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DaFranker comments on Rationality Quotes December 2012 - Less Wrong
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What works in chess does not necessarily generalize to swordfights. In a duel your responses to your opponent's techniques are mostly cached actions carried out on reflex, and and any ideas you might have about how many times your opponent is likely to try any particular move are not likely to have that much influence on how you react.
How you set up the move certainly makes a difference, the same technique can be used in many different ways, but if you take a specific approach and your opponent defeats it once, you shouldn't count on it working the next time, and if they defeat it twice, you should be even more confident it won't work if you try it again.
From my experience as a fencer, I can affirm that facing a beginner can be disorienting, because when you train to respond to intelligent and efficient techniques, unintelligent and inefficient ones are just confusing. I've never known an experienced fencer to lose to a newbie, because when one person is using efficient techniques and the other isn't, and both are unfamiliar with how to respond to their opponent, the efficient one will win, but it can be pretty frustrating.
On the other hand, having a newbie opponent try the same thing repeatedly even when it's not working is one of the least troublesome things they're likely to do.
Yes, I fully agree that things will work differently depending on the specific rules of the specific competition.
I'm mostly referring to questions of strategy and metagame. In terms of a specific type of strike in fencing, for instance, things have to become a bit more contrived for this to become applicable. Two really great fencers could, for instance, face off in a duel of mindgame meta, where one strikes twice in a manner that is unlikely to succeed, but is an attack on the pacing of the duel, attempting to take control of it, which the other will respond to.
On the third attempt of this technique, the opponent might anticipate a slight change in the technique, such as the strike turning into an actual attack, and prepare a more diverse set of reactions to counter how their opponent might avoid their default reaction (which they have now seen twice, and may have figured out a way to circumvent). Then, the game takes more depth, as both fencers become aware that there are more possible reactions, but that who takes control of the battle's pacing will depend on the attacker's anticipation of their opponents' style and possible reactions.
As I said, very contrived, but I could plausibly see this happening in high-caliber duels, naturally occurring at the quarter-second level or faster, particularly for fencing from what I know.