Why John Danaher is wrong about randomness in striking and "punchers chance" compared to grappling

mattemate said:
Strongest guy I ever trained with was a big Lithuanian dude. 6'4", 250, day laborer. He's stronger than NFL guys I've trained with, it was just ridiculous. He tapped me twice with sloppy guillotines that were nowhere near being close to choking me, but it felt like he was about to just break my neck. Shit was crazy.
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I think that everyone who rolls for any reasonable amount of time runs into someone like this. My version of this was a Polish dude I once trained with. He looked like what I'd imagine The Thing would look like if he were real. If he would've told me he was part boulder, I would've believed him. He'd make me want to tap just from the pressure of him crunching down from side mount :eek:

On the opposite side of the spectrum, I dated a Lithuanian girl once. Still the hottest girl I've ever seen in real life. You had to deal with a gorilla dude from that country, I got to deal with an elegant girl :cool:

mattemate said:
If I had him in side control, I had to have perfect technique and keep driving forward, because his hips were so strong he could just stand up. I finally figured out his number. I couldn't take him down, but he would always try for judo throws, and he didn't have good technique, so would expose his back. Being able to get a guy like that out of there gave me a lot of confidence in my BJJ, because he was an absolute animal.
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For sure, being forced to deal with outliers forces you to dial in on technique. There's no way to "muscle out" of positions or submissions when you're dealing with a monster. The Polish dude forced me to get good at arm drags and getting back at least to half guard if not full guard.

Here I am posting about grappling more than I have in a million years, which is about as long as it's been since I've been on a mat, and now it's giving me the itch to back into it even though I'm barely keeping up with all the shit that I've already got going on :confused:

Still, I forgot how much I enjoy this sort of shop talk.

shunyata said:
They flow off each other nicely too.

Both in take down defense and in the full guard > hip bump > kimura > guilotine loop.
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True, I think that the kimura sweep was the first sweep that I was taught and that the kimura/guillotine combo (in either direction) was the first submission combo that I was taught. And I remember seeing old footage of Cro Cop doing some sort of seminar teaching self-defense and I was so stoked when I realized that I was learning the same technique that I saw him doing :D

 
Enclave said:
I'm obviously fucked once they hit their groove and get into actual rolling, but it's not out of the question that I can stuff a takedown, even do a random o goshi that they don't expect that I can pull off, and slam them. Stuff like that.

Suppose instead that I have to strike Canelo. There's very little chance for me to hit him. And I am not a bad puncher. I can put him out if I land,, I just don't think I will.
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You are a special type of stupid if you think you could come remotely close to hitting such a skillful technique on Maia or Burns like an O-Goshi, much less slam them with anything. You would not slam or o-goshi either guy or any skilled BJJ based MMA fighter, and you would not outstrip Canelo. You could however land a lucky punch on Canelo that would do nothing to him though
 
Bullitt68 said:
Here I am posting about grappling more than I have in a million years, which is about as long as it's been since I've been on a mat, and now it's giving me the itch to back into it even though I'm barely keeping up with all the shit that I've already got going on :confused:

Still, I forgot how much I enjoy this sort of shop talk.
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Haha, same. It's not been THAT long, just some nagging injuries have kept me off the mat. Time to get back to it.
 
I think you are wrong. Luck is a bigger factor in striking than in grappling. I say this as a striker with a little grappling experience. The luck factor just makes striking more challenging.

It's like soccer and basketball. Soccer has a much higher chance for an upset. For the weaker team to get lucky and win, not so much in basketball
 
Enclave said:
It doesn't matter what exact level. I've done KB rules sparring for 4 years. Anybody who came.in there, MA or not, who never sparred in their life, could not touch me. I had to let them.
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that is true, but they are not going all out to get you, I assume.
 
Enclave said:
John Danaher made the point that a fair inferior athlete and fighter can still win via KO with the so called punchers chance in a striking bout. Grappling offers no such opportunity. Everything is fully earned.

I will argue that it's quite the opposite. It's in striking where there truly is no randomness. You can't KO Lennox Lewis, Adesanya or Mayweather via punchers chance.. Line amateurs up.. It's not going to happen..

If you take a high level striker and put him up against any tough guy who never trained striking, not only can't he hurt the striker, he can't touch him.

I know from doing both arts that grappling is far more innate than striking. You will always suck doing sparring for the first time against a black belt in striking, but grappling, and wrestling in particular you can get by if you are talented and big enough. Any outcome: submission, slam, stalling is possible.

