On the day of the tournament, it is generally a good idea to arrive about an hour before the tournament will begin (also known as close of registration). You will check in with your ID card. If you did not already do weapons check, you must do this and get your glove and mask stamped. Some places, especially national tournaments, will also check your 2 body cords and label them with tape and they may also check your lame if you fence foil. You only need to do weapons check once for the whole tournament. Once checked in, get warmed up and try to do some practice bouting 15-20 mins before your tournament will begin. If other members of the team are at the tournament, they can do warm-ups with you even if they are not fencing at that time if they are available. NEFC will generally have a banner marking a place where people can congregate, find others, and leave some of your stuff.
For most tournaments, all the information you will need to follow the tournament can be found at Fencing Time Live. It is invaluable to have a phone with a full charge as Fencing Time Live will tell you where you need to go. (And you might want to record some videos).
Prior to the start of the tournament, fencers are seeded. The seeding is based first on their national ranking. They are seeded secondarily based on their letter classification. Anyone with a current national ranking will be seeded above anyone without one. Once the nationally ranked fencers have been seeded, fencers are then seeded by letter classification from A to U. Within a given letter, the higher seed is given to the fencer that earned the letter most recently (B22 is seeded above B20; the numbers refer to the year the letter was earned).
Here is a typical initial seeding:
The seeding is then used to construct the pools. The desired number of fencers for each pool is 7, but pools are occasionally as big as 9 or 10 and as small as 4 or 5 depending on the total number of registrants and age groups. To estimate the number of pools, divide the number of fencers by 7 and go up to the next whole number (so if there were 31 fencers, 31/7= 4.4 so round up to 5).
Pools are then filled by what is colloquially known as “the snake”. The #1 seed goes into the first pool, #2 into second. In our example of 31 fencers, when you get to the 5th pool with the #5 seed, the “snake” turns and the #6 seed is also placed into the 5th pool (i.e., they are the second fencer added to that pool). The #7 seed enters the 4th pool and this continues until the #10 seed is added to the 1st pool at which point the snake turns again and the #11 seed is also added to the first pool as its third fencer. This continues until all the fencers are placed. You can see that there is an advantage to being the #1 seed as the second strongest fencer in your pool is set up to be much weaker than you are. Of course, there are always surprises and there are always fencers who are improving quickly, so it’s great to be a strong fencer with a high initial seed, but also always be wary.
The fencers will then fight everyone else in their pool in a 5 point match. If you are using Fencing Time Live, you can see the fencers “pool” under the pools icon at the top. If you find the pool and click on “details”, you can also see the bout order so you can help your fencer know their turn. The fencers are also all assigned a number (to the right of their name). Referees often call the fencers by their number (1 vs 3) rather than by their name. The fencer called first hooks up on the right unless the fencer is left handed (left handed fencers always hook up on the left unless both are left handed then they follow the normal convention where first called hooks up on the right).
At the conclusion of pools, all the fencers in the tournament will be reseeded based on the pool results. The fencers are sorted based on 3 criteria: 1) the percentage of bouts won from 0.00 to 1.00 (V/M); 2) the “indicators” (Ind)—the difference between touches scored (TS) and touches received (TR), the more positive the better; 3) the total number of touches scored. If there is a tie for the first two items, then the fencer scoring more touches is seeded ahead. If all of these measures are equal, the fencers are tied and they are randomly selected to fill the two corresponding positions when the elimination bracket is constructed. An example of pool results is shown below:
