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A Thought on The Scramble: Hitting the Deck
I've been helping one of the instructors at my BJJ school get the kids ready for an upcoming tournament, and there's one thing that I noticed when I was working with a few of the kids with the best instincts in the group.
When you feel like you're in a bad position in a scramble, you have your opponent on top of you and he's setting up a good position like mount or sidecontrol, hit the deck. Roll to your knees, protect your neck and look for a leg.
I'm not a wrestler, so grabbing an opponent's leg is not my first instinct to get on top, I'm much more likely to turn into an opponent and start looking for guard, but I've found that as I work with more and more complex scrambles, the best setup for getting on top is to hit my knees and grab a leg, then muscle the takedown through (which isn't that hard if I'm just pulling the leg into my chest).
People will say that this will get you stuck in turtle, and that's true for some occassions. The secret isn't really a secret, when it comes to making sure that that doesn't happen: just grab your opponents calf and pull it into your chest.
The escape from turtle, too, is also a fantastic armbar/triangle/omoplata setup, if you roll over shoulder, slip a leg either over or under and pretend like you are setting up guard. All that it requires is a slight momentum adjustment and landing your leg in a different position, as well as being on your side (something that gets easy when you consider the amount of momentum going into the roll).
Hitting the deck is something that most jiu-jitsu guys don't do because they don't tend to favor that search for top position that risks having your opponent sprawled on top of you. Still, if you catch that leg, it doesn't really matter what your opponent does when they sprawl, just explode through to the finish.
As far as finishes from this position, I haven't been able to work with the kids on some of mine (given that I like leglocks when working in the scramble), but I will say, simply, that if you really want to finish, it's important to know how to work in the scramble.
Scrambling is something that nobody ever gets entirely comfortable with, even guys like Marcelo work on it constantly, because it always offers new challenges. Remember, though, that the goal is really too be more efficient in a handful of scramble positions than your opponent, because if he's confused while he's looking to get back to a position he knows, you can catch him and finish way easier.
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