Firefighting - The Financial Crisis and its Lessons (2019) - Book review, part 1

The 2008 Great Recession was the first major global crisis in my adult lifetime. I still remember standing in the lobby of the Budapest headquarter of the multinational company I was working for. The CEO (or CFO or whatever) was explaining to the crowd of maybe a hundred people that something bad had happened and kept happening, and although the company will do everything to protect its employees, the time has come to tighten the belts. Which they soon started doing. I wasn't alarmed. At 26, I already counted myself as a veteran software engineer, so I felt secure in my place. Besides being cocky, I also lacked imagination. Nevertheless, unlike my younger colleagues still on their probation, I was not affected by the economic near-collapse in any meaningful way, and neither was almost any of my friends or family members, so I rather looked at the whole thing as some interesting and mysterious event in history.

I never had any education in finance or economy, but in the following decade I did some reading and I tried to come to an understanding of at least the big picture. I read about bad incentives, subprime mortgages, bubbles, inadequate regulations, and even some quasi-mathematical explanations of how the securitization of mortgages led to obfuscating financial risks instead of diluting them. But I never felt confident that I could explain the Great Recession well if I had to. In short, I lacked a coherent narrative.

This is the reason why I was so happy to put my hands on Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons, a book by Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and Henry Paulson, among whom the first held the office of the chairman of the FED, and the other two were the consecutive United States Secretaries of the Treasury at the time of the events. They were actually in charge of the US response to the crisis - within the limits of their offices, at least. If there was anyone who could explain what happened, I thought, these guys are the ones! Another big plus is that the book was published in 2019, more than a decade after the crisis. The future consequences of many of their actions were unknown then, but they have had the time to run their course by now.

The benefit of hindsight is a double-edged sword, of course, as the authors, who had, and at least with respect to their reputation, still have skin in the game, can present the events in lights more favorable to them. I don't have enough knowledge of the history of the Great Recession to judge that, and as a financial illiterate at worst and a curious but lazy layman at best, I really can't evaluate their decisions. In short, I just take their word for everything in the book.

And in the following, I try to summarize what I learned from a 160-pages long summary of a very tumultuous and controversial event, in chronological order. In the first part, we will look at ...

....how it all began

Crises naturally don't happen in a healthy economy, although their inevitability is only seen in hindsight. According to the current wisdom, what led to the crisis were the following: global savings glut, the common practice of overleveraged investments, a patchy system of regulations, bad incentives, rampant securitization, and a subsequent panic that turned a normal recession into the Great One.

Low interest rates and overleveraged investments

What experts called the global savings glut was the phenomenon that in the early 2000s foreign investment poured like rain into America (mostly from China), as local investors sought higher yields and better investment opportunities than they could find at home. This caused a huge build-up of debt (both by private households and banks) but plenty of cash.

The sentiment of never-ending good times and low interest rates incentivized financial institutions to overleverage, that is, they financed their investments largely by borrowing. Let's enlighten the concept of leverage with an example. In this, our private citizen Optimistic Oscar decides to buy a house for investment purposes. The house costs $1 million, Oscar spends $100,000 from his own money, and takes a loan for the rest - that loan is his leverage. He duly manages to sell it a year later for $1,200,000 (a 20% extra). He pays back the $900,000 loan to the back with let's say 5% interest, which amounts to $945,000.  The rest, $255,000 remains in his pocket. He turned $100,000 to $255,000 in a year, earning a spectacular 155% profit!

Had he paid half of the original price himself ($500,000), then he would have to pay back $500,000 * 1.05 = $525,000 to the bank which leaves him with $1,200,000 - $525,000 = $675,000. His profit would be $175,000 on the $500,000 investment, that is, 35%. Not bad, but far from 155%.

How would the math look like in the first case if the price of his house had dropped 20%? He would sell it for $800,000, pay the bank its $945,000, which would leave him in $145,000 debt! He started with $100,000, ended up with -$145,000, that's a loss of $245,000. -145% loss!

What if he had paid half of it himself? Then after paying back $525,000 he would end up with $275,000. He lost $225,000 of his original $500,000. -45% interest. Bad, but at least not -145%!

This whole thing is very much like what banks have been doing since the Medicis. They have realized that not all their clients will come to take out their deposits at the same time. It's enough to keep a fraction of their assets at home, the rest they can invest, and earn profit.

