Critical Success

skribs

skribs123 143

Grandmaster
There's a concept in tabletop gaming where if you roll the highest dice roll possible (usually a "natural 20" on a 20-sided die) you get a critical success. This is when your success is so good it goes above and beyond what could normally happen as a positive outcome.

Yesterday, we had a teenager move up from the kid's class to the adult class in our BJJ gym. I was going with him, and there were several times where I was just trying to recover guard and somehow he went flying over and I ended up sweeping him. I'm still not sure exactly what happened. But it happened multiple times. I think as I rolled away to get my feet under, he focused too much on staying connected, and so my momentum threw him over.

Got me thinking about critical successes. I'm curious if y'all got some good stories of your critical successes.
 
I've had other people get critical hits. Like the new guy who roundhouse kicked me in the thigh and I somehow wasn't processing things so I didn't even block. Then there was the time in judo when I was doing randori with somebody much, much better than me and I dumped him backwards by merely sitting back
 
One time, this is around 10 years ago probably, I'm doing Can-Ryu JJ and it's grappling night (basically a BJJ class). So this teenager, 15 years old, taller than me but a good 50 pounds lighter and a few belts lower, I was black and he was green, I think, comes up to me for a roll and, smiling, said "I challenge you!"

This was an incredibly nice, respectful kid, so we had a good laugh at his obvious joke and then he explained that he didn't want me to roll in teaching mode but to go for it 100% so he could feel it. All right.

We start from the knees due to space concerns and I immediately go for a kneeling version of a flying arm bar which I'd NEVER managed to land before. Friends, it landed. Tapped him out in 3 seconds flat. Took a full minute to stop laughing, then we continued but I was in teaching mode.

There was something about that family. His big brother, a black belt at the same time I was, 18 at the time, once asked me to actually kick him in the leg full power so he could feel it. Now, I was known for my kicking power, they'd bought a special pad just for me do I could actually kick with some kind of intensity.

So I called the instructor over, had the kid repeat his request, the instructor had him repeat it a THIRD time (with a "are you nuts" expression on his face") and managed to talk him into at least holding one of the thinner pads in front of his leg.

I kicked. The leg I hit went flying, and so did his other leg, so the kid had a nice opportunity to practice his break-fall. Then he tried to stand up and looked like Bambi. He was limping for a week.

Hey, he'd ASKED.
 
Simfers said:
I kicked. The leg I hit went flying, and so did his other leg, so the kid had a nice opportunity to practice his break-fall. Then he tried to stand up and looked like Bambi. He was limping for a week.
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We had a guy at our gym, 50 year old white belt, been going 2 days a week for a month or so. He was drilling with a younger, athletic, larger blue belt, and said, "I need to work on my breakfalls?"

Brown belt coach was watching and said to the blue belt, "Well, help him!"

That's when the rest of us heard a loud thud.
 
skribs said:
There's a concept in tabletop gaming where if you roll the highest dice roll possible (usually a "natural 20" on a 20-sided die) you get a critical success. This is when your success is so good it goes above and beyond what could normally happen as a positive outcome.

Yesterday, we had a teenager move up from the kid's class to the adult class in our BJJ gym. I was going with him, and there were several times where I was just trying to recover guard and somehow he went flying over and I ended up sweeping him. I'm still not sure exactly what happened. But it happened multiple times. I think as I rolled away to get my feet under, he focused too much on staying connected, and so my momentum threw him over.

Got me thinking about critical successes. I'm curious if y'all got some good stories of your critical successes.
Click to expand...
The dice don’t lie brother!
 
Trained with a guy who was pretty much a bully to other male students. He tried to injure my knee during an exercise by side sweeping me. I asked him not to do that as the exercise was cooperative not competitive and could result in injury. He did it again. This time I warned him not to try to injure me again. Now everyone in the gym is watching, including Sifu. He did it again, but this time it was with everything he had. I simply picked my foot all the way up. He pulled so hard he threw himself to the concrete floor. Nothing more was said, everyone went back to training. I treasure the memory of the look on his face.
 
I've had a few instances where I've just been in a 'zone' that I can't really replicate..it's like when a basketball player says "The net was just huge and open today, I don't know why".

One specific instance speaks out to me. This is going back about 10 years. I was an early 20-something-year-old training at my main dojo. We have someone who's been training with us maybe a few months, but he's been training kickboxing for close to 10 years, and was actually fairly decent. He's sparred a few times, against lower belts and the head instructor, and joins a sparring session we did sometimes where tow people set up in the ring, go 3 rounds, and everyone critiques afterwards. He already knew he wasn't a match for the instructor who was a very successful professional kickboxer, but he figured he could beat the twenty-year-old without any active fights. On the opposite side, as the third most experienced person (behind mentioned instructor and another pro kickboxer) I didn't particularly want to be seen losing to someone who had only been training with us for a few months, regardless of his earlier experience.

Sparring starts, and for whatever reason he starts head-hunting. It feels almost like slow motion, I don't need to block or even really move out of the way of any of his punches initially, I can just slip around all of them. This makes him sloppier, and more determined to hit me and headhunt, I drop my guard completely and just every once in a while tag his stomach as I avoid punches (something I learned from the earlier-mentioned instructor, who'd done this exact thing to me within the first month of me joining the dojo). Somewhere in the second round, after a combination of him tiring himself out with swings that are missing, and my punches to his stomach, he pretty much just keels over on himself and says he's done. He stayed with us for another 3ish years until the dojo was sold, and while I don't think I ever performed quite that well against him again, I later learned a large part of the reason he stayed was because of that match. He figured that if a "kid" who had never been in an official match could do so well, he had a lot he could learn here.

