And this time, my hand was raised… My first victory in a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu competition.

My silence over the weekend was due to being busy trying not to get my butt kicked during my second ever Brazilian Jiu Jitsu tournament (In case you wondered why I took so long replying!).

This one was a smaller event than the first tournament I competed in (you can read about my experience here). This tournament was also only for white belts so it had a more relaxed feeling to it. 

As per usual, women fight first so I arrived to the venue half an hour early than the official starting time so I had time to say hello to my team mates and claim my spot in our base, get changed and start warming up before my first fight.  

After the Tournament’s inaugural speech and weight ins, I stepped on the mats for my first fight. I remembered looking into my opponents face and seeing the morning sunshine making her eyes very blue and bright. After a brief time seizing each other up during the stand-up part, I took the fight to the ground by doing a guard pull. She started passing so she ended up in top half guard; at this point, I had one of my hands deep on her collar creating a frame to prevent her from passing, but then I got the thought of going for a baseball bat choke.

This is exactly what I did (the video from my match was shaky and taken from far away in an odd angle that doesn’t show the choke, so this video will have to do instead, to give you an idea), the choke I used is shown in the first 15 seconds:

I remember thinking: “I got her! This is over”. Only a few seconds later, I saw her roll her eyes. She didn’t tap out in time so she went unconscious as a consequence of my choke. I was shocked, I didn’t expected that to happen. As soon as I felt her go limp, I released my grip and simultaneously the referee called off the fight. She started making snoring noises and convulsing while still laying on top of me, it was unexpected and unsettling.

She was only unconscious for a few seconds, and then immediately opened her eyes again and started looking around her in confusion. “What happened?” was the first thing she said. The referee and her coach were now assisting her and making sure she was alright. “The fight is over, you got choked” “It’s alright” they said. She looked at them in disbelief; clearly the shock of going unconscious played some trick on her immediate memory.

It was also very awkward since my fight was the opening fight of the tournament, so everyone was watching. Then, when everything happened, there was this dead silence.  

Once it was established that everything was alright and the referee raised my hand declaring me the winner, there was a big round of applause. 

However, by the way they were looking at me, for a moment it felt like I was Chong Li combined with Tong Po:  

Funnily enough, as upsetting as the experience was for me, everyone else seemed to be looking at it from a completely different perspective. Right after my fight, my professor/coach approached me and said “See how the choke works much better when you pull them close to you?” (He was referencing a mistake I made in my first tournament). I could tell he was beaming with pride.

When I told one of my friends, who is a professional Mixed Martial Arts fighter, his comment was “Hahaha, you are a savage!”. Similarly, when I arrived next Monday for training, seemed like the story of my putting someone to sleep during my first fight had made the rounds, got lots of congratulations (one of my friends even said “I’m so jealous!” – What?) and now they have given me the nickname of “Miss Baseball bat choke” and “Baseball bat choke Irime”.

If you are not familiar with how chokes work you are probably thinking right now “Wow, what a bunch of careless assholes” (or something less rude and indelicate in case you don’t have a pirate mouth like I do), but let me explain.

When a choke is very tight, it usually cuts the circulation of blood to the head, causing your brain to shut down in a few seconds in response. This can happen very fast, so sometimes people don’t tap out (make a signal for you to let go) in time and they fall unconscious – thus it is not rare to see this happening in competitions, were people hold on resisting for longer in hopes of not losing the fight.

However, upon immediate release, the blood flow is restored and the brain resumes normal function, jolting the body back to conscious mode. At that point, your brain only spent a few seconds deprived of its normal oxygen supply, so there is no significant (if any) damage as a result – the true danger comes from holding a choke for a prolonged time (more than a few seconds), which can cause brain damage or, if kept for long enough, death. But this doesn’t happen in competition or in training since everyone releases the pressure immediately.