In short, leverage is an essential tool in finance. It multiples wins and losses equally. The markets were superbly optimistic in the early 2000s and took gambles that rewarded them immensely. When the times turned bad, it wiped them out.

Patchy regulations and the shadow banking system

Shouldn't regulations have demanded more prudence? Don't banks have capital requirements stopping them from being overleveraged? Well, there were regulations, and banks had standards. But both were inadequate.

The hodge-podge regulation framework didn't make it easy to see what's happening in the economy. There was no single regulator that could assess the big picture, and the strong anti-regulatory lobby ensured there won't be either.

The regulation net didn't even cover the whole financial infrastructure. Many financial entities - part of the so-called shadow banking system - didn't have to abide even by the low standards imposed on banks. Moreover, government institutes, like the FED or the Treasury, didn't have the authority to help them in trouble, either.

Securitization

And then there was the magic of financial engineering, especially the technique known as securitization. Let's explain that briefly and inaccurately. When Joe Average takes a loan from the bank to buy his house, the bank gives him let's say 1 million dollars on the condition that in 20 years he has to repay $2 million (the numbers are completely ad-hoc). This mortgage is an asset of the bank. Now the bank might find itself in trouble one day and in need of quick money. It can decide to sell Joe's mortgage to another bank (or any financial entity) for, let's say 1.2 million. It forgoes the stream of revenue in the next 20 years in exchange for having the cash now (not completely unlike what Joe did in the first place). So Joe's mortgage is actually a product that can be sold and bought, like a second-hand car. 

A mortgage is, of course, not a riskless product (another common trait with second-hand cars...). Joe can default on it, which is a loss for the bank on him (in case the value of his home doesn't cover the mortgage). However, smart statisticians have figured out that even though Joe Average has a 1% chance to default on his debt, one thousand Joe Averages' mortgages bundled together is a very safe investment, because according to the expectations only 10 of them will default. That's the reason banks bundle products together in big numbers, so the future aggregated loss on them is both low and foreseeable.

Of course, the mortgage is just one example of financial products that generate steady streams of revenue for some limited time. Jane's student loan is another example. Joe's mortgage can be bundled with Jane's debt and a hundred similar products and then sold and resold, and split into smaller products and merged into other bundles made of products originated from other banks. Products can be sliced even "horizontally". To explain it with an example, let's assume a bank has a package of 1000 debts, which it splits into 3 tiers or "tranches", each of which generates the same revenue to its holder. It sells the lowest, Tier 1, for 10 million dollars. When some of the 1000 debtors start to default, this will be the tier whose revenues will be affected by those losses. Tier 2 is sold for a bit more, 12 million dollars. The holder of that will be affected only in the unlikely event of more than 10 debtors defaulting. Tier 3 is the priciest, it's sold for 14 million dollars because its revenue is guaranteed. The owner of this has bought peace of mind for the extra 2 million bucks. The numbers might be unrealistic here, but the concept holds.

So at the end of the day, a Norwegian city council can invest into a product to enjoy a steady stream of revenue for the next 20 years that consists of a fraction of Joe's mortgage monthly payment from Texas, a fraction of Jane's payment on her student loan in California, and bits and pieces from a thousand different origins. Of course, by the time the first cent reaches Norway, these products went through so many hands and slicing and dicing that no one can trace them in either direction anymore.

The core idea behind this whole complicated business is to reduce risk. The products are made of diverse and often geographically distributed components. Some of them will default, but the overwhelming majority won't because they are independent. They need different reasons to fail (Joe's financial situation in Texas correlates very little with Jane's in California), and the failure of one product doesn't affect the other. With the vertical splitting, even the probabilities can be controlled, so risky products will be bought by those who can bear the risk.

At least, such was the consensus before 2008. What happened? 

A housing bubble happened...

... that exposed the flaws in the theory brutally. From the early 2000s, the American government actively promoted house ownership. With the help of government subsidies (tax breaks and such) and the historically low interest rates, a huge number of people could afford (and were actively encouraged) to buy their own houses. They did it mostly by taking loans, sometimes with no capital at all (see overleveraged). House prices shot up all across America. This didn't stop the buyers, because the rise seemed to be inexorable. Joe thought that he could buy his house on a loan only. The interest rates were low (at least in the first couple of years, in the "teasing period") and he figured that the price of his home will continue to rise. Even if he ends up being unable to pay the monthly installments, he can sell the house for more than he bought it for, thus even earning some money on the whole thing.