I've had a few instances where I've been in the zone like that, but that one in particular, probably because it was in front of a group and I became friends with my opponent afterwards, has really stuck with me.
 
Yesterday I got upset with one of the kids in the BJJ class. He was using the "earthquake method" to isolate an arm for an armbar. This is a method one of our black belts taught the adults. When you've got the armbar position (opponent on their back, your legs straddling their arm) but they have their arms locked, one method to get them to unlock is to just jackhammer your thigh on their face to get them to just give up the arm.

This is something I've told this kid before not to do in the kids class, only do it to adults. I told him, "there's so many more ways to open up the arms." I showed him a kimura grip that we've taught several times. I showed him how to pull the other arm to weaken the grip. Then I showed him how to use their resistance to the armbar to set up a back take. Both him and the other kid their jaws dropped, it was like magic to them.

I made that back take up on the spot. I was completely riffing and it just happened to work.

I rolled a nat 20 on the bluff.
 
skribs said:
Got me thinking about critical successes. I'm curious if y'all got some good stories of your critical successes.
Click to expand...

I've rolled my fair share of d20 1's in my training, and it's something I've recently changed perspective about.

This below selected excerpts are from an interview with Sawada-sensei of the Tendo-ryū in Diane Skoss' book Koryū Bujutsu:

Meik Skoss:
So I shouldn't be thinking of winning or losing at all?

Sawada-sensei:
"You hate losing, right? But only through losing can you understand what it means to win. But you only know about winning. You ned to lose and then examine your mental state. You have to realize, "Ah, this is what it feels like to lose." Then, you must do the same thing the next time you win...

...If you don't know what it feels like to both win and lose, then you cannot win. If you can't lose, you can't win. This is a very important thing about martial arts...

...You think only about winning since you hate to lose. Only by losing, again and again, can you know what it is to win. [Koryū keiko] can only be understood through repetition. You have to do it over and over..."

Reference:
Skoss, D. (ed.) 1997, Koryū bujutsu: classical warrior traditions of Japan, vol. 1, Koryu Books, New Jersey, pp. 50-51.
 
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Wing Woo Gar said:
He knew what I would do so he let me handle it. My Sifu and I were very close. He knew me better than I knew me.
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I was thinking of another story somewhat similar.

We had a situation in my BJJ gym. One of the girls (daughter of the kid's class coach) was being bullied at school by a few other girls. These other girls found out she did jiu-jitsu. They had the absolutely brilliant idea that they could bully more if they also joined the jiu-jitsu school.

The girl's Dad let them join. Then told his daughter, "let your mat work speak for itself."

Those other girls did not last long at our gym.

Normally I would be against letting bullies join the gym. But this I think was an excellent exception.

This may be a perfect real-world example of, "I'm not locked in here with you..."
 
skribs said:
I was thinking of another story somewhat similar.

We had a situation in my BJJ gym. One of the girls (daughter of the kid's class coach) was being bullied at school by a few other girls. These other girls found out she did jiu-jitsu. They had the absolutely brilliant idea that they could bully more if they also joined the jiu-jitsu school.

The girl's Dad let them join. Then told his daughter, "let your mat work speak for itself."

Those other girls did not last long at our gym.

Normally I would be against letting bullies join the gym. But this I think was an excellent exception.

This may be a perfect real-world example of, "I'm not locked in here with you..."
Click to expand...
It truly is. The definition of lead by example and let your work speak for itself.
Confidence is seen not heard.
 
I almost forgot my best nat 20 story. I was in a bar with my training brothers once about 20 years ago. We were spread out talking with friends or girls when this drunk guy approached me and starts talking nonsense. Never seen this guy before and his friends are trying to pull him away. He is saying “you think you can just kill me?!” I kind of chuckled and offered to buy him a beer. He didn’t like that and kept insisting that we fight. I tried a few things to calm him but he just wouldn’t desist. Finally, I tried explaining that I was there to meet girls not wrestle dudes. When he tried to grab me I turned him into the brass rail pinned him against it, jammed my fingers into his ribs and savagely tickled him while he yelled and squirmed to try getting away. His friends were laughing so hard at him and he was bright red in the face as he left the bar completely unharmed. His friends bought me drinks for being so gentle with him. I felt like a real winner after that one.
 
skribs said:
I was thinking of another story somewhat similar.

We had a situation in my BJJ gym. One of the girls (daughter of the kid's class coach) was being bullied at school by a few other girls. These other girls found out she did jiu-jitsu. They had the absolutely brilliant idea that they could bully more if they also joined the jiu-jitsu school.

The girl's Dad let them join. Then told his daughter, "let your mat work speak for itself."

Those other girls did not last long at our gym.

Normally I would be against letting bullies join the gym. But this I think was an excellent exception.

This may be a perfect real-world example of, "I'm not locked in here with you..."
Click to expand...
We gave any new student a month of classes free of charge to see if the place was a good fit for them. There wasn’t much in life I enjoyed more than letting known bullies join. We sort of adopted them like discarded pets.

Most of them developed into gentlemen and raised their future children the same way. The few that didn’t usually peed their gi pants and disappeared quietly into the night. And that was without any sparring at all. They got to watch sparring, plenty of it, and you could pretty much sense them thinking “What the hell am I doing here?”

People learn in different ways. But sometimes you need to get their attention first. 😁
 
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