by Sean Holtzman

Hello everyone! Welcome to our first Lightspeed Rogue Series Write-up! Here we will have some recaps and breakdowns of what goes on about the fights, some gifs of highlights from the fight, and hopefully get you a nice reading experience to get the experience of the fight in another medium.

Due to the pandemic, the Rogue Series is being filmedfollowing all medical professional standards of safety. We practice safe social distancing, choosing airy outdoor locations, requiring cloth masks underneath the fencing masks, a lack of physical contact among participants as much as possible in the ring, and required among the other fighters and crew who are working or spectating. We provide and utilize plenty of cleaning and sanitation supplies as well.

For our second show episode, we added a second fight for viewers to watch, as well as some highlights that never made it to show in the first day's matches! 

For the recaps, first we saw the fight between Hunter Allison of Lightspeed Saber Irvine and Nick Richardson from Penguin Saber Academy, both very traditional fighters in very different European based styles - Hunter with two handed swords and Nick with Fencing - with Nick taking a lead after figuring out the necessary dodge and lunge distances, as well as timing to get in between Hunter's extremely long reaching shots! 

Second we saw Elizabeth Panos from Lightspeed Saber Buena Park make an amazing effort coming off a quarantine break, but get caught off by the consistency that Amy Rooney from Penguin Saber managed.

For the start of Rogue Series Episode Two's premiere fights we saw William Alonzo of Lightspeed Saber Los Angeles, a fighter for over around 4 years, take on one of the newer instructors for Lightspeed Saber Irvine, Brandon Nease. Although Nease is less experienced in fighting, he has a long history of professional dancing and has an amazing athleticism and eye for detail and adaptation that has quickly progressed him through the ranks and to be able to fight toe to toe with many veterans.

From the start this showed itself to be an amazingly athletic fight with tons of lunging and leaping backwards from both competitors. Nease applied a ton of early ring-control with a lot of rushing forward to keep Alonzo contained, a strategy he mentioned he would likely need as Alonzo has a well known aggressive and accurate blade work style as well as expert use of feints (12:30). Following this, Alonzo still took an early lead until he backed away from a strike by Nease interrupting the flow he had had going on before. Nease used this opportunity, and his explosive and long lunging distances, as Alonzo found his pacing again to slowly start working his score up while slowly losing more and more ground to Alonzo who got more aggressive in his own ring control, taking back  the ring while making Nease work extremely hard to take the first round 10-8.

The second round saw Nease take a commanding lead, really pushing in from a distance on Alonzo with his lunges (17:30), which Alonzo caught pace of and started dodging back at incredible speed himself, while also switching up his striking style in the middle into an off-angle and change-up style that hit Nease hard in the middle of the round and created a second round where Nease's amazing lunging barely pulled ahead 11-8. 

Starting with the third round, Alonzo took a dominating round as Nease conserved energy,having a two round lead. Alonzo started going low, utilizing Nease's lunging style against him and as Nease came in, we would see Alonzo with great reads and sniping hands or arms, or dropping into squats to avoid a more vertical strike. 

In the fourth round Alonzo took another dominating lead by drastically changing to a range-wary hand snipe style of combat, throwing Nease off from the style he had been fighting before, allowing Alonzo to take a 9-0 lead.

Things were really not looking good that round for Nease, but he chose an interesting route, instead of staying back and trying to utilize his lunging range he moved the combat in closer, preventing hand sniping and moving into an area where lower blade interaction and defensive actions were possible instead of just letting Alonzo's blade work dominate unchallenged, having found the weakness of Alonzo's style, defensive interactions past the first blade contact if he can't dodge out and get back to a safe distance and allowing him to back-to-back take defensive action bonuses into a 12-9 finish and taking his 3rd round to win the Rogue Series match!

The second Rogue Series match presented in Episode 2 was Tony Zaldua from Lightspeed Saber Los Angeles against Richard Garcia, a fencing coach from Griffin Fencing. This was a huge battle of fighting ideologies and backgrounds. Zaldua is notorious for an extremely fine-tuned controlled style with amazing athleticism and endurance, which has led him to quickly become the League Champion over the two and a half years he has been fighting with us. Not to be outdone, Garcia has a decade or more of proper and competitive fencing experience and is an extremely well-controlled and strategic fighter himself, although most of his competition experience is in fencing and is a relative newcomer into the Lightspeed scene in competitive experience.

The first round saw each opponent throwing out shots, sizing the other up and getting a feel for each other’s ranges, lunge distances, defensive or reactive habits, and even how the judges happened to read contacts in an effort to make sure they could maximize points awarded as they both fight extremely accurately and prefer hitting the opponent with the last 2 inches or so of the blade to keep themselves safe. This feeling out window led to Zaldua seeing how well baiting Garcia would do and some amazingly clean hand snipes for Zaldua (34:15) as Garcia lunged in; and some extremely clean parry-ripostes, the most points-efficient strikes you can make, while maintaining a punishingly long engagement distance that led Garcia to win the first round 11-6.

In the second round we saw Zaldua take to extremely aggressive and quickly adjusting footwork with some amazingly well timed hand sniping regardless of defensive or lunging from Garcia. Garcia did not let this get to him, continuing some amazing defensive actions, despite Zaldua starting to find good countering timing, and working extremely hard to take the second round against Zaldua 12-9. 

Zaldua, however, would not go down without a serious fight, having spent two rounds making Garcia work hard while Zaldua learned his distancing he very quickly countering the lunging timing and managing his distance, with a pacing shift that turned from clean shots into very close, hard to call timing differences, with lots of double calls from the refs, slowly allowing Zaldua to take the third round, not in the clear yet, but certainly showing his ability to adapt very quickly to new fighting styles.

The Fourth round saw Zaldua really getting the distancing right, and explosively returning, while also upping his defense (45:55, 47:33), showing him really figuring out his opponent, and having really found where Garcia's style and pacing keeps him. Garcia really swapped up how he decided to fight in the 5th round once his lunging was countered, getting more defensive and getting closer into Zaldua's range to get the blade work he is amazing at to benefit him. This was a strong strategic push that also had him pushing slowly and methodically towards Zaldua and keeping Zaldua pinned to the corner for the first 45 seconds of the round so badly that Zaldua couldn't leap back out of range if he pushed forward any longer. However, Zaldua had figured out his number in those last rounds, making it extremely difficult for the amazing blade work of his opponent to land as he lept to gain strategic and off-angle dodges and snipes (49:50, 51:44) to take the final round 10-1.

Zaldua shows why he is the highest scoring and top fighter in the league. Very early on he found that he wasn't going to win in a blade work competition against an experienced and skilled fencing opponent. And to play to his strengths, he used his athleticism and his pin-point accuracy and focused on the sub-fights he could win each round, making sure he didn't leave himself in the position where his opponent could sneak in opportune shots unchallenged. His adaptation allowed him to claw his way back, not only from the 0-2 round setback, but eventually completely confound and dominate his opponent.

Garcia showed an amazing amount of blade and pacing control. He routinely had Zaldua on the ropes where Zaldua's only hopes wasto try and get a shot in to at least minimize the points lost if he could, or double out and limit the amount of points that Garcia was able to accrue. Garcia was certainly a bit out of his element, unable to stab, and minimized himself taking advantage as he would fencing, normally, showing an extremely high level of skill, awareness, and control that was quite intimidating to the few other Lightspeed fighters that have fought him. It will certainly be amazing to see how his experience and style evolve as he becomes more experienced with Lightspeed's format, and if he went toe to toe with a champ already you better be sure he will be one to watch!

Sean Holtzman
LSL Director of Southern California
Rogue Series Staff Director