Bad incentives

The buyers weren't alone to blame. Banks and brokers gave loans to people about whom a basic background check would have revealed that they will never be able to repay their mortgages (these were the so-called NINJA loans - for borrowers with No Income, No Job or Assets). Why? Because they had no incentives to do so, just the opposite. The practice of securitization made them indifferent to whether the buyers will be able to meet their obligations or not. The originators of the loans immediately repackaged and sold them, and thus they no longer bore the risk. Brokers even received hefty commissions after each mortgage they negotiated, making them financially interested in not making those background checks.

What about the financial entities who bought the securities? Shouldn't they have demanded more checks? They actually did, that is what credit rating agencies, like Moody's and Standard & Poor's, are for. However, these agencies were funded by fees paid by issuers or sellers of securities. This is called a conflict of interest. It's like you were paid by Adam Sandler to write a review of one of his movies.

And the panic

Eventually, more and more homeowners defaulted on their mortgages. They put the houses on the market which started to push the prices down. Once the trend turned, there was no stop to it.

The bubble burst and so did the theory of risk-defeating securities. House prices started to fall everywhere, which eliminated the supposed safety of the geographic diversity of the securities. Banks and other financial institutions that stored their wealth in mortgage-based securities saw them evaporate. The byproduct of the financial engineering of spreading out and diluting the risk was obfuscation. No one knew exactly which financial products were affected. So instead of cauterizing the rotten part of the system - and rid it of the bad actors and practices with some collateral damage -, the fire spread. The market players started to distrust those who dealt with any kind of securities. Then those who made business with them. And then those who had links to those. And so on. Everyone was reluctant to lend to anyone else, and the system started to come to a grinding halt.

In the second part, I will sum up how the events unfolded in the following 2-3 years, and what role the FED and the Treasury played in the story.

Read More

War of styles: Navy SEAL vs martial artist

Martial arts are such a rich and entertaining topic that having started pontificating, I find it hard to stop. However, the act is entertaining only as long as the pontificator is in the right, and one inevitably will reach the end of his/her comfort zone eventually.  Still, there are so many low-hanging fruits - countless myths to bust, claims to debunk, styles to compare, people to valorize or laugh at - that simple common sense can carry you a long way before you make a total fool of yourself.

The chosen topic for today examines the question that often comes up in the minds of martial artists, martial art fans, teenagers, and movie-buffs. And this was the question I posed to my then Shotokan Karate master at the tender age of 16 (in the intersection of all the aforementioned categories): "How would a special forces guy fare against a Karate master?"

By Karate masters then I invariably meant Japanese Karate masters who were both objectively superb and far enough to be seen even more so. My own master's answer was soberingly simple and something along the lines of "Not very well. A master is on a way higher technical level". The response both reassured and disappointed me. On one hand, I was practicing Karate, so I wanted to believe this style is superior to the alternatives. On the other hand, everyone knows that special forces guys are the ultimate badasses. They can snap a guy's neck with one move, drive his nasal cartilage into his brain (a la Con Air/The Last Boy Scout), crush his windpipe, or just go full Jason Bourne and demolish 3 people in 2 seconds.

So let's dig into the question: who would win a match between Batman and Captain America an average Navy SEAL (for the sake of brevity, from now on I will just use SEAL for any special forces guy) and an average professional MMA-fighter/boxer/Thai-boxer/grappler? (I have elaborated my not very falttering opinion of traditional martial artists at length earlier). I see three ways to approach the question, two of which require some research and the third one some thinking. So, the first is looking for some hard evidence supporting either case, which doesn't require expertise neither in martial arts nor in military training programs. The second is is to check the opinion of people who know both SEALs and martial artists, or maybe are both of those. And the last is taking a look at the training regimes of each side, and trying to deploy some common sense. Those who read the previous blog posts will feel the following somewhat redundant, but repetition is the mother of learning. 

