SAFETY-BAR:

The Kani-Basami position, ie your opponent stacking your knee bar position or successfully overturning your saddle (inside sankaku) is important to own as a safety mechanism for all leg locking positions and negative half guard passes.
As well as anybody who inverts a lot to defend guard pass attempts, you’re going to be vulnerable to being stacked and put in the chiropractor pass. This detail is an important preliminary before we start playing the position. This technique allows us to stop the position from getting worse, stall out, and reverse the opponent. Therefore, once we have a solid positional pathway to work our way back from a bad position safely, we can start being more aggressive and daring going after leg locks and using the inverted Kani Basami position to sweep from stacked positions into leg locks. Our X guard and Butterfly guard systems become double powerful when we add in the Kani Basami option – the opponent has no safe zone to run to when they’re on top. If we can defend punches and go from bottom to top in a guard system – it is valid for MMA. Having a leg lock system that is valid for MMA is cutting edge in 2023, and this is a key cornerstone detail in that process. Notice that the action of capturing the knee-line for the top grappler to get to the smash pass is identical to the action of forcing half-guard, except it’s on the top leg across the body.