A: my point was that getting poked in the eye doesn't damage the body to the point that the pokee can't physically continue. That's a fact, not an opinion.
And yet, in the video of them being used in the UFC, nearly every fighter crumpled immediately when their eye was poked.
3:01 - the fighter completely collapses like he's been KO'd. If the other fighter didn't stop, he could easily have taken his back. Or if this wasn't the UFC with UFC rules, throw some kicks to the gut, or throw some downward strikes to the spine, neck or back of the head.
4:58 - the fighter turns away and collapses like he's been KO'd. There had been several pokes before - each one he closed his eyes and turned away (but the fighter poking him didn't follow up). This time he follows up and the stop the fight, because there's no way he can fight back. I'll come back to the idea that it took several eye pokes in a second.
5:58 - turns his back, no protection at all, and the ref has to stop it. If the ref doesn't get involved, that's a RNC or some punches to the back of the head.
If you think any of those fighters could have continued, you're as blind as they are.
Coming back to the fighter that took several pokes before collapsing. This doesn't mean eyepokes are ineffective. If it did, then every strike and every submission move would be ineffective, too, because none of those are 100%.
The fact is these techniques are dangerous, because they can really easily cause significant damage. A busted elbow or knee you can recover from (look at most football players for examples of that). Concussions add up. But one bad situation from an eye poke and your depth perception is gone for life.
B: the guy that understands timing and distance will be better at eye pokes than the guy that only does cooperative drills.
First off, where is this rule written that you can only train eye pokes
or distance and timing? It's things like this why I say you have the same flaws as DB. You can spar with conservative techniques, and train eye pokes in a compliance setting. Best of both worlds.
An eye poke doesn't have to be thrown like a punch. You can scratch someone's eyes without the need to accelerate your hand. It can be used from pretty much any position where your hands can reach someone's face. Tied up in the clinch? Instead of throwing punches that barely land, jam your fingers in their eyes. Going for a choke and your opponent keeps his chin down? Abandon the choke and rake his eyes. Threw a punch and your opponent dodged it? Rather than retreat your hand, rake your hand across his face and go for the eyes. This is the one I saw in a few of those fights in the video above.
We've played with the tkd variants on the standing arm bar. If you actually get caught with that you have made a huge mistake or slipped on a banana peel.
We have several different limb destructions based on how our opponent falls when we take them down. The standing arm bar is if they fall in a position that would facilitate that technique. If that submission is not there, I'll use another one. The same is true of any art with submissions. If the opening isn't there, you're not going to make it work. So you have to have trained other techniques or other transitions to make it work.
I get that you might catch a guy that doesn't know what he is doing or very drunk, but anything works on those guys. Why even defend a technique that only works on those guys? It seems to be a sort of counterproductive brand loyalty to me, but I'm sure you see it differently.
There are a lot of techniques I've seen online that wouldn't even work in those situations. You've made two boxes of "what works in MMA" and "what doesn't work in MMA". This is a good set of boxes
for your training for MMA. It's not accurate when you lump everything that doesn't work in MMA into the same category.
For example, I just watched a TKD video of strikes, where they show several bad ideas. Strikes to the sternum instead of solar plexus, strikes to the hardest parts of the skull, strikes with fists in ways such you're more likely to dislocate your own finger than cause any real damage. These strikes are not likely to work even in the situations you describe. I'm not training for a UFC match. I'm training for TKD sparring rules, and to defend myself against the most likely skill level of an attacker. So what if it wouldn't work in UFC? That's not what I'm training for.