Let's try the evidence-seeking approach first. What would constitute hard evidence? Obviously, the aggregated result of a series of matches between the creme of martial arts practitioners and SEALs. We are past the age of gladiators and fight-to-the-death matches, so the rules should disqualify dangerous techniques (eye gouging, punching in the throat, biting, etc), but allow for everything else. MMA-rules satisfy these criteria. If there is a sufficient number of matches under these rules, the statistics would give us the best possible answer to this binary question - the probabilistic one. One or two examples are not enough. You might say that you know a SEAL who kicked the ass of the local MMA champion last Saturday in a bar you frequent. I might respond that I know of two occasions when the SEAL's ass got handed over to him by my friend's Kung-fu teacher. Individual cases mean almost nothing. The loser could be drunk, had a bad day, slipped accidentally, and so on. Or the winner is such a natural talent that he would beat 9 guys out of 10, even if the only hand-to-hand education he ever received was on the schoolyard. On the other hand, if there were 100 such matches between SEALS and professional fighters, and the SEALs won 68 of them, that would say something uncontroversial.

Unfortunately, there is no such evidence for either case. Some ex-SEALs ended up in combat sports, but not enough to draw conclusions from their performance. The first approach is quickly discarded.

The next way of exploring the question is to learn whether there is a consensus among people who know both worlds. My experience in this area is limited, as I only know about one high-profile person who fits the descriptions. Jocko Willink is a former Nacy SEAL, black-belt BJJ practitioner, and all-around combat sportsman (not to mention children-book author, motivational speaker, and podcaster with a huge audience). He covers a lot of related topics in his podcast and he mentioned on multiple occasions how easily he overcame his sparring buddies in the Navy with only a blue belt in BJJ. He is also asked a lot about which martial arts he finds the most effective. Wrestling, BJJ, boxing, and Muay Thai I heard him mention most frequently. I never heard him saying anything about military-variant hand-to-hand combat styles. 

How much is his opinion worth? Jocko is certainly legit. He is too high-profile to be able to avoid being exposed if that wasn't the case, either as a fraud or a fool. He has also recorded countless interviews with both SEALs and martial artists, so to me he seems to represent the consensus. But if anyone can point to well-known people voicing opposite opinions, I'm interested.

I left the common sense approach till the end, as it will be the lengthiest. My common sense tells me to compare both sides' relevant skillsets and physical abilities, and try to infer the result from there. Assuming this is the right way to go, what exactly should we look at? In a fight, you can say there is a small number of major factors. These are (and we are talking about very broad concepts): mental toughness, physical abilities, and technical skills. How do martial artists and SEALs compare in these?

On the mental toughness front, SEALs must be superb. Their training is famously grueling and the military has all the incentives to filter for people who never give up, never back down, and carry through the mission, whatever it takes. I honestly don't know how that compares to the fighter's resolve who are regularly willing to step into a cage to confront someone who wants to beat them bloody and unconscious. Let's call it even.

Mental toughness has another component besides the will to endure. Which is the length someone is willing to go at hurting his opponent. Again, I suppose SEALs are second to none at this. These guys are prepared to literally kill at command, after all. But UFC fighters regularly pound their opponent's head on the ground with full force until the referee pulls them off. It's hard to imagine how to surpass that level of aggressivity and brutality. Let's call this one even, too.

What about physical strength, as in punching power, stamina, the capacity to absorb damage? Or reflexes, natural agility, explosiveness? These are attributes of a sportsman. No military training substitutes for them. SEALs are certainly selected for people who are above average for most of these, but I doubt too much spent time of their training spent on improving on them - apart from the obvious emphasis on physical fitness.

And then, finally, technical skills, in which it's also reasonable to include some physical skills that correlate with them. A Navy SEAL training is less than 18 months long. During that the candidates, apart from rigorously improving their fitness level, learn to use every kind of weapon invented by man from knives to bazookas. They learn parachuting, seamanship, diving, laying and disabling explosives, interrogation techniques, navigation, basic medic-skills, handling radio equipment, survival in water, cold, and wilderness, tactics, you name it. They are pretty busy. Let's assume that they have a one-hour hand-to-hand combat session squeezed in every single day. That would amount to around 500 hours of training, gross, and I think this number is a big overestimation.

