In the first hour, we worked on a pair of techniques. One of them was the same counter to the mount from Watchdog that we worked on Tuesday. The other was the knee wedge to Watchdog move when you've passed someone's guard and they are trying to block your hip with outstreched arms.
I remember doing something similar with the knee before from a slightly different top position. Or at least I think I remember.
Anyway, I worked with Bruce. It was good to be working on some relatively familiar, straightforward technques.
In the no gi class, Cindy had us work on guillotines and guillotine defense, as well as that nice arm-stuff triangle move from the guillotine. I worked with Andrew and Bruce. It was especially nice having Andrew there to point out mistakes and such when Cindy was working with other folks.
Cindy also had us work on another technique from the guillotine in the guard. This was one she had shown us before, I think. You release the lock under the neck and hook the near arm. Reach over the guy's back with your other arm and lock in a gable grip. Hug your elbows tight against your respective sides and turn him over.
If you need to use a butterfly hook or a stepover to finish the sweep, that's fine.
A good class. Everyone who rolls no gi should have a good guillotine game. It should almost be mandatory, but I see very few top-rate guillotine games - even at the elite level, sometimes. Everybody who does jiu jitsu owes it to themselves to have not just a pretty damn good guillotine, but also a good set of techniques based on the guillotine.
In fact, there are so many mediocre guillotines out there, just about everybody is convinced that they can escape. A lot of the time, they are right. But if you work on it, you can develop the kind of guillotine game that always gives you good options from a fairly-easy-to-achieve position.
I only got one 5-minute roll - a smashing by Andrew. He caught me in two or three chokes. I started out inexplicably with butterfly guard, then switched to half guard. He's a great guy to spar with for most of the obvious reasons. But it doesn't thrill me to spend a week of training where all I'm doing in sparring is getting smashed two weeks before a tournament (even if it is just a friendly tournament).
But I've been pretty sideways all week, to be honest. Hopefully the weekend with Marcelo Garcia will help snap me out of my funk. These days there seems as if there is a chasm between the jiu jitsu I want and the jiu jitsu I have. Here's hoping its just a phase.
