9/20/09 DB Open Gathering Vid-clip

[Crafty Dog]

YouTube - Dog Brothers Open Gathering 2009

[wilclibri]

I agree, still a lot of tones missing especially in the background & on the waterfalls... I'll make sure to complete a project next time.

[Mananandata]

YouTube - Dog Brothers Open Gathering 2009

Great event!
What are those knives made of?

[Crafty Dog]

You're seeing different knives in there. While some are simply hard plastic, you also are seeing

a) "Shocknives". As the name implies, these are the one with a very sharp electrical charge.

b) aluminum trainers

c) some really big aluminum trainers

d) for those fighters seeking to develop their IFWA (in fight weapon access), a few try to use replica trainers i.e. training knives designed to be very close replicas of the particular knife that someone actually carries.

The challenge of course is provoking "realistic" behavior in what we sometimes call "sport knife dueling". What the hell is "realistic" anyway? Here is a thread that tries addressing the question: Respect the knife!. In a related vein, here is a discussion of stick vs. knife:
Some thoughts on my recent experience with stick versus knife....
On a deeper level there is this thread, which occasionally gets a bit warm
Tippy-tappy drills-- threat or menace?

But I digress , , , as I so often do. Please feel free to do so as well :-)

The Adventure continues,
Crafty Dog

[Tee Sok]

Thank you for sharing the discussions, they were very interesting.

I was surprised to see knives being pulled out in the fights, I didn't expect that as I had never seen that being done in a DB stick fight before. I don't know if the participants were aware of that possibility, but that added a lot to the unpredictability of a real situation. I mean everything was real except for the knives of course.
In my limited experience, knife drills were good to get familiar with angles, distance and so on, but when I sparred (with woodden knives) a lot of what I had trained was not necessary.
Also, in the DB video I saw weapons used as if they had a live blade and that "ended" the fight. In my opinion, you can't go further than that and as some of the members of the DBMA forum said people should really respect the knife and be in the correct mental state before sparring with replicas and training knives.
That's one of the reasons why some advanced instructors do drills with real knives (I posted one of them in the Indonesioan MA section) as the attention rises dramatically.

[Tee Sok]

In this video they taped the knives and only left the tip of the blade, like they did hundreds of years ago, and the aim here was to reach the heart.

YouTube - puntatina knife kombat Mario J vs Salvatore C (omaggio musicale x il film il padrino)

[banmark123]

I mean everything was real except for the knives of course.

[Crafty Dog]

Tee Sok:

Glad you enjoyed the discussions.

IFWA (in fight weapon access) is something I have been working on establishing within the DB Gathering culture for a couple of years now. Fighters can agree not to have hidden weapons, they just can't ASSUME no hidden weapons any more. I was very pleased to see at this Gathering how well this has become established.

While our IFWA has important differences from true self defense (e.g. pulling a big fixed trainer from one's waist band during a DB Gathering is different than accessing and opening a real folder in one's pocket during a criminal assault leaving one under an initiative deficit) I think it quite worthy to get people thinking about tracking an opponent's hands during an adrenal event and think that the power of this learning in the ritualized adrenal state typically will transfer over to real world benefit.

For the record, in our Euro DB Gatherings, they do not do this.

[Tee Sok]

Tracking the hands and being able to do it in the adrenal state does make sense. One of my teachers once told me to look at the opponent's shoulders during a knife fight in order to get a better overall vision witout focusing on the hands and not to be distracted by the eyes/face.

Probably in prisons as they use improvised knives and as they have to conceal them until the very last second, this kind of training (knives pulled out unexpectedly) is good. I was trying to find an eye-opening natgeographic documentary that had some footage of actual stabbing in a prison yard but it's now unavailable, instead I found these clips:

YouTube - Weapons in prison folsom prison

YouTube - Prison Weapons

[Crafty Dog]

If I understand your teacher's point correctly, he was addressing an issue of what to do when the adversary's knife is already out.

Here we are looking at the issue of criminal assault/ambush and/or an escalation of a previously unarmed fight.

Yes?

[Tee Sok]

Exactly. It's about a duel situation, I was never taught how to handle a situation where a knife suddenly comes out of nowhere. That's a totally different thing and that's what struck me in the video. That's a crucial point to take into consideration, getting your mind ready for whatever comes.

[Crafty Dog]

Which is precisely the point underlying the logic of our "Kali Tudo" empty handed material AND our "Die Less Often" material-- that we actually manifest using the same idiom of movement (as we say in DBMA "Consistency across categories") whether weapons are involved or not.

For a related discussion see
Kali Tudo
KALI TUDO (tm) Article