BJJ Tournament

Saturday was the 'Hawaii Brazilian Jiu Jitsu State Championships', or at least that's what the flyer that our club put out says. A ton of people showed up. 250 competitors where the biggest ever before was 150. It was huge and way way too long but a lot of fun. We started with a crowd of several hundred at 9am, but by 930pm when my second set of matches started, there were about a hundred people sticking around. There are two types of match (divisions). "Gi" and "No Gi" A Gi is a uniform so either you're wearing it or not. This makes quite a difference because the gi is a heavy material with lots of sneaky places to grab and choke people with.... a lot like a suit. Anyways, when you're only wearing shorts it's a lot harder to hang on to somebody and pin them down. Here's a shot of the crowd at 10am during the kids rules-clinic.




I entered both divisions as a middle weight (162-174) at 168. There were ~10 guys in the "Gi" division so there were 4 fights to win. In the semi-finals I was against a really good MMA/No-Gi guy, Mike, who caught me in a knee-bar after ~3min. But, knee-bars were illegal in our match (dangerous) and the ref called it back. I ended up winning in points at the last second. I ended up in the finals against somebody from my school and since you don't fight a guy from the same school, we shared 1st/2nd. The guy was good (Gil) and usually beats me in class so I don't think I would have won gold but Gil didn't want it when I offered so we split it. It felt like a bit of an anti-climax since Mike got the knee-bar really good (we do those in class). It was against the rules and I won fairly, but some part of me thinks he should have won it. The knee-bar was damn smooth. I got to his back standing up, but as I tried to take him down he got my leg. Perfect defense.




The "No-Gi" set had only 8 guys but I liked that one a bit better. The climax was the finals against Rick (HMC?). He was really good at standup. He got a hold of my knee twice. The first time he picked me up and took me down, but the second time I pushed him to the side and took his back. On the way down I got lucky and sunk in a choke. He held on for 15 seconds!!!! It was an awesome feeling.





I'll have video's of some of the fights up at www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~dmh/ by this afternoon if anyone's curious.