The Advantage of Advantages (And Their Disadvantages)
We’ve all been there…the last 30 seconds of a finals match between two super evenly matched competitors; one opens up to go for the kill the other goes to pass the guard… ADVANTAGE! The patient (and less aggressive) competitor wins the match, not by points or submission, but by an arbitrary “advantage.” Most competitive grapplers and jiujiteiros have been on both sides of this conundrum and neither side is a pleasant place to be.
Advantage? What the heck is an advantage?
In jiu-jitsu competition, there are a variety of ways to win a match. One competitor can submit the other or score more points than the other. There are various ways to get disqualified, which is never anyone’s preferred way to win (or lose), but it happens. There is also a construct put in place by various competition circuits called the “advantage.”
Simply put, an “Advantage” is an “almost,” as in “one competitor almost passed the other’s guard, almost swept the other or almost submitted the other.” For all intents and purposes, advantages are subjective and put in place to prevent overtimes. They are, fundamentally, a momentary referee’s decision. I say, “momentary” because, regardless of which competitor pushes the pace, advantages wind up being more important.
At the end of the match, in the absence of points or a submission, advantages reign supreme. World championships have been won and lost on an advantage, and for this reason, their existence has often come under fire.
Why would a tournament buy into this construct?
Competition-based jiu-jitsu is almost always subject to a time limit. Even high-level sub-only invitationals have some sort of time limit because otherwise spectators would invariably lose interest. For this reason, when two evenly matched competitors go against each other, a match will often go to a draw if relying entirely on points and a submission. Enter the “Advantage,” set up to define a winner, even if no points or an equal number of points have been scored.
Advantages are difficult as they can be paired with point scoring tools. For example, when a competitor hits a sweep, the other person has a designated amount of time to recover. If they can recover within that allotted period of time, an advantage is awarded to the person who attempted the sweep. The IBJJF rule book states in Article 5 Section 5.5, “The referee may only award an advantage point once there is no longer a chance of the athlete reaching a point-scoring position.” That determination can be difficult to make because a lot can happen during that time, making advantages sometimes exist in a gray area between real position/situations during a match.
Somehow it always seems to happen, two of the best competitors in the world can end up with a tied score with five minutes to go or even at the buzzer.
Know the Rules
Different organizations have different rule sets. Some do not score advantages, while others give them for situations and positions that may seem counter-intuitive. For example, one organization gives advantages for the guard pull, while another may not give advantages for certain submission attempts. It depends on the organization as well as the individual referee. I did a local tournament recently that had issues with the scoring table sometimes missing advantages entirely. For this reason, it is best to try to win all matches by submission rather than leaving the match in the hands of the tournament/referee/scorekeepers.
Even if you are a submission hunter, you may come across an opponent who is difficult to submit and forces you to rely on points and advantages for victory. In some cases, such an opponent can be an inferior jiu-jitsu practitioner, but still win the match based on a minor mistake made by the better practitioner. For example: in IBJJF, if one person is playing guard the whole match and the other person is defending, there can be some issues for the guard player. When the guard player attempts a triangle, they have to break the other person’s posture to gain an advantage. However, if the person defending manages to force the other person to turtle, they wind up getting an advantage. This can ultimately cost the better practitioner the match.
Sometimes just going for that sweep against an opponent content to hold a position is enough to earn the advantage.
Are advantages good for competition?
Advantages accomplish what they were intended for, and that is to reduce the likelihood of overtime. However, there are many pitfalls that are inherent to them.
Advantages are a way to be objective about something subjective.
For starters, there have been instances in which the decision to award an advantage has come under contention because it appeared that the referee who awarded that advantage was biased. There are a lot of politics in jiu-jitsu and scoring decisions are a way that those politics can manifest. There are many moments in matches in which there are flurried transitions and it can be difficult to decide which competitor is more aggressive, initiating action and actually displaying an advantage over the other. In such moments, referees may decide to award a controversial advantage, and the reality is that there is very little that can be done once that decision is made.
One example of this is the definition of a submission advantage, as stated in Article 5 of the IBJJF rule book: “The athlete shall be awarded an advantage-point when he/she attempts a submission hold where the opponent is in real danger of submitting. Again, it is the referee’s duty to assess how close the submission hold came to fruition.” (Article 5 Section 5.3) The referee’s assessment may or may not relate to reality. There are many instances in which a submission may look tight, but is in all reality not even close.
Another inherent issue with advantages is that they do not take into account the constantly evolving set of techniques available to competitors. An example of this is the prevalence of the baseball bat choke. Some competitors offer their opponent a guard pass as bait so that they can take a baseball bat choke. If the competitor who is trying to pass realizes mid pass what is happening, they may decide to play it safe and backtrack. In that situation, who should get an advantage? The person who almost passed or the one who almost secured a submission? This is just one example of how an innovation can lead to gray areas.
One example of this is the treatment of the body triangle by the IBJJF rule book that labels both a body triangle and a back mount in which both of the opponent’s arms are trapped as mere advantages. Both of these positions could be part of an extremely dominant technique, but neither results in points.
For this reason, advantages can be a double-edged sword that allows competitions to run smoother, while at the same time potentially punishing innovation.
As a competitor, what’s the best way to handle Advantages?
While submissions are the best way to end a match, always be conscious of advantages as they can win or lose you the match. When preparing for a tournament, do your best to know what the rule set is. During training, keep count of your advantages and your training partners’ advantages during your rolls. Try to rack up as many as you can, knowing that it is likely that they will not all be given to you in a match. It is not always the better jiujiteiro who wins the match, but the better player of the game.
On the other side of things, if one competitor scores 50 advantages and the other scores one point, the one point wins the match. If one competitor scores 50 points, and the other achieves a submission, the submission wins the match. There is an inherent hierarchy of ways to win, and submission is the trump card in the world of jiu-jitsu, competition or otherwise. Train to finish, but also train to understand the rules of competition.
All the advantages in the world don’t add up to points. So finish your techniques!
Play to Win!
If you’re going to compete, play the game and play to win. Given that we train day in and day out to value the submission, a victory acquired by points or advantages will be less satisfying than a submission. However, the structure of points and advantages do in fact to some degree emphasize the application of effective jiu-jitsu.
Advantages aren’t going to go away. Competitive jiu-jitsu will continue to have rules in place to prevent matches from going into overtime, and a victory by an advantage is still a victory. At the end of the day, in most matches, one competitor has their hand raised, the other does not, and that determination can be made by an advantage.
