You Might Be Getting 'C Gamed'

In the alphabet of jiujitsu, the letter ’c’ reigns in the shadows. Your above-average blue belts know this. Purple belts are constantly contorting your world with this. And for brown and black belts, this is an art and a law of the physical universe on the mats. 

What am I talking about? 

It’s the ‘c’ game! Its the game you play when you don’t really want to play; the game inside two other games; a meta-game only you know about; a game to unwind at the end of a tough night with the unsuspecting lesser opponents. Its the sportsman’s game!

The ‘c’ game is what you aspire to develop when you start training BJJ, and most of the time your don’t even know it. This is because a ‘c’ game comes after, and thus, presumes, an ‘a’ and ‘b’ game. The former are what you spend most of your time building because they’re all you’ve got, and they’re what you want when you’re in a scrap! 

When you start, there’s only a burgeoning ‘a’ game, and as you get into the more experienced, darker gradients, a little ‘b’ starts to sneak in once in a while against a certain kind of opponent. You notice you slow things down a little, maybe try a few moves you don’t normally try, put yourself in slightly disadvantaged positions just to see what you can do. This is you working a ‘b’ game. 

Thus, a ‘c’ game is just a way of saying you’ve got experience and a deep arsenal of tactics and procedures at your disposal, you’re adaptive to the opponent and judicious in your submissions. You can comfortably try new things without a lot of risk - you’re what one might call good. 

So why reflect on these letters as proxies for skill? 

Well, because as practitioners of jiujitsu, we need to have some casual awareness of the game our opponents may be playing with us, and use this to continue to develop our own alphabetically tiered game. 

There will come a day training with someone when you realize that you’re getting ‘c gamed’ and, in fact, you may have been getting ‘c gamed’ by this person from the beginning. They may have never rolled with you as any other letter! 

This is not a bad thing. You may not want the brown/black belt hitting you with their ‘a’ game every time you slap hands and go. You also don’t necessarily want or need to roll with a much less experienced opponent using your ‘a’ game as someone with significantly more experience. These are times for experimenting and exploring that beloved, enigmatic letter ‘c’.

For those of us on the receiving end of the ‘c’ game, however, its important to take note of both the strategies and techniques of this letter and the humility and awareness required to play it. 

You may be fighting for your life in that roll, but your opponent is just casually workshopping in their ‘lab’. Respect this. Learn from this. Someday, you too may add an elusive new letter to your arsenal and carry on the ‘c’ game’s proud mystique.