This is one of our most important drill series for passing the guard.

What we need to understand conceptually is that, fundamentally, we have two major threats at close and long range in our opponent’s guard – at close range the threat is submissions like the triangle choke and armbar. At long range, the primary threat is the opponent’s open guard sweeps.

We need to find the right “happy medium” between those two risks where we are out of range of their submission threats, but still stuffing their open guard and being heavy against their sweep attempts. The answer is the Headquarters Position – allowing us to stuff the open guard sweeps and set up our guard passes while staying out of the range of the triangle and armbar threats.

But which threat is greater? The submission threat is greater, because if we are swept we can still recover using our own guard and avoid being submitted, so we have to remember that it is safer to pass up off the ground using the headquarters as a setup to pass the guard.

Here you can see that we’re putting this drill series in 3 stages

Stage 1: Setting up the HQ (Headquarters) v.s. different guard scenarios (v.s. a sitting upright opponent, v.s. scissors guard, etc.)

Stage 2: The 3 main ways of passing from hand positions based on their reaction

Stage 3: Passing around the north-south to the far side using the pinwheel spin to kimura-stepover armbar (Juji-Gatame)

Altogether you have a dynamic and functional pass-to-finish system that is one of the most reliable ways to win in rolls and competition. The reason why this passing strategy is so effective is that you will be able to access a high-percentage finishing pathway whether you finish your pass to side control or mount (using your standard seatbelt grips and ratcheting to the arm triangle, americana, or spin-armbar), or if your opponent does win the underhook on you as a last-ditch pass-defense, you will now be able to spin around the north-south all the way to the other side and use the Kimura-Stepover-Armbar from the “Off-Side” top control. If the opponent is able to fight up to their knees, however, we’ll simply revert to the Sprawl-FHL(Front Headlock)-to-Backtake sequence from Fundamentals 2, which will lead us to the RNC finish.