As I mentionned, I have been working on my open guard game for a couple of months now. I have a solid closed guard game, but during my first competitions I found that if I am unable to pull guard, I’m worthless. And better opponents don’t walk straight into your guard.

Progress has been very slow, but at first I figured it was only due to me being still a white belt. Then that open guard is such a vast concept that it is necessarily hard to understand (which I still think is true). But after six month without much progress I decided to step it up, and it’s finaly paying off.

I’m lucky that we have a purple belt at my academy who has a similar morphology — and he plays a great open guard. i’ve been sparring a lot with him… and by sparring I mean he’s been smashing my guard over and over again. He gets side control, wait until I start escaping then stands up and starts over again. It’s great.

I’ve also done that perspective switching thing. I did one week focusing on leg work, one on my grips, one on straigth line theory, one on distance management. Throwing it all together I finally managed to piss someone off with my guard.

I’m also experimenting with two other aspects, the omoplata and the berimbolo. I manage to land the two quite often but I’m trying to initiate them from uncommon positions. The idea is somewhat similar for both techniques: I bait my opponent into hooking my right foot with his right arm or leg. If he uses the arm I try to roll, get my leg deep into his hook, grap his arm and omoplata him. If he uses his leg I try to get a grip and invert into a berimbolo/twister sweep like position, and experiment from there on.