It's nice to have competitions so we can evaluate how effective training methods are. However in competition as it is commonly practiced today, we have overconfidence in the reliability of our results. Instead of assuming that the champion is the best in the world, we should assume that he was adequately trained to defeat his last opponent: in a tournament you do not know where one fighter stands against all the other fighters unless he fights them all, and you don't know what training methods were most effective if one fighter is excluded from losing only two matches. Double elimination means the best over all fighter could easily lose because he just happened to be beat by two individuals who could take him, while most of the rest of the individuals in his division could not take him.
Sounds crazy, right? This is me fighting Zack, everything he knows about knife fighting he learned from me, and when I fight him you can see the disparity between my superior knife skill level and his:
Since I started participating in the North West Warrior Tipon Tipon in 2017, the fighter who has given me the most grief goes by the name of "Scott." There are no official winners or losers at a Gathering like this, but the tale of the tape speaks for itself. Mine and Scott's first match was something like a draw, maybe slightly in his favor, which was strange for me because he was spastic and new a the time. A year or two later at our second confrontation, it was very one sided over all in his favor as he caught me with a snake-arm disarm, landing many knife thrusts to my mid section in less than 30 seconds, and otherwise seemed to outpace me with his footwork. But most problematically a year or two after that, even after I had specifically trained to fight him and integrated more of my Tai Chi push hands into my knife dueling, and even as I hit him with an epic push hands projection counter throw, he still clearly dominated me in over all deadliness, and the commentary behind the camera says it all:
Going by tournament logic, if Ben can take Zack, and Scott can take Ben, then Scott can take Zack, right? Wrong:
And I have numerous other examples, but this is the one most obviously involving my own personal practice of the martial arts that has video evidence. Going forward keep in mind that being able to beat one person does not guarantee that you could have beat anyone that one person has beaten. Competition is a great metric for us to have for evaluating training methods, but we often have more confidence in that data than we should.
