Vincent Paglia

I practice Aikido, but not Tomiki (Shodokan?) Aikido, and I wanted to get a sense of how aikido techniques are used in competitions, so I watched a couple Tomiki tournament videos. The kata sections seemed fairly familiar to me, the techniques were familiar but the energy of the students (much of it seemed aggressive to me) was not.

But what I really was confused about was the competitive part. I didn't see any aikido techniques utilized at all. One person had a tanto and the other was unarmed, and they basically danced around and pushed at each other. To an outsider ignorant of the rules, it looked like sumo wrestling for small people.

Could someone shed some light on tomiki competitions? My guess was that if the tanto touches you, you're out or the other person gets a point, etc. How does the unarmed person get points? How does the competition reflect/assist aikido development?

Thanks for any info on this.