This was a phenomenal weekend. I got to meet so many awesome people and learn so fucking much jiu jitsu. It's becoming quite expected to meet top notch, quality people whenever I make the trip up there. I met so many people that I've talked to on the forum that I didn't even need to tell my name to, "Ross, right?!" It's amazing to be welcomed like family by people I've never even met in person before.
We got in Friday evening for the open mat and proceeded to have a BLAST. I heard someone say that it reminded them of a shark tank, except that everyone was being shark tanked, and it was packed more than any gym I've ever trained at. So for about 2 1/2 hours, I got to roll with absolute killers. Repeatedly. Over and over. Nonstop. It was absolutely insane.
Then Saturday rolled around, and while there were only two or three rolls in the cards for me, the amount of jiu jitsu knowledge that I received will probably leave me trying to master for years. Eddie is awesome. I felt like I was in an episode of MTS. I'm not going to divulge exactly what we worked on, but I will say that my spider web, truck, and quarter guard have all been upgraded, hardcore.
But that's not the only stuffs that was passed along to me. After the 3 hour seminar began 4 hours of watching, discussing, and personalized attench to many intricacies of the game, things to do better in my game, and whole new ways of thinking about how to play.
Sean Applegate is a wizard. He straight up schooled me on the nogi berimbolo. And it's gonna take me quite some time to get this as a staple in my game, but my thinking has already been changed. The very next roll I had, I immediately started looking to set up the DLR while my opponent was standing, and we didn't even go over it for situations when the opponent is trying a standing pass. So basically, what I'm really trying to say is, the berimbolo is crazy legit nogi, Sean Applegate is a wizard, and if you aren't trying to get this into your game you're greatly limiting your mind to some really awesome jiu jitsu.
Also, there were so many people that just wanted to hang out and practice different techniques. Bobby Rivers was really, really helpful with advice for my game, and showed me quite a few things to tweak and add to make my already established game better. Sam Davis gave me some great advice to work on for the next few years, as did Tori Applegate. And of course, it didn't take Bmac long to find a pretty big defect in my game that I need to work on.
And that was all amazing, but the person I want to thank most is Alberto Moya. He opened his home to a bunch of us this weekend and even cooked us all a delicious breakfast yesterday. Class act.
Great trip. Can't wait to get back out there.
