This Is Gordon Ryan's Favorite Way Of Passing The Guard

Half Guard Passing Is That Fucking Good

A few days ago I made a post about the invariants of guard passing (check it out here: Simplifying Guard Passing For The Greater Good). Now I want to talk about the specifics of guard passing. In this case, what it is in my opinion the best position to pass the guard, and the one that Gordon Ryan has used many times against world-class opposition with a lot of success: half guard passing.

The Half Guard Paradox

Half Guard is one of my favourite guards to play, actually, I probably just prefer open guard, other than that, half guard is the best. Way better that close guard, that butterfly, than any other guard in no gi in my opinion.

So if half guard is so great from the bottom, how it can be the best passing position from the top? It makes no sense.

Well, this is what John Danaher calls The Half Guard Paradox. And there is one thing that decides if half guard is working in favor of the bottom player or the top player. That thing is the head and shoulders. If the head and shoulders of the bottom player are free, he will be able to play his half guard in any configuration of his choice and be effective from there. If the top player has control with his upper body of the head and shoulders (let’s say, far side underhook and crossface, or double underhooks), then the top player is in the most powerful passing position of all the sport.

If you read the post I mentioned above, you will understand why half guard works so well. With our lower body we immobilize his hips and with our upper body his head and shoulders. So we have a lot of control of our opponent and that allows us to pass the guard with less effort compared to other types of passing.

This position where we control the head and shoulders of our opponent is named chest to chest half guard, and it should be our end-goal always.

We can get to chest to chest half guard by beating the knee shield in a normal half guard. That being said, we don’t need to get to our opponent’s half guard to get to chest to chest half guard. We can force chest to chest half guard by another style of passing like loose passing, bodylock passing, headquarters, and so on. Just be creative.

I think this is it. I’m kinda sick, also I haven’t been feeling good emotionally so you can see this is not my best post, but I will keep showing up here, just because I like it.