So danaher has deduced based on one punch KOs that striking is more random than grappling, when it's due to either one of two things. A) the better striker falls asleep on the switch. Overconfident, arrogant, or tired. He simply doesn't care.

Or
B) neither striker know what they are doing. And so the entire excercise is random.

This entire concept of punchers chance does not mean that you can RANDOMLY KO a World champion. An elite striker understands range. You won't even be in position to hit him, unless he lets you.

Same between intermediate and brawler.
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You have a high resolution view of striking in neutral, and a low resolution view of affairs in other phases of the fight, and in such cases, the natural tendency is for someone is to reason under the uncritical subconscious impression that the matter(s) with which they are most familiar are suffused with nuance, detail, and ranges of possibility, while those things they are unfamiliar with are likewise devoid of any appreciable complication. They confuse their lack of perception of something with the lack of existence of that something.

Many people do this with many things in life. It is something our good friend Mr. Danaher somewhat falls prey too here as well; the take away is that everything you've said about a sport like boxing here can apply just as much if not more so to other sports like muay thai, vale tudo, wrestling, judo, or so on, as well.

It's simply a fact that grappling exchanges are more 'deterministic' in a manner of speaking, where a superior party has great ability to not just control what he himself is doing in relation to the opponent, but to impose his control over what the other opponent can be doing altogether in any case; even slight differences in ability between two competitors will consistently produce certain victory conditions X times out of a hundred. Again, this is also something you can say about the highest levels of competition in K1 or Glory and et cetera, but they are of course not the same things, and so of course you will not see the same degrees on the same metrics.
 
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rmongler said:
You have a high resolution view of striking in neutral, and a low resolution view of affairs in other phases of the fight, and in such cases, the natural tendency is for someone is to reason under the uncritical subconscious impression that the matter(s) with which they are most familiar are suffused with nuance, detail, and ranges of possibility, while those things they are unfamiliar with are likewise devoid of any appreciable complication. They confuse their lack of perception of something with the lack of existence of that something.

Many people do this with many things in life. It is something our good friend Mr. Danaher somewhat falls prey too here as well; the take away is that everything you've said about a sport like boxing here can apply just as much if not more so to other sports like muay thai, vale tudo, wrestling, judo, or so on, as well.

It's simply a fact that grappling exchanges are more 'deterministic' in a manner of speaking, where a superior party has great ability to not just control what he himself is doing in relation to the opponent, but to impose his control over what the other opponent can be doing altogether in any case; even slight differences in ability between two competitors will consistently produce certain victory conditions X times out of a hundred. Again, this is also something you can say about the highest levels of competition in K1 or Glory and et cetera, but they are of course not the same things, and so of course you will not see the same degrees on the same metrics.
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A stronger guy can outwrestle a much better wrestler. A stronger guy cannot outbox a good boxer though. Strength has no real meaning in and of itself.
 
Kforcer said:
If strength has no meaning, why would a stronger guy get the better of a much better wrestler?
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It has no meaning in striking if one is an amateur and the other knows MA. It has all the meaning in the world if two people wrestle though. I have outwrestled a wrestler by simply being stronger and taller, weighed about the same.
 
Enclave said:
It has no meaning in striking if one is an amateur and the other knows MA. It has all the meaning in the world if two people wrestle though. I have outwrestled a wrestler by simply being stronger and taller, weighed about the same.
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No.
 
Nah. Danaher is correct.

BJ Penn. Yeah - he might be way past it - but he is an ex-professionsal and a fighter who has put in hundreds of rounds of sparring, fought in the top-level against beasts. Get's KOd by a random bum in the street.
 
laz0001 said:
Nah. Danaher is correct.

BJ Penn. Yeah - he might be way past it - but he is an ex-professionsal and a fighter who has put in hundreds of rounds of sparring, fought in the top-level against beasts. Get's KOd by a random bum in the street.
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He was drunk.
 
We need to compare guys of similar size. I think it's pretty possible some guy like Carwin or even some Tank Abott like dude could KO Mayweather in a boxing match, if unlikely. Just like some giant could sub Marcelo Garcia through pure size.
But given similar sizes I think both are really hard but the bigger you get the realm of possibility increases. Carwin could land a lucky blow against Lennox Lewis but I don't really see Lennox Lewis submitting a heavy weight in ADCC or outwrestling Karelin.
 
Enclave said:
It has no meaning in striking if one is an amateur and the other knows MA. It has all the meaning in the world if two people wrestle though. I have outwrestled a wrestler by simply being stronger and taller, weighed about the same.
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You must not have that much experience with wrestling, honestly.
 
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