For our upcoming agon, on Saturday 4/19/14, we won’t have any reliable score keeper. The absence of seconds and time keepers is not an issue as this is a blade contest. I would like to return to something we did in the very beginning, in 2000, out at Riverside Park: a round-robin point elimination format.

We will fight with an uneven number of weapons, in rounds.

Each fighter begins a round with 5 points.

Fighters engage from oldest to youngest.

When a fighter is struck cleanly, without countering within a beat, he steps down and loses a point.

The next fighter in the rotation [which will alter during the round] engages the fighter who scored.

Mutual and countered strokes are re-done until there is a clean point.

The last fighter with a point remaining wins that weapon round.

If there is a tie after the agreed upon number of weapon rounds those two fighters shall fight a five point round with a weapon set determined by the losers—a famously unsympathetic demographic—to decide the day.