The boring truth about high-level jiu-jitsu

Real pros focus on probabilities.

In this week’s episode of the BJJ Mental Models podcast (link here), we discussed the availability heuristic: a mental shortcut that humans use to make decisions faster. It’s worth explaining this concept further because it’s so key to good jiu-jitsu strategy.

The availability heuristic is a natural human bias toward memorable things. If a memory comes to mind easily, our brain treats it as especially important. Our brain then mistakenly assumes that because that information is more readily “available,” it must also be more relevant.

In other words, we’re biased to believe that memorable events are more likely to occur.

The availability heuristic is why people get so nervous about plane crashes, even though the car they drive daily is statistically far more dangerous. When a plane crash happens, it’s a spectacular catastrophe that everyone sees on the news. But car crashes happen so commonly that we seldom think about them unless they happen to us.

This leads us to screw up our risk management calculus: we’re scared of things that will probably never happen, but don’t think twice about things that probably will.

Once you become aware of the availability heuristic, you start seeing it everywhere, and you realize just how bad our human “default mode” settings are for decision-making.

Here’s an example: Are you scared of spiders? The movies taught us that black widows and brown recluse spiders are deadly, right? What if I told you that fewer than 10 Americans die every year from spider bites, and that the last recorded black widow death in the United States was in 1983? If you’re afraid of spiders, your fear is far greater than any actual risk.

Meanwhile, you’re far more likely to be killed by things you don’t think twice about. Heat stroke can kill thousands of Americans during a hot year. Influenza can kill 50,000 Americans in a year! But we’re so accustomed to living with these risks that we don’t think much about them.

Our attention goes to the risks that are unlikely but memorable: freak accidents, sharks, self-driving cars, and other newsworthy events. This biases our decision-making toward unlikely events.

You probably see the parallel to jiu-jitsu: the preference to chase the unusual, innovative stuff you see in highlight reels.

The statistics tell us you’d be better off studying the bread-and-butter stuff that works: basic takedowns, sweeps, guard passes, and submissions. We teach this stuff to white belts for a reason. But it doesn’t make for sexy instructionals or Instagram reels, so it doesn’t draw the same amount of attention. This unusual stuff is more “available“ in our memory, which makes us think it works better than it does.

Are you into card games? If everything you know about cards comes from film and television, you’d think the best players are constantly busting out big wins with four-of-a-kinds and royal flushes. But those kinds of hands are very rare. Real pros focus on probabilities: what gives the best consistent results over time? Anyone can fluke out with a great hand, but what wins the most over the long term?

In card games, as in jiu-jitsu, the answer is the same: common, boring, but effective stuff. Over time, those unremarkable techniques lead to compounding results that put you ahead of the people chasing the flash and dazzle.

Jiu-jitsu, cards, finance, public health... It’s the same strategy everywhere. Remember the availability heuristic, and avoid our natural tendency to chase the shiny and fancy stuff.

As Jake Luigi from Less Impressed More Involved BJJ says, high-level grapplers aren’t just trying to win; they’re trying to win reliably. The goal of good jiu-jitsu is predictability. It’s a game of percentages, and good strategy stacks those percentages as high in your favor as possible, even if it’s done with boring white belt techniques.

If you’d like to learn more about cognitive biases, I strongly recommend reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. Dr. Kahneman was a pioneering researcher in the field, and this book is a far better resource for jiu-jitsu than most realize.

And of course, don’t miss the conversation that inspired this newsletter: our chat with Jake Luigi in BJJ Mental Models episode 397. He’s the mind behind OutlierDB and Less Impressed More Involved BJJ.