Hold your knife in the hammer grip against your thigh.
Dark blade.
Dark pants.
At night or on an oblique approach.
When the enemy takes the step befor contact you step to meet them and make meat of them, poking your rear left fingers at their eyes while you slam a thumb-up stab in under the ribs, ideally entering between the abdominal ridges at the sola plexus.
This upward stab should always be delivered with a step and check.
Use the open feint hand to grab hair, hood, shirt or shoulder and pull them in as you rip down to the pelvis, then across, the blade kicking out on the hip.
Then move to engage the next foe, ideally to your left, which was my situation on Friday night.
This is, of course, ideal for taking two foes from the right or front.
If the second man is to the left, you push the gutted casualty onto his feet and plunge an overhand pronated thrust into the torso and go to close work.
Close work with traditional grip requires more empty hand assist, due to danger to the thump of your knife hand, which is why you use the hammer grip and not the saber grip.
Thanks to LaMano and PR for sparking this entry.
Being a Bad Man in a Worse World
Fighting Smart: Boxing, Agonistics & Survival