Let's compare it with a competitive boxer's or Thai-boxer's training regime. Most start in their childhood years. Some champs started much later, so being very charitable to SEALs in this comparison, a competent amateur county-level sportsman has at least 3 years of training behind him (10, much more frequently). And we are not even talking about professional fighters here. Let's deduct the strength & conditioning + warm-up and bagwork components from their training, they probably still have 5 hours of technical training every week. That's around 250 hours per year, which surpasses the SEAL training, often many times over, by the time they are ready for competing. Not to mention that even their auxiliary training regime is focused on fighting as opposed to general fitness.

In short, the sense of timing, rhythm, and distance, the tactical skills, reflexes, speed, punching power, and endurance of a competitive combat sportsman is just on a whole different level than a soldier's. And his technical skills are simply beyond comparison. A SEAL might practice a right hook a thousand times during his training. A rookie professional boxer has done it ten times more than that.

To wrap it up, in the ring the average SEAL stands no chance. If special forces people knew a way how to train more effectively for conventional one-to-one fights, those training methods would be adopted by coaches in the world of sport. I already hear the objection "Oh, but the military of course keeps those training techniques secret" - give me a break. Only in the movies. Nothing which is shared with thousands of people over the years stays secret for long, especially if it were very much in other people's interest to learn them. In the world of martial arts, there is money, ambition, and - most importantly - genuine unsatisfiable interest to explore new styles and techniques. And as a matter a fact, there is no specific special forces hand-to-hand combat training curriculum. It's something that changes all the time and it's mostly determined by the particular instructor - you can check it on Wikipedia or listen to interviews with SEALs. 

What about a fight in real life? I think, in a real-world fight, the SEAL training would give an edge. Absolute ruthlessness and the acceptance of serious injury on your part are not natural for ordinary humans, not even for UFC fighters. But it wouldn't be enough to make up for the skill difference. And about the windpipe-crushing and nose in the brain punches? You really shouldn't watch so many movies.

Read More

War of styles: do traditional martial arts work?

This post intends to fill a gaping hole in the previous one and to take a hard look at traditional martial arts. Are they real? The basic assumption I made in the previous post is that if there is sort of competition where apart from extremely dangerous techniques everything is allowed, and it is open to any style, and it runs long enough to provide statistically significant results, then, in the long run, it will show which styles work in practice, and which don't. 

This series of repeated experiments is impartial, quantifiable, and requires no expertise, only common sense. The UFC satisfies the above criteria. There have been more than 500 fights so far inside the octagon in the span of three decades, featuring fighters from all kinds of martial arts and combat sports. Everything from Western boxing to Chinese kung-fu had the opportunity to prove itself.

And traditional martial arts didn't shine. No one who was proficient in traditional styles only - like Karate, Taekwondo, Wing Chun, Tai Chi, Kung fu, ... - ever got close to the middle tier, let alone the top. Which came as a surprise for most. Aren't arts developed for centuries, by masters honing even the smallest moves to perfection, supposed to be superior to mundane "sports", like box or wrestling? The defenders - those who at least recognize that the burden of proof is on them - offer many explanations, and I want to address the most frequent ones here before I attempt to come up with the reasons for why the result should have been predictable.

Explanations

But there are UFC champions using traditional arts

What about Lyoto Machida, George St-Pierre, or Stephen Thompson? These karatekas are among the very best fighters in UFC! Well, yes and no. First of all, they are not simply karatekas, they are also expert grapplers, who are additionally trained in wrestling, boxing, Muay Thai, etc. Second, although they have a recognizable background in Karate, it amounts to maybe 10% of what they are doing. It lends their fighting style a distinctive sheen, but 90% of their moves are indistinguishable from the other fighters'. Also, when talking about statistics, having a handful of counterexamples against hundreds doesn't make a case. A God-given talent can compensate for a lot.

In real life, there are no rules

Eastern martial arts have been developed for life and death situations, so goes one argument, not for playing by the rules. That is, their masters on the street would employ techniques that are too dangerous, therefore illegal even in the UFC. On the other hand, the effectiveness of combat sports in real life is hampered by the artificial rules and protective gear their practitioners are used to. 

This is a very weak argument. Lethal techniques by definition can not be sufficiently practiced. You can't learn how to crush someone's jugular with your fingers by practicing it in slow motion against an obliging partner any more than learning how to hit someone with a right hook by only imitating it many times over while your partner patiently plays the role of a sandbag. One can only master a technique by continuous and persistent trial and error. By trying to apply it hundreds of times against training partners who do their best to thwart it. The only proof of having learned anything practical is if you can successfully apply it frequently enough. If you not a single time did it for real, thinking that you'll be able to in a situation where you are in real danger is delusional.

