This week's training session has what become usual  light and easy. Andre's class was of course eye-opening and well detailed. Andre illustrated a basic method of achieving side-mount by way of passing the half-guard and from that point, he moved on to sidemount where he creatively showed a way to take the crucifix via knee-trapping the arm in sidemount and pushing the opponent over and then using your legs to manuever them around the opponent's arm into a crucifix position. He then illustrated a counter to a common reaction of the opponent going to turtle and flowing with it rolling with the arm trapped into a shoulder lock. The rolling session was fairly light and I noticed a weak area as Joel was able to counter my kimura from half-guard  by attacking the arm-bar which is a move I have too often neglected and must be researched. Wrestling class was quite awesome as the class was substituted by a well-trained greco-roman wrestling specialist and champion who showed a variety of wrestling moves. The movement I can explicitly take away from the class is the hand break followed by moving under the opponent's arm then waiting for my opponent to clamp my arm and whereupon I re-clamp my opponent wrist then thread my leg inside and take his back. Light rolling proceeded afterwards and I was able to get tapped by an intricately set  up guillotine choke administered by my friend Marco, so it is yet another area of research that needs devotion. Anyways, it was a cool session.
 On Wednesday, I made the decision to change my routine and headed to Barum's for rolling and I learned some rather provoking things. First, it was nice to have Alfredo oversee our training and rolling as he noted weaknesses in my game and opportunities for improvement. The two rolls with the black belts Fernando and Harlan proved to be very enlightening as I learned that in order to continue control over the opponent, it is necessary to move or in other words flow with the opponent. Fernando showed me through simple rolling why it is an absolute must to break grips as his incredibly strong grip grinded me directly to the ground. The next few days were exclusively rest in preparation for the tournament, and on Saturday the tournament occurred and I truly put on an awful performance. I struggled to pass the guard of a guy who was continually attacking and in the process he hit me with an arm bar off my stack pass. The second match was against an opponent said to be skilled in judo and since my Judo skills are less than stellar, I made the regrettable decision to pull guard and this fateful decision led to a perfect opportunity for my opponent to institute his strong top game against my rather weak guard game. Consequently, a new direction in my BJJ experience will be put forth whereupon I learn to attack creatively and effectively from both guard and half-guard. Additionally, I will be of course devoting more time to training staying after class to roll and drill. To that end of rolling and drilling, I have noticed that I often fall back to the turtle when rolling yet I don't answer well from that position;therefore, the following instructional may prove to be useful.