In summary, while getting choked out is definitely not good for you, it is not as harmful as it might seem (as long as you release it as soon as the person loses consciousness); for the most part, you just wake up right away feeling embarrassed and confused. In this sense, a joint lock –attacking the knee or shoulder– could be much more dangerous, since it can cause lasting damage, and depending on the severity of it, it can even be life-altering.   

But anyway, let’s talk about what happened next in the tournament: 

I had one more fight in my weight class, the final for the gold medal. This was against a girl I had observed in the last tournament, and I remember thinking she looked very technical and experienced in her matches back then. So, we shook hands, the referee shouted “FIGHT!” and it all started. 

She tried to take me down several times but didn’t manage to. Then I did a guard pull that ended up with me being in bottom half guard. She moved so tightly that I had trouble stopping her from passing my guard, and eventually she managed to take my back. She went for a choke but I defended it and got out. Then she trapped my arm and went for an armbar, I tried to defend but in the end she caught me with a belly down armbar and that was it. The balance of the universe was now restored: I had lost my second match.

After her hand was raised and we exited the combat area, I met my teammates. One of them told me: “Irime, you tried to defend the armbar by rolling… but instead of rolling out you rolled right into it, so you basically gave her your arm for free!”. Yep, that’s what I did. Because, you know, white belts... (later I found out that another one of my teammates who is much more experienced than me made the exact same idiot move in the final match for his weight class, so I felt a bit less bad about it). 

White belts...

She suggested that next time, I kept my arms closed, don’t let go of the arm being attacked and applied shoulder pressure instead to escape. 

After going to the podium to get my medal, I signed up for open class. This is a round of fights were all weight divisions get combined, so you fight against both lighter and heavier opponents. It is a good way to get extra fights and also to test your Jiu Jitsu in a challenging way.

My shiny silver medal.

That face you make right before getting destroyed in open class... (note to self: do not ask BJJ fighters to take photos, they have shaky hands!)

In my first march for the open class, I went against the heaviest girl in the female division. She was a four-stripe white belt wearing a tattered looking belt, which I interpreted as a signal that she was probably quite experienced as well. I knew this match would be very tough, so I made it a point to give it everything I had.

I got smashed. She was applying lots of pressure from the top position and I was unable to escape or attack from the bottom. At some point I got her with my baseball bat choke, and I got really excited for a moment, but she powered out of it and released her neck from my grip. I was overwhelmed by her, she was very tight in her way of moving as well, leaving very little space for me to escape or reestablish my guard and crushing me under her weight.

Then I learned that my Jiu Jitsu is not good enough yet to deal with a trained person who is also about 15 kg heavier than me (she was competing in the +75 kg weight class, I weighed in at 63 kg wearing my gi for this competition). At least I didn’t get submitted and endured the entire match defending her attacks. I also immediately applied my teammate’s advice, and that got me out of a rather tight armbar attempt. But in the end I lost, quite miserably by a lot of points (I scored zero points in this match). My coach was refereeing my fight and at the end he said “good effort” but I could tell he was disappointed. So was I, I hoped to do more. But as always, more training is required.  

In the end, I discovered that I really like competing mainly due to the following factors:

• It’s exciting! Also, it is fun to cheer for your teammates and bond with them. 
• It’s a true test of your Jiu Jitsu and a better indicator of where you stand in the grand scheme of things. You face a wide variety of opponents with different strategies, styles and degrees of experience than you.
• It is great to highlight weaknesses and mistakes that you need to work on. For example, it was very clear this time that I need to work on not letting my back get taken so easily!
• It gives you something to work towards, keeps you focused on your training and gives you motivation to achieve more.
• It makes you fearless. You learn to stay calmed in the middle of the storm and to control your nerves so you can think clearer and perform better.

Bonus:

If you are a fan of the baseball bat choke (like myself), and would like to adapt it to no gi, here is a very useful video showing how to do it:

In the video above, Eli Knight’s description says: this is a deceptive choke, hard to see coming and hard to defend by the time you see it. I can say I fully agree!

Until the next time, 

Irime