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There is an ongoing theory that BJJ is fake in the sense it doesn't work against someone unwilling to engage in BJJ with you. Although I think that only counts with regard to the sport aspect.
What that video shows is a guy who knows nothing about BJJ starts off getting trucked by pretty middling BJJ folks. Then he gets trained up by someone pretty good, at BJJ, and then he demonstrates that against an opponent with very low stamina you can win in BJJ by basically ignoring the rules of the sport.
But MMA hasn't embraced BJJ so much because they are idiots, MMA has because 1v1 combat is messy, and BJJ has a lot of techniques that are good at dealing with messy situations. In a standup situation there's no point of it, yes, but most fights don't end when you pass an arbitrary sideline, in fact, that is one of the great things about MMA's realism is the cage shows how fights actually happen, when people are pinned in by obstacles (sometimes a mob if we are being honest). The standup prelude the the ground phase is also common in real fights, but real fights rarely get decided by a nicely placed uppercut or roundhouse. Most of it is suckerpunches, and surviving until a fight is broken up. MMA asks the question as to what you should do if bouncers and beer bottles don't exist and you get in a fight. A big part of that is on the ground, wrestling and BJJ generally are thought to have decent answers.
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I mean, it's probably not that helpful in a boxing match, but this is trivially true. But that's like saying guns are useless in the military because of drones- sometimes different things solve different problems.
Yep, but it is worth asking what problem Jiu Jitsu solves and how common that problem is.
Arguably the way its practiced has so many constraints that in practice it fails if any of those constraints are violated.
If you're fighting a guy who boxes, is not wearing a gi, on a concrete surface, and he may be carrying a weapon, I dunno if its reliable.
Excellent conditioning though.
That said, wrestling (specifically Sambo) seems to dominate everything in a 1 v 1 context.
isnt wrestling similarly confined by sportsmanship? For instance i would imagine most holds would be easier to get out of if gouging the at the grappler's eyes was an allowed strategy or pocket knives were allowed in the sport.
outside of some form of codified decorum the half drunk guy with a gun wins more martial contests than all the other combat disciplines except sober guy with a gun
All combat sports would be technically limited in that way, but for wrestling and related fields, knowing the rules actually increases your ability to injure and debilitate people. Wrestling bans eye gouging, weapons, nutshots, biting, fishhooks, etc. But if you are a good wrestler in a fight, you can do those things just as much as a bad wrestler. There is no functional way to train in eye gouging because the entire dojo would be blind in a week. However, there are other holds banned in wrestling that are simple to execute FROM the legal holds, and if you just do one of those illegal things you basically win the fight by ripping their arm, knee, or ankle off of its pivot point and tearing all the ligaments. If I have you in a legal armbar, the only thing preventing me from causing you to have a useless arm is the rules, and whatever grappling training you have that can mitigate me having gotten into that position of significant advantage.
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In a 1 v. 1 scenario, I would no-shit bet on a guy with a knife who sort of knows what he's doing vs. the guy with a gun.
We've tested this under pressure. Unless the gunman gets a shot off that actually incapacitates the other guy instantly, once the distance closes a blade does more damage more quickly and reliably. If its already close quarters, good luck actually deploying the weapon and getting a shot off under pressure.
And if the gun jams or slips from your grasp or the other guy manages to take it, you're screwed.
You're almost better off using it as a bludgeon.
There's dozens of bodycam videos out there of a cop getting jumped by knife-wielding attacker and they almost always get cut before the attacker is neutralized. And oftentimes the only reason the attacker is neutralized is because another cop shoots them in time.
The loser of a knife fight bleeds out in the parking lot; the winner bleeds out in the ambulance.
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The paradox of BJJ is that it is effective self defense because you can practice it constantly and competitively at full(ish) speed and power, but once you are practicing it constantly and competitively at full(ish) speed and power you are practicing increasingly esoteric techniques and positions to defeat other BJJ practitioners practicing at full speed and competitively.
Sure, you don't want to roll around on concrete, but if you're training grappling you are in all likelihood going to be the one making that choice for your opponent.
The aspects of BJJ that are effective for self defense against an untrained opponent are going to be the wrestling aspects with a couple super basic easy submissions thrown in. Throw a guy who doesn't train in grappling in there and he's going to be drowning. But those aspects aren't really trained as much in class, because in class we're mostly trying to beat up each other. My BJJ game if I had to fight someone untrained would be to look for throws or standing armlocks, or more likely just fall back on straight counterpunches. But in competitive BJJ, my A-game is built around bottom half guard, which I would essentially never find myself in during a fight at the Linc.
Sometimes our coach wants to talk about the "self defense" implications of how to pass somebody's De La Riva guard in a streetfight, and I joke that if I get into a bar fight and some guy tries to throw a De La Riva guard on me, I'm going to stop and say "Whoa, no way, I do jiu jitsu too, where do you train bro? Do you know Dan? Because Dan is like my best friend! Oh shit no way let's get a drink, why are we fighting anyway?"
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That's kind of the rub with figuring out how good someone is at real real fighting. You can't practice that without someone at risk of maiming or death.
And a "real" fight is chaotic so there's an irreducible element of chance involved.
The secret to winning fights is mostly "bring more guys, with better discipline."
Add to it that "winning" a fight might well send you to prison. We all live in civilization with cops, prosecutors and judges, and we all know that they salivate at the chance to drop a book on law abiding white person defending himself from criminals (especially law abiding person who is busy online on extremely extreme extremist forum).
This is why serious trainers will tell you: "I am not going to teach you how to "win" fights, I am going to teach you how to get out of fight."
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