Competition result: 3rd place

Vids here:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6FAF6E42E7C87800

This was my first real competition (my previous competitions were all the type where you come in third because there’s only 4 people competing…). I lost my first match, and won my next two, one by side choke and one by an advantage.

It was a great experience, and made me realize what I need to work on. Aparently working on my bottom game for the last 6 months paid off because I never got my guard passed and was never controlled in any position. But now I need to get better at guard passing, my top game needs some improvements ! I wasn’t so sure about doing this competition, but I’m glad I took the risk. The experience of seeing what does and doesn’t work when you’re under pressure is invaluable.

And you learn a lot about yourself too. For example I learnt that despite training judo and chinese wrestling for some time now, I’m still a BJJ guy at heart. Why ? When I’m in trouble I fall back on my butt…

Armbar from Turtle

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=uZKxNiqu30U

Rafael Lovato Jr Highlight

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJzxLCCgJ8M

Jiu Jitsu drills

Fredson Paixao demonstrating some Jiu jitsu drills.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adOueUoWS4Q

Youtube Video Resources

Youtube is probably the best place for free grappling instructionals. If you know where to look, that is. Otherwise you might end up watching backyard grappling or maybe even worse…

Here are a few of my favorite youtube users’ homepage. By the way, those are ranked according to my own interests. For example SamboSteve’s vids are probably 5 star for someone who practices Sambo, but since I don’t, I only gave it 4 stars.

3 stars (good stuff)

• Sha167 (me): not much here, except a few good Roy Harris instructionals on escaping from Full Mount.
• LegendOfAndy: a lot of freestyle, folkstyle, and greco-roman wrestling highlights. Some good stuff there.
• JeanRotondaro: vids from a seminar by Robson Moura students.
• FighterFitness: a few good vids on the twister backmount (or back half guard)
• XJitsu: a collection of various BJJ and grappling techniques.
• CascadeRaft: Keith Owen (Pedro Sauer BB) vids.
• Xkidmidnightx: only two vids, but they show a very unusual guard (the “goro guard”)
• BJJtapes: 3 excerpts from Braulio Estima’s instructional
• AllianceBJJ: a few cool techniques.
• Tobystaley: a nice “locked guard” (meaning you never open your guard at all) sweep series
• Jasculls: only gets 3 stars because he can do a muscle up and I can’t. A really good vid on closed guard attacks.

Instructionals

For whatever reason, over the years I’ve downloaded bought a ridiculous number of instructionals. Of course I’ve watched maybe 50% and applied probably 10% of all this stuff. But my theory was that I might one day get stuck on a desert island with 50 bored passengers, a wrecked ship transporting judo mats, and my laptop, so you can never have too much instructional material.

The Inverted Spiderweb

If you look at my diagram in the previous post, you might notice there’s a position called the “inverted spiderweb” (I’ve decided “inverted” sounds cooler than “reverse” after all).

This is a fancy name for a very common situation, as demonstrated here by Mike Swain:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Hmzv0Nssz4A

Jujitsu Flow Diagram V1

This flowchat shows the current state of my jujitsu game. Not all of it – I wanted to keep the diagram clear and it’s not even finished yet. But it already made me think about a few things. First of all, some areas are more heavily populated than others. We can see that I have much more options from the back and the back mount than from side control top. I should probably work on my transitions and submissions from there.