u/Hellhooker

Hi guys,

Do you have some recommandations of bands where we really hear some good polymeters? I am thinking about stuff like Tesseract's Dystopia riffs where you can really feel the beat and the variations with good mid tempos

I find that too much djent bands tend to overcomplexify their structures and we lose the groove of the polymeters

Of course I am already familiar with the known bands like monuments etc... so mostly on the less known side would be appreciated

I have been playing around berimbolo quite a lot lately, most notably thanks to Lucas Kanard's patreon (and Mateusz) :

https://www.reddit.com/r/bjj/comments/1tf21qj/lucas_kanards_bolo_instructionals_makes_me_feel/

I have been having varied degrees of success with it but I am thinking more and more it's actually a great system to add to an already "good enough" game. The trick is... I think bolos mostly work for leglockers and that's why we are mostly seeing guys like Lucas and Mateusz having success with it.
IMO it's due to two things:
- entering bolos, again imo, works very well when doing some late stage heelhook defense and flirting with the knee line. A lot of my bolos are done when people have my heel and I am defending the entanglement to keep my knee line free (and avoiding getting my leg broken in half), on the opposite side, a lot of entries also give up some heel exposure but if you do it well enough, you can give up heel exposure if you stay safe from the actual breaking mechanics
- second thing, bolos themselves are not that good nor high % BUT defending it pretty much involves either conceding a flat back and/or isolating the legs to get some distance, which means you can follow up the bolo attempts by very strong and easy leg entries on both legs depending of what they do. They almost always give up leg isolation to defend the bolo on weightless legs, which is incredibly good for the leg locker. Most of these entries are pretty technical though and involves kani basami through inverted position (or some Lachlan style k guard attack around the leg).

So overall, I am thinking more and more that working on it is actually a good idea and the reason we have not seen it used that much in nogi is mostly because it's pretty hard to get safe with it if the player is not a good leglocker with more than decent leglock defense (which is kinda obvious but my recent experience shows we are always countering leg attacks very late stage to get the offense going and it's hard to do when people are affraid of leglocks, or bad at them). It explains why ibjjf guys still struggle a bit with it and the ones who have success pretty much shifted their game into a leglocker one (Mikey, Levi etc...).

In the end it's another option from leg entanglements and a good one when the opponent denies the inside control.

It's still is pretty tricky and not something I would advise people to get into before at least purple belt (and again: GOOD leglock defense). I think it's a slightly different beast than the gi bolos. Ironically though I think it's safer for the body in nogi because you cannot stay stuck under the opponent that much (which is needed to take the back sometimes and with gi grips).

Mateusz and Lucas are leading a new style of leglocking/guard play and I am curious to see how it will evolve. I think a lot of the euro guys will do it more and more because all these guys train together often and are influenced by each others.

Disclaimer: I am very much not into berimbolos. Like everyone from my "generation" I used to do it quite a lot during my purple belt days, in the gi, but I disliked the game of staying inverted while death gripping belts and pants until I got to the back. I was more into Rafa's style of going into a legdrag if needed.

However, I still like to watch bolo specialists doing their thing and unfortunately a lot of this stuff has been pretty difficult to pull off in nogi, especially against leglockers. Either they tended to miss the back in competition or they went against terrible people with bad leglocks. Very few guys showed interesting things (Levy of course, Kaynard and Mateusz) against good competition.
I still think the bolo game is a weird one because it tends to occupy the same place as leglocks do in a general game and getting good at berimbolos takes a lot of time better used in something else (ie leglocks, for the most part). I was always kinda frustrated to watch berimbolo "instructionals" who were obviously pretty badly done and do not adress the obvious leglock counters, including the decade old very very stupid cross ashi counters into berimbolos (from terrible cross ashi positionning and not adressing the obvious follow ups).

I was also not that impressed by Kanard's leglock instructional: good for intermediate players but nothing groundbreaking for experienced ones but I love watching the guy in competition, he has such a fresh game in the current meta and his instagram page has been so full of gems lately, on jason rau level of greatness so I bought his patreon when he said he had a bolo instructional on it... and damn.

So good. So technical. He adresses a lot of my complains on berimbolos, on leglock counters, etc... The things he shows are so technically sound. I pulled off a few berimbolos in training, against fine leglockers after watching his instructionals and everything that went wrong or difficult are situations he adresses on his instructional. I still don't think it will be a big part of my game but it has been so awesome to see someone teaching bolos at a real elite level. In the end the bolo vs leglock battle still is a battle of the knee lines but Lucas show so many little details everywhere to counter advanced techniques (and I can be a very very harsh public towards these things and have been pretty angry at some recent "leglocks instructionals" from well known guys). Everyone interesting in the modern game should take a look at his stuff, at least just to "know" what is possible. Becoming good at this is probably a big commitment and at some point I think people have to specialize a bit into techniques occuring in the same space of the game graph but it's always good to be open minded, at least to play around with it in training and understanding it better against real specialists of the craft.

And all of this for the price of a Patreon? seriously, it's really good.

So good job Lucas and I hope he will continue to show awesome stuff in competitions and instructionals

As someone firmly into the Fire Emblem camp in SRPG, I struggled a lot to play precedent versions of FFT and noped hard out of TO

I tried it again with the remake and spend quite some time to finally accept the game was not really a strategy one but more a JRPG with deep build and I am finally loving it.

I may retry TO after that but I dread the spongy feel of the game and the bullshit card stuff. Maybe I will be able to overcome it... or I will go straight to fell Seal instead after that...