My sixth ‘People Who Read People’ podcast episode is an interview with Seth Baldwin. Seth is an experienced fencer (swords, not fence posts) who, at the peak of his career, finished 3rd in 2004 at the U.S. National Championships and was 7th alternate for the Olympic fencing team.
Links to the episode:
In this episode, we talk about:
- Some basics of fencing maneuvers and strategy
- The role of skill vs luck/variance in individual fencing matches
- The role psychology and “action anticipation” play for skilled fencers
And Seth also likes to play poker, which is how we know each other, and so along the way we talk a little bit about poker and poker analogies.
In this episode I mention a couple studies I found regarding behavior analysis in fencing and here those are:
- 2016 study: “Recognizing fencing attacks from auditory and visual information: A comparison between expert fencers and novices”
- 2010 study: “Visual perception in fencing: Do the eye movements of fencers represent their information pickup?”
And here is a link to one of Seth’s fencing training videos on YouTube, which he mentions in the podcast. He has several videos up.