Prizefighting is beneath the arts

The next explanation is that it is beneath a real master to participate in such a bloodsport entertainment. I'm sure that many masters share this view. But I'm also sure that not every one of them does. From the tens of thousands of students of martial arts, there must be a large number of them who don't feel the competition demeaning. Yet, they are nowhere to be seen. At least not among the winners. There is a craze nowadays about exposing fake masters, and youtube is overflowing with videos where some MMA fighter beats the crap about masters of exotic styles. Plus, in the martial arts lore, the stories of wandering masters who developed their style by accepting and actively seeking challenges are abundant. The founders of almost every style were famous for their supposedly numerous victories where they proved that their new school is better than the rest. The conveniently risk-averse high-mindedness is a recent phenomenon.

The aim is spiritual development

Then come the ones who claim that the purpose of martial arts is developing the character and keeping the body healthy - therefore the effectiveness of them as combat styles is of secondary importance. This is lame. If the aim is health and spiritual development, don't call your method a martial art. Either it is "martial", that is, it prepares its practitioners to defend themselves in violent situations, or it's just a cheap PR trick to claim that what you sell is more than it really is. 

Furthermore, the traditional arts are suboptimal by their own standards. What instills more respect and humility and the appreciation of hard work into the students: testing their progress and facing their limitations every day on the mat or practicing forms and meditating on theory?

Self-defense is more than dueling

The last explanation is that martial arts focus on self-defense, which is more general than a one-on-one fight. Situation awareness, fighting with multiple or armed opponents, etc. This argument has some merit. But still, a more holistic approach to combat doesn't explain why the practitioners tend not to excel in one-on-one fights - which is still supposed to be the center of any martial art.

These are the common arguments for the lack of evidence that traditional styles work. I tried to explain why they are all unconvincing. The simplest explanation is often the best - and the burden of proof is on the one who argues against it. The simplest explanation for the lack of evidence supporting the effectiveness of conventional martial arts is... that they are not very effective. They are tradition-bound, overcomplicated, inward-looking, and they emphasize practicing forms over sparring exercises.

The problems

Overcomplicated

By overcomplicated I mean that the Eastern styles tend to have a huge repertoire of techniques, and most of them are not very usable. Karate (and I'm sure various kung fu styles as well) for example, has a plethora of exotic strikes, such as the one using the pressed-together fingertips in form of a bird's beak (chicken-head strike) to hit the side of the neck just behind the collarbone. For one, hitting the neck with a simply clenched fist is probably much more damaging - unless one imagines that he can tear up some artery or hit a deadly pressure-point with his beak-transformed hand (watched too many movies presumably) -, and for two, good luck with hitting a small specific area on a moving opponent. Or as another example, the world is yet to see anyone in the octagon going down from a classic, back-of-the-neck-hitting, knife-hand Karate chop. It's as if the founders of most styles had wanted to incorporate every possible move that can be useful in some imaginable situation, while not giving much thought to how frequently those situations are likely to happen in real life.

The majority of defense techniques are not that versatile maybe, but equally useless. Traditional Karate blocks are practiced with opponents who stop and freeze after a strike, so the blocking hand has enough time to meet the attacker's hand helpfully held motionless in the air. The testament of their impracticality is that these blocks go unused even in Karate-competitions, where the fighters resort to simple parries, like boxers.

The unnecessary large and mostly useless repertoire also means that even if it contains reliably effective techniques, the students have much less time for practicing them than kick-boxers or Thai-boxers. 

Tradition-bound

Due to their heavy emphasis on tradition, martial arts evolve with glacier velocity. The MMA world fully adopted BJJ in the course of a few years only. It simply worked and everyone recognized its necessity. Low-kicks from Muay-Thai got integrated as well in no time. Martial art techniques evolve beyond trivial changes only when someone founds his own school and redesigns the repertoire. If the students ask about the reasons behind a certain technique, the master doesn't point to the twenty-five times Royce Gracie submitted his opponents with that particular arm lock - instead, the explanation often boils down to that "the old masters knew what they were doing, and you should believe it works".

Navel-gazing

The inward-lookingness is the inevitable consequence of the tradition-bound mentality. Since we know that ours are the best offensive techniques, learning defense only against them is sufficient. Traditional Karate or Wing Chun with their emphasis on linear moves don't have an idiomatic way to deal with circular strikes like a boxer's hook. And repeating the Wing Chun mantra of "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line" won't deflect a body shot or an uppercut. Wing Chun in particular is a style that lives inside its own bubble. The famous sticky hands practice, in which the partners keep constant hand contact to be able to react to the opponent's move, is often a spectacle of strikes and parries exchanged with almost supernatural speed when demonstrated by advanced students. But it works only if the opponent plays the same game, as the very few Wing Chun practitioners stepping in the octagon can testify.

What about Aikido and the like?

So far, I have only mentioned martial arts focusing on strikes and kicks. What about the ones using wrist locks, throws, arm-twists, like Aikido or Japanese Jiu-Jitsu? There is even less evidence in their favor, and every problem above applies to them. The simple fact is that just can't catch a wrist in the air. Sure, some can if his opponent tells him exactly what technique he will use. When the attacker can choose randomly between two pre-agreed techniques, it is much harder. When it's a choice of five, I think it's almost impossible. So what about a real fight with two dozen possibilities? What if he can also fake? Or do combinations? Boxers who practice nothing else than evading punches can only block or duck one - and often not even that. Catching one in mid-air and improvise something...good luck with that.

What about the famous "using the opponent's weight and strength against him" principle? This is even more ridiculous than the aforementioned Wing Chun aphorism. Does anyone really think that the weight categories in Judo competitions are there to protect the heavy and strong from the smaller people?
It is not to say that Aikido or Jiu-Jitsu is completely useless. They probably come in handy in self-defense situations when someone is trying to shove you around or grab your jacket, and thus expose himself to a counter-attack. But the assumption that the opponent is always less competent or can be taken by surprise is not something to reliably count on.

Emphasizing forms over sparring

The little emphasis on sparring in the training sessions is the ultimate problem with traditional martial arts and the one from which the others follow. And also a probable reason for their existence. Sparring is a force for convergence. Whatever background one has and whatever forms he practices seem to have little effect on the techniques he will use in a full-contact sparring match or in a real fight. Look at occasional videos on Youtube where kung fu masters are challenged and you'll see none of the moves you expect from movies or staged demonstrations. But it doesn't exclusively apply to people who volunteer to get disabused of their delusions in front of the whole world. To a lesser extent maybe, but it's true for professionals as well. The differences between the moves of a, let's say, Thai-boxer and a Kyokushin karateka in a full-contact match are far outweighed by the similarities. Martial arts even at their bests are guilty of the narcissism of small differences.

Infatuation with the number of techniques and the importance of perfecting every little detail  crowds out the development of the most important skills in a fight: the sense of distance and timing, the ability to read the opponent, keeping your composure after eating a heavy blow, the ability to cope with the messiness of a fight where nothing ever goes exactly how one plans it.

Caveats

Of course, my arguments above are sweeping generalizations, bound to be false here and there. There must be very combat-centric styles that, nevertheless, are not interested in competitions, or not in UFC, at least. Not every style is equally bad either, and there can be huge differences between dojos of the same style. Some dojos are competition-oriented and pay lip service only to the rest. Some traditional Karate styles, most prominently Kyokushin, are very much combat-focused - and produced great UFC champions, like Georges St-Pierre. The most decisive factor that reliably predicts a style's effectiveness is not whether the traditional label applies or not. It is how much emphasis it places on sparring.  For example, there are great Judokas in UFC, but I also know about black-belts who didn't even need to spar on their exam.

Old myths in the new world

Will traditional martial arts disappear eventually if enough people watch combat sports and read this post? I don't think so. They appeal to the human psyche in ways that down-to-the-earth sports like wrestling or box don't. Their techniques can look amazing. Demonstrations, like shows of acrobatics, are often a joy to watch. They provide not only physical education but lifestyle guidance, social structure, a feeling of belonging, and mystery. The promise of secret knowledge - who knows, some old masters perhaps really can control hidden energies or you can be lethal even in your eighties - always lingers in the back of the mind even for skeptical and reasonable students.

