Mini Ep. 88: Table Selection

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I just want to let you know, we released a new mindset course featuring Rob Bernaki from Island Top Team and BJJ Concepts. It's called Mindset for Betas. It's an amazing resource that breaks down a new way to build a resilient jiu-jitsu mindset. It's part of BJJ Mental Models Premium. I will spare you the full sales pitch because you can try it for free. Just go to bjjmentalmodels.com/beta. I will give you a free month, you can check out the course and if you decide that it's not worth your money, you can cancel, you won't have to pay a cent. I've already been told by subscribers that this is the most valuable piece of jiu-jitsu content they've ever received, so I hope you like it too. Speaker 2: Hey everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. Today I want to talk about a concept called table selection. Like many concepts in the realm of strategy, this comes from the world of poker. I am not a poker player myself, but it is a game that in many ways is almost pure strategy and so I like to look at what people do in poker to make decisions and see if there are parallels to jiu-jitsu. And with this concept, I think there definitely are some relevant ones. So in the world of poker, the table that you play at makes a big difference to your odds of success. And there is a whole process for how professional poker players select the table that they're going to play at. Obviously, when real money is on the line, you want to maximize your chances of winning. So they will look for tables where they think their odds are best to achieve those wins. And there's a lot of things that they could be looking at. It could be the experience level of the people at the table. Again, I am not a poker player, but what I can tell you is that this concept of table selection is just as relevant to jiu-jitsu or real life as it is to poker. So the lesson I take from this idea is that we should find or create environments where we are likely to get the best result. Now, again, in jiu-jitsu, it's not a poker table, but there are things that we can do to cherry pick the best environment to get the best results. Your mind is probably going towards tournaments and competitions. This goes beyond that though. Even at a more macro level, there are many examples where choosing an environment can make a big difference. So let's start off by talking about high-level situations where table selection can help your jiu-jitsu. One of the most common one is the training environment that you choose. If you look on Reddit, you'll see a lot of threads where people are asking, hey, should I leave my gym? And they'll post all of the issues that they have with their gym. If you're training in a bad gym, or maybe it's a good gym, but it's just not a good fit for you, one of the best things you can do to improve your jiu-jitsu is get to a different environment. Leave that gym and find one that is better aligned with your goals and better able to serve them. Staying at a gym that cannot meet your needs is one of the ways to stunt your jiu-jitsu growth because you're just not in an environment where you're likely to succeed. It's way too easy to get into this mindset of thinking that, hey, if I just try hard enough, I'll succeed eventually. And although that's aspirational, it's not always true. You are not guaranteed success just because you worked hard. A big part of this is table selection. Are you in an environment that is giving you the support that you need to be successful? So, if you've ever worked in a job where you've been angling for a promotion and you just can't get it no matter what you do, then you can probably relate to this. I've definitely been in situations like this where in that environment, they just liked me where I was. They weren't incentivized or motivated to help me grow or get to the next level. They wanted me to stay where I was. And for a lot of people who are struggling with their jiu-jitsu gym, this might sound way too familiar. If you are not getting the vibe from your coach that they really care about your goals, that's a huge indicator that you might have selected the wrong table and it might be time to look for a gym that is better suited to what you're trying to achieve in the sport. If you are playing at the wrong table, or in the case of jiu-jitsu, if you're training at the wrong gym, you are way less likely to get the success you want, and you can also get a lot of bad answers because if your coach isn't really committed to your success, maybe they have alternate goals or maybe they're focusing on other people in the gym to the exclusion of you, then that's a problem and you've got to find a different environment. And that doesn't mean that the coach is a bad person necessarily, but they have their own goals much like you do, and if there's a mismatch, you have to be honest with yourself about that and leave that environment. Staying in a bad environment that is not suited to helping you achieve your goals and hoping that somehow you'll buck the trend and beat the odds, that's not a good way to select the table to play at. So that's a big picture discussion. But the idea of table selection also applies at a more micro level in jiu-jitsu, which is when you're attempting a specific move. Have you created the environment where that move is likely to succeed? White belts often have this problem tremendously because they aren't experienced enough yet to understand things like chaining techniques together. So they will just attempt a move and then be surprised when it doesn't work. If you've ever attempted a move in isolation, say a pendulum sweep with no setup, what you've probably found is even against a barely experienced white belt, it's hard to pull those moves off because it's really hard to succeed at a move when your opponent is ready for it and knows how to stop it. So what you need to do is create a situation where that move is more likely to be successful. Something that friend of the show and BJJ Mental Models sponsored athlete Margot Ciccarelli once said is that you should find the window where the technique becomes effortless. That's why setup matters so much when we're attacking a specific tactic or technique. If you want to do a move, don't just try to do the move by itself, but think about what kind of environment or situation can you create where that move is more likely to succeed. Good grapplers will have different moves that they like to use in different situations. And that's an acknowledgement that sometimes it's just hard to make a move work because it's just not the right time to do it. Rafael Lovato Jr. had once talked about how when you are playing guard, you need to have different attacks depending on the height that your opponent is attacking from. So if they are down on both knees, you may have one preferred sequence. If they get up to one knee, you might want to do something else, and if they stand up on both feet, then you want to do a different technique altogether. That's important because depending on whether the person is on their knees, one foot or both, that changes how likely specific moves are to be successful. Keith Krikorian and Rosie Miller recently posted about this as well and knowing the difference between high and low techniques and when to use each. So that's almost a micro example of table selection. In a given moment, how do you know which move is the best to pull out at any point in time? So the lesson there is to realize that you're not guaranteed the same odds of success for a move in every different situation. The odds of success will change depending on what your opponent is doing and it's wise to have different tactics that you like to use depending on those situations. So there's table selection, a really useful concept. It's applicable to poker, to jiu-jitsu and to real life. It's been very helpful to me to understand that sometimes you just get into environments where your best efforts aren't good enough and changing the environment is the best way to increase your odds of success. If you found this helpful and you want more, go to bjjmentalmodels.com. We've got many episodes like this, plus more in-depth full-length episodes of the podcast featuring some of the best minds in jiu-jitsu and our newsletter. These are all completely free, so you should sign up for those. Beyond that, if you want to level up with us and get access to the world's largest library of jiu-jitsu audio courses on concept, strategy, tactics, mindset and philosophy, think Audible and Masterclass for jiu-jitsu, check out BJJ Mental Models Premium. All of that is at bjjmentalmodels.com. I will put a link in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon.