So you failed at the sweep. Roger Gracie shows how to save yourself with the guillotine

Roger with some valuable details to finish via guillotine.

Full of options, BJJ demands that its practitioner have up their sleeve a few plans for when their good position goes wrong. With the evolution of your opponents, it’s not always that that strong sweep of yours is going to work out. To Roger Gracie, finishing can sometimes be a beautiful plan-B.

In this lesson produced for our friends at the Dojjo channel, Roger teaches how to develop a defense against the hook sweep with a finish on the neck. After having his sweep foiled by the passer, Roger pushes his opponent with the legs to sit and wrap the other fighter’s neck. After making the grip, Roger has some more valuable tips to get even more pressure. “Now I have two choices,” he says at 2:03 in the video. “I can now do a guillotine with the arm. My hand will go under his arm, holding my wrist. This other hand that is on the neck, the other hand will come underneath and give it support to choke.”

“Or,” he says at 2:18, “I can do the guillotine without the arm. I will create space between my body and his shoulder and will pass my arm through here. The grip is basically the same: I will put the four fingers right on my wrist, on the soft part of the arm. If you wanna do it on the forearm, you can as well, to keep it tighter. This is optional. I like holding on my wrist. Keeping my elbow always closed.”

“In the guillotine with the arm,” he adds at 2:47, “an important detail that makes your opponent’s situation much worse, unlike the no-arm guillotine, is throwing my support arm up. This way it gets extremely tight and very hard to defend against. Now I simply lie down and squeeze, and the arm goes over his shoulder. It gets super-tight.”