The guillotine according to Cesar Gracie

I'm on-call this week (Friday morning to Friday morning) so I can't train. The on-call guy for our team is expected to be within about 10-15 minutes from logging in to a machine at work to start working in case there's a problem, and somehow that doesn't really jive with being called in the middle of a match. I can't spar with my torn finger tendon anyway so it's not that big a loss, I just go a little harder on the calisthenics and mix in some weights. It turns out that medicine ball workouts are great for finger injuries since you just wrap the fingers in a gentle curve and hold them there the whole time (minus throwing exercises).

At any rate the guillotine has been bugging me for a long time. Obviously it's a powerful move, and simple to apply at a generic level, meaning anyone can slap it on and get it if the other guy is dumb or not paying attention. But there are a few details that take this simplest of techniques to a whole new level of ass-kickery. So where does this tie into Cesar Gracie? Well, since I can't train I fired up his excellent BJJ DVD and started watching his no-gi guillotine section (DVD #3, 30 minutes in).

My beef with the guillotine is simple - I think that most the time we see it thrown it's not really a submission attempt as much as it is an attempt to make up for a poor takedown defense. Guys find themselves on the bad end of a double-leg and know they can't stop it so they reach down and try to get a forearm across a throat. The result is almost always the aggressor passing the guard to the side opposite that which his head is stuck and negating the crappy, desperate guillotine while sliding easily into a position that the bottom guy could have at least made him work to get if he wasn't trying to go for a sloppy guillotine. I guess that's a problem with the application of the technique rather than the technique itself.

But Cesar (rather than call him Gracie, which is ambiguous in BJJ conversations...) has two tricks for this. The first assumes you're paying attention, and that you want to stay on your feet (you can always go down later). As your opponent charges in you want to stop his momentum with your hands on his shoulders if possible. It's important to sprawl a little, but to get a standing guillotine you don't really want to sprawl on him entirely because there's a good chance he'll stumble or otherwise go down.

If you can stop his momentum, slide your forearm down the side of his neck (rather than a big, looping lasso of a movement) and cinch in the guillotine, while moving your hips under him a little. If you don't move your hips under him and he's tall you won't have the room to choke or crank him properly; you'll be yanking his neck on your tip-toes and he'll be fine. With your hips under him you change the angle. Now you pull up on his neck and you can actually get him to dangle his entire body weight from his neck alone, which even if it doesn't choke it hurts like a bitch.

The second trick Cesar demonstrated was for those times that you're just plain going down and want to grab the neck. You know, those scenarios I just complained about above. His technique changes the order of operations.

Cesar falls back on the ground without grabbing the neck at all, and immediately closes guard so his opponent can't just walk around to side control. From there to apply the guillotine he opens guard, puts his hands on the floor behind him to push himself up to a 90-degree sitting position, THEN he wraps the guillotine. After it's wrapped he closes guard and leans backward again. Now that's a choke. He also mentions that in case it doesn't land quite correctly you can't pull the head to the right (assuming you used your right arm to lock the guillotine). Now it's a painful crank.

This is a beautiful set of details because I so often see people trying to land a guillotine from closed guard. It's sure safe - you never opened guard so you didn't risk anything. But you can't get the correct angle with your forearm under the neck unless you open guard and sit up, so you're not just wasting your time, you're burning energy and arm strength with almost zero hope of submitting your opponent.