I just started listening to the Audio Book Yoda: Dark Rendezvous. So far I love the book. Like the Jedi Apprentice series this book gives a look inside the Jedi Temple and how the young Jedi are trained. One of the things that seemed a little odd to me though was the lightsaber tournament at the Temple. Here is a little background for those that are not familiar with the books.
It is common for the young Jedi in the time before the Purge to be involved in lightsaber training and tournaments. Because of the possible danger untrained apprentices could pose using lightsabers, these soon to be Jedi would use "training sabers" which were less powerful versions of the lightsaber. These training sabers would not cut through a person, but they did leave a pretty bad burn. In the tournament featured in Dark Rendezvous, the young Jedi had to strike their opponent 3 times with their lightsaber in order to defeat them. The other way to win would be to have your opponent submit. The thing that I found odd was the lack of saber strikes in the tournament and the large amount of wrestling type moves. Apparently many of the apprentices at this time were trained in fighting techniques by Jedi Master Xan who was a female instructor at the Jedi Temple. She was known for her knowledge of close combat and was nicknamed Iron Hand. I guess she taught the children to use these grappling techniques as often as possible, because the lightsaber tournament seemed to be more like a wrestling tournament. The matches were being decided by submission holds more often then lightsaber burns. The girl that ended up winning barely used her saber at all, and I don't think she landed even one saber strike. If this is the way the Jedi are trained to fight, I'm surprised Obi-Wan didn't put Darth Maul into a choke hold rather than cut him in half or Anakin didn't get Dooku into a wrist lock instead of relieving him of his wrists.

I just found it kind of weird

Aa-Ron Jinn