. I fleched off the line, hit him again to go up 2-0, and once again did the dirty bird back to the line. When I turned around to get back en garde, I saw two things: a middle finger from the Brown fencer pointed at me, and a black card extended at him from the referee. Mission accomplished!

Here are the signs you can probably capitalize on the opponent’s mental vulnerability:

• They argue excessively with the referee
• They get triggered when you yell or showboat, or if you hit them with a flashy touch
• They don’t take a loss with grace
• They complain about booboos after a hard hit or incidental corps-a-corps
• They’re Italian (it’s a joke y’all, calm down…unless?)

There’s an additional layer to this too: the Coach. If you watch tape and find a Coach that gets easily flustered, finding ways to set off the Coach can trigger a chain reaction to the fencer that creates beautiful chaos if you’re someone who enjoys watching the world burn.

While most fencers at the highest levels aren’t going to baited by mental antics, on the rare occasions they are (watch Pereira vs. Nikishin from the Doha Grand Prix for the ultimate masterclass in mind games), find ways to be an exploitive troll and get them so enraged that they forget how to fence. Exploiting mental vulnerability toes the line between (bad) sportsmanship and gamesmanship, but sometimes the road to glory is paved in the tears of milquetoasts.

Things to Call Out in “He Does”:

How the Opponent Moves: The first thing to call out in “he does” is an overall assessment of the Fencer’s movement style. Do they bounce? With what frequency? How do they move in and out of distance, and how do they use their feet to manipulate distance? Are they weirdly unorthodox and fence with a completely out of left field style (e.g. Mohammed Elsayed, Cupr, Galassi, Imrek) and if so how do you “cut through the noise” to understand the right approach?

School of Fencing: As a frame of reference, call out the style of Fencing the fencer generally uses (e.g. French, Hungarian, German, hybrid). Don’t assume that the school aligns to the nation they represent, as fencers might train abroad, or work with coaches originating from a particular school.

Preparations: How does this fencer like to set up and prepare touches? Do they prefer on blade or off blade preparation? How are they generally creating Oh $@&# Moments on the opponent?

How they Score: Favored closing actions and generally what they’re looking to hit with. Good to also call out the areas of the strip where they tend to be the biggest threat (and most vulnerable).

Tactical Tendencies: Some fencers have tactical comfort zones they like to begin and/or end matches with, and if there’s a consistent pattern in their bout approach, those should be mentioned. Three examples of this:

• At the start of a bout, Ruben Limardo is almost always going to pull, be exorbitantly patient, and wait for the opponent’s initiative. He will draw P-Cards until the cows come home (carrying P-Blacks).
• Ana Maria Popescu was almost always going to take the first period to look mostly for counter-offensive actions, feel the opponent out, and then up her aggression and offense in periods 2 and 3. (Average of 44 seconds per touch 1^st period, 26 seconds per touch 2^nd period, 18 seconds per touch 3^rd period)
• Mohammed Elsayed begins bouts very risk averse, and usually starts by pulling, making massive invitations to draw the attack, and look for a counterattack over the top. He’ll get more bold once he establishes a lead.

When you see tactical tendencies established by both the analytics and observation, bring those to the table.

Favored Closing Actions: How does this fencer usually close on offense? What about on defense? How do they like to score the final action?  

Case Study: Using Analytics, Coaching, and the Athlete to Pull an Upset

At the time of the 2022 Berne World Cup, Romain Cannone was the #1 ranked Men’s Epeeist in the world and had gone on a recently dominant tear that included the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Gold medal followed by a nearly impossible repeat at the 2022 Cairo World Championships. In between, he had medaled in several world cups and was seemingly unstoppable.

Despite the dominance of Cannone, as I began to analyze his data, I began to realize that there were some things he did exceptionally well, and some things that I hypothesized could be exploited. But as I dug even further into the weeds, I couldn’t believe my eyes just at how much fencers were allowing him to play in his area of excellence without stifling him.

American Nick Lawson was a freshman at Princeton at the time. He came into the 2022 Berne World Cup unseeded and managed to sneak into the Tableau of 64 only to draw Cannone.  

In that moment, I only had a few hours to make a strategy, consult with the national coaches (plus Nick’s coach Kornel Udvarhelyi), and make sure Nick was comfortable with it before gametime.

What Cannone’s Game is:

Cannone is a 5’9 French gripper. I liken his style of fencing to a killer bee: he’s constantly swarming in your face, imposing forward pressure on the push with his tip, working preps around your guard, and just when you think you’ve swatted him away, he will sting you.

He thrives at backing his opponents into a corner, drawing out their attack and squatting into the preparation before they’ve fully elongated.

He executes broken tempo attacks with gusto in which he’ll flick to the outside of the guard, pull the arm back and coupe to the inside with high success.

Your toe is always in danger with him. On your step forward, he’ll pop you. On your retreat, he’ll nail you before your back foot hits the ground.

But as you watch Cannone, you might notice something fairly consistent: he’s almost always on the push, he thrives on the push, and people seemed to let him bully them on the push!

Talking Data:

Now that we’ve talked a little bit about fencer archetypes, let’s dive into his data there. Take a look in the bottom section of his scouting report and you’ll notice that he’s pushing his opponents 65% of the time.

And when he’s on the push, he’s scoring a whopping 75% of his touches that way.

And seeing as the guy scores 51% single lights on his attacks (compared to 31% on defense), that presented another opportunity. The conclusion that can be reached here is that if you retreat on Cannone, give him space to operate and time to prepare, you’re going to have a bad time.

One other little nugget that I found as I really dug into the weeds: I noticed one other funny quirk worth exploring: 43% of the touches scored on Cannone were occurring in 10 seconds or less. The data presented opportunities, and it was time to create a strategy based on that.

Translating to the Athlete:

Every athlete is going to receive information differently. Yeisser tended to want a qualitative summary. Jonas Hansen wanted the full slate of numbers. Lawson tended to want a little bit of both.

So we decided to come up with the following themes for Lawson to explore:

1. Unrelenting forward pressure and back Cannone into a corner. Close hard and if you see the moment to go, don’t second guess yourself.
2. Smart aggression and take initiative on the attack instead of waiting for his action.
3. Do not let his preparations develop. Even if you think you’re not taking enough time to set it up, cut through his noise and go.  

How it Worked Out:

When I fell asleep the night before the T64, I had a bizarre dream that Nick Lawson was fencing Cannone in a cornfield with a fencing piste in it. Think of it like the baseball field in Field of Dreams, but with a Fencing piste surrounded by corn. Nick just kept pushing Cannone into the cornfield and bullying him. Why did my brain generate this subconsciously? Because I have rampant ADHD and my brain subconsciously decided this is how it would play out. Minus the corn, it played out exactly like this.

Lawson stuck to the strategy amazingly, and looking at his analytics post bout, they confirmed he stuck to the strategy given:

1. Of the 11 single lights scored by Nick in the bout, 7 of them were scored in 10 seconds or less. He didn’t give Cannone time to prepare and he used that 6’8 powerful frame of his to impose, pressure, and go.

2. Nick pushed in 91% of the bout and completely neutralized Cannone’s area of excellence here. He almost never let Cannone exert pressure and only allowed Cannone to push twice the entire bout.
3. Nick took initiative on the attack 63% of the bout, which was key.

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[1] Harmenberg, J. (n.d.). Chapter 6. Technique and Strategy. In Epee 2.6 (pp. 95)