UPDATE on Tourney...
It was a great experience to enter this tournament. Many famous BJJ black belts were there. I bumped into a guy and when I said excuse me, I noticed that he was Marcelo Garcia. I'm not the kind of guy to make a big deal of it, so I just kept walking, but I'm 99.9% sure it was him.
More importantly, I learned something about BJJ tournaments and that is that they are nothing like I expected them to be. When you are training, you learn to constantly look to advance your position, for example you try to pass the guard, establish side control, then maybe move to knee on belly, then mount, then maybe go for a submission. But this does NOT seem to be the game plan for the experienced players. You'll only see this happen when the two people are totally mismatched.
Instead, I've noticed that when a guy gets up in points, maybe because they get a take down, their main goal is to just maintain their position for the rest of the time and win by points. They'll just block up and hold on until time runs out. If a golden opportunity is there, they'll take it, but they really aren't looking to do anything once they are up on points.
The vast majority of matches ended as 2-0 or 0-0 with an advantage. The coaching that was being yelled was focused on telling the winning guy how much time was left and reminding him to keep a solid base.
I was a little let down by that. I thought the matches would be more exciting. I think those tourneys where you can only win by submission would be more exciting and fun to watch. I wonder if the more local tournaments like NAGA are different because the guys want to test their skills a little more. The competitors in this tourney seemed to have a pure tournament strategy that didn't have much to do with trying to go skill against skill but was instead focused on getting an advantage and then defending it until time runs out.
Anyway, my strategy was flawed. I pulled guard, but ended up getting just half guard and tried to work my bottom game. My opponent was focused on maintaining top position, which made it very hard to sweep him. We had a little back and forth, I was able to get a gi choke on him, but he was able to pull out of it and he got up on points. After that, he was focused on maintaining top position and I was trying to sweep him. I was able to eventually sweep him, but was totally exhausted by the time I was successful (word of advice, be in excellent shape before entering a tourney). He got me in his full guard and was able to get a gi choke on me that I couldn't defend. In summary, he was more experienced, had a better tournament strategy, and was in better shape. He was also a nice guy, so congrats to him.
If I was to enter a tourney again, my strategy would be to never pull guard unless I was off balance and falling down. The majority of the time, I've noticed, when someone was able to take the other guy down and be in at least half guard or better, that person ended up winning, and usually 2-0. Sometimes, the bottom guy would get desperate because they were down on points and would try something drastic, but they often ended up with the top guy getting an easy pass and getting a couple extra points. Guys that got early advantage and just hung out waiting for the other guy to get desperate and give easy passes did the best in the tourney.
In your experiences, are all tournaments pretty much like this?
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Originally Posted by Nick Powers
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