Another dilemma game- whenever you’re passing from a split squat, ultimately you want to use that to force a half guard (in most cases). You see here that Vagner knows this, and understands that if I am able to get my left knee to his right hip that I’ll be able to control him much easier. There is a battle happening for bottom knee position. Vagner is doing his best to extract his knee and post his foot on my hip, I am trying my best to stuff the leg and get my knee to his hip. The issue for the bottom man occurs when you start playing a knee post/cross face dilemma. Vagner has 2 choices in this case. 1- hand fight against my hand posted on his knee so he can extract the bottom leg, or 2- use an inside bicep tie to stop me from cross facing him. The dilemma here is simple- I fight back and forth for knee position at the lower body and control of the head at the upper body. If Vagner fights at the upper body and doesn’t allow me to cross face, I fight the legs and drop into half guard. If Vagner fights me at the lower body and tries to stop my knee from connecting to his hip, he has no ability to stop a cross face from coming on (this is what happened here). Once the cross face comes into play, he has no choice but to use both hands to address the cross face pressure, BUT that now leaves a wide open space for my knee to beat his bottom leg and connect to his hip because he now has his hands occupied at the upper body. During this exchange he got overextended and accidentally got his top (left) arm trapped across the center line. As illustrated yesterday in my previous breakdown, because he now has no ability to fight my knee coming across into 3/4 mount (because his arm is trapped), it was easy to post the knee and slide across. Knowing he is beat from here he gives a final bridge to attempt to create space but I was in such a strong mechanical position it had little effect. Precision of gripping and a game based around dilemmas is a very hard game to counter indeed.