Benjamin Green

Can the person deal with a decent attack? Can they reliably stop the other guy?

Of course in order to do that you have to have people who are skilled at attacking - and that's where a lot of aikido clubs seem to fall down. The minute you lose that selection pressure the rest of it starts to go squify.

To a certain extent, if you know what a decent attack looks like, you can just eyeball it. Some things you can look at and see how wide open the other person is - how inefficient their movement. And you know, sure as sure, if that's the best they can do, you could take them.

It's harder to judge relative skill. You can generally tell if you can take someone less skilled than you - but it can be hard to judge who's just a little bit more skilled than someone else when they're both less skilled than you. Then again, I'm not sure whether there's much merit in measuring such small differences in skill to begin with. One or two belts between people... a lot of the time, it could still go either way, in my opinion.

A fair bit of what someone'd actually do in a fight just comes down to what sort of person they are. As far as the effectiveness of their technical skills goes though - sure.