I personally know William, so I feel he will not be offended if I contribute to his little thread here. My pekiti tersia instructor, Al Solomon, always said you have one chance in a knife fight and after that you are pretty much just depending on being lucky. In other words, if you don't succeed in a disarm or a counter-attack during the initial 'meet' if you don't get distance immediately you will probably get cut. Another thing, at the Buddhai Sawan when we practiced knife techniques we needed an area about 20 X 20 because we would jump around and stay as far away from each other as possible just so we wouldn't get cut because we were trying to fight knife to knife. The idea being to only attack when the other person is mispositioned or overextended during his attempt to strike you. I have stated in other threads our theory that if you have time/distance to get your own knife out you have time/distance to throw it at your opponent. Unfortunately many people when they watch a Filipino Martial Arts drill they assume it is the way to actually fight with a knife. Training attributes is very important, but please remember you are TRAINING, and not fighting. Most instructors I have seen in the United States forget the footwork aspect of their 'knife art', rendering it into somewhat less than an art and more into a mechanically inefficient system of rote arm movements, almost always culminating in "then you just step around here and cut their head off."
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