Mini Ep. 84: Probabilistic Thinking

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 1: 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. This mini episode is going to talk about probabilities and how important thinking in probabilities is for your jiu-jitsu. Now, many times when you start jiu-jitsu, you're looking for definitive answers. You want quick hit solutions that'll solve complicated problems. When you get stuck in a triangle, you want to know what is the one escape that I can do to get out of this position. When you get to a dominant position, you want to know what is the one submission I can do that can close this one out for me. Speaker 1: When you get more experienced, you start realizing that jiu-jitsu is actually not really about definitive answers like that. As you get more experienced and you progress up to the higher belts like brown and black, you'll start to realize that there really are no sure things in jiu-jitsu and there's no one answer that you can be given that's going to work 100% of the time. An example that I come up with here is self-defense. Many people like myself got into jiu-jitsu because they were interested in learning to defend themselves. And when I started this journey, my hope was that jiu-jitsu would give me some sort of toolbox that would keep me safe and if I just knew how to fight effectively then I could fight without fear. Well, let me tell you, being on the the tail end of my journey now, having done this for so long, the one thing that I have learned about fighting is that there is no sure thing in a fight. There is no guaranteed answer. There is no way to guarantee your safety. Fighting is inherently chaotic and violent and that's why we want to avoid it because there's nothing that you can do that will guarantee a good outcome in a fight. Now that I'm a black belt, I'm increasingly aware that my goal with fighting is to avoid fighting. It's just too unpredictable and even if you are an experienced fighter, a white belt or an untrained person can still beat you and the odds of that happening are probably higher than you would want to believe. There just isn't any way to guarantee a good outcome in jiu-jitsu. And so that's where we introduce this concept of probabilistic thinking. Speaker 1: As you get further in your journey, you want to think less in terms of absolutes and more in terms of probabilities when you grapple. So to give you an example, when I am attacking from mount, as a white belt, I'm probably sitting on you mounted and thinking what are the submissions that I can do here. As a black belt, my number one priority is to keep the probabilities in my favor. I can't guarantee that any one individual move is going to work, but what I can do is focus on making sure that I stay in a position where I've got a good probability of getting good outcomes and you have a worse probability in your favor. So as an example, if we talk about why mount or side control or neon belly or back control would be considered good positions, the main reason why is because they give you a higher probability of good outcomes and they reduce the probabilities that your opponent has. So for example, if we are playing guard and I am standing in your guard, this is basically open season. There are so many things that I could do or that you could do that the probabilities for how this this fight could go are very unpredictable. There's so many options for both of us. As I advance to a more and more dominant position, the reason I'm doing this is because it takes your probabilities away. When I pass your guard and I get to side control or to mount, I have very good options, but your options are narrowing. There's fewer things that you can do and many of them have a bad outcome. So your options are restricting. Not only does that make it more likely that I'm going to succeed, but it makes it easier for me to predict what you're going to do because you have fewer options available. And a big part of success against a good opponent is being able to predict what they do so that you're ready for it in advance. That's very hard to do from chaotic positions like if we're both standing up or if we're playing guard. There's a lot of variables and a lot of probabilities that could happen. But as I start to advance to a more dominant position, this allows me to restrict the probabilities for you, which makes it more likely the fight can go in my favor. Speaker 1: Again, this is all important because we need to get past this idea that there's a sure thing in fighting. There is no guaranteed outcome. What we want to do is get to a place where we have a high probability of things going in our favor and our opponent has a low probability of things going in their favor. And eventually, as I get to a more dominant position and I break your alignment further, we get to a place where the probability of me winning reaches 100%, which is when you tap. But up until that point, there is no guarantee and we should never presume that there is a guarantee regardless of how well things are going. This impacts your grappling because when you are an experienced grappler, you understand the importance of maintaining a good position. We've all heard the adage position over submission. Why does this matter? Because position is what allows us to control probabilities. If I attempt a submission and I lose the position, then unless I get that submission, the probabilities are no longer in my favor. I have now put myself in a worse position, which means I have a lower percentage chance of controlling and winning the fight. As you get experienced, more senior grapplers will try to maintain and control an advanced position as a priority above trying to end out the fight and that is because of probabilistic thinking. Speaker 1: Now, are there exceptions? Yeah, there's generally going to be exceptions. One of the exceptions in this case would be if you have the clock running against you. If you're in a competition and you're down on points and you have a short time to end the match, in that situation, you might try to roll the dice and get a submission even if that means giving up position. But that's more of an exception to the rule. Most of the time, you want to stay in a place where the probabilities of you getting a good outcome are high and the probabilities of your opponent getting a good outcome are low. So this was a very helpful realization for me in terms of how to think about my jiu-jitsu, less about how do I get a specific move done and more about how can I stay in a position where good moves happen for me. This kind of idea is what we talk about at BJJ Mental Models. You can get more mini episodes like this plus more long form discussions on the BJJ Mental Models podcast. I also suggest signing up to our newsletter. You can get all of this at BJJmentalmodels.com and if you want to level up with us, check out BJJ Mental Models Premium. It is the world's largest library of jiu-jitsu audio courses and content on strategy, concepts, tactics, philosophy, mindset, great stuff and all of this is at BJJmentalmodels.com. Thank you for listening. I hope this was helpful and we'll talk to you in the next episode.