The myths surrounding martial arts are not in any way less fascinating and enjoyable than other kinds of fiction. Today's UFC champions are 30-some guys who mostly have bodies of Greek gods and are experts in multiple fighting styles on Olympic levels. The idea that there still are some old masters in the mountains of China that could beat them easily if they deigned to do so is a hilarious and amusing testament of human gullibility. And yet it's something that life would be poorer without. Suspending our disbelief is necessary to enjoy works of fiction. Movies of Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, Van Damme, Seagal have been formative experiences of many kids, me among them. If some have problems with re-adjusting to reality when the film is over, it's not the end of the world. And it's not incurable either. A punch in the nose with a boxing glove usually helps.

Read More

War of styles: which is the best martial art style?

Which is the most effective martial art style? Every combat sports enthusiast wondered the question at one point (or rather too long), and many have thought to have found the answer. "Ninjutsu is the most lethal". "A Sumo-wrestler would simply steamroll over anyone". "Shaolin-monks are invincible". "An Aikido master would just use his opponent's energy against him". "Muay Thai is the toughest". "A real boxer would just knock the lights out of them". "A wrestler would just break those jokers in half".  "No martial art tricks would help against a body-builder". And so on. Martial arts are more than sport. They often are a part of the identity of their students, and few people are willing to say something like "yeah, I've been doing xyz for ten years, but to be frank, uvw is much better." 

The question and the answers are purely speculative unless there was a controlled experiment where fighters from any style could enter the ring to duke it out between each other - under a minimal set of rules. The rules should allow for kicks, hand strikes, throws, grappling techniques - basically everything short of eye-gauging - to give every style the opportunity to prove itself, and the winner should be the one who manages to incapacitate his opponent or force him to submit. There has to be a high number of matches to produce reliable results. One wrestler winning against a boxer doesn't mean a lot on its own. But having a hundred matches resulting in a 70-30 win-loss ratio for wrestling is a statistically significant result. If the result were an unsurprising 100-0 between Muay Thai and Tai Chi, that would really say something of the latter.

Luckily for everyone interested (and open-minded), such an experiment has been going on for almost 30 years. When the Gracie family launched the Ultimate Fighting Championship in 1993, few people noticed. Today, it's a major source of entertainment worldwide and has produced probably the best hand-to-hand prizefighters in human history.

So, what does the UFC tell us about the effectiveness of martial art styles? Or in other words, which style(s) should one learn if he or she wants to be able to handle him- or herself? The short answer is that there is no such style. Every single champion or high-level athlete in UFC is proficient in multiple ones. But there may be a priority order, and I'll try to establish a possible one below.

Submission grappling

The biggest impact on the world of martial arts in modern times was when in 1993, Royce Gracie won the first UFC with a previously almost unknown fighting style. Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, the style his family developed from Judo, concentrated solely on the ground fight. Gracie was not only the most unassuming fighter in the ring - an average built and average height guy, nothing like the default lean-body-builder-like competitors of today - but he was evidently untrained in any art of punching and kicking. Every fight of his went down the same way. He ate some punches while getting close enough to his opponent to grab him, dragged him to the ground, and finished him quickly with some choke or armbar.

Brazilian Jiu-jitsu became a phenomenon overnight, and by now it has become the fundamental building block of every fighter's skillset. Today, you can rarely win a match with BJJ only - since everyone is an expert - but you will never win many without it. BJJ is, of course, only one of several submission grappling styles, although the most famous, and it can be substituted by Sambo, Judo, and various forms of catch-wrestling.

So if there is only one martial art you want to learn, go for BJJ (or something alike). I wrote a lot about why a fight between a grappler and a striker favors the grappler in a previous post, here I just point to the historical records. If your opponent doesn't know grappling, you have a very good chance to win - as Royce Gracie demonstrated. And if he knows, by managing to get to the ground with him, you can at least neutralize his other skills.

Takedowns

Submission grappling skills can sometimes be substituted by good takedown skills combined with some striking ability. Lots of UFC matches end with one fighter taking his opponent down and pounding him into submission. The so-called "ground and pound" is not as elegant as a nice choke or a lock, but it works. The most common takedowns seen in UFC come from wrestling. Judo sweeps, trips, and throws are less frequent - maybe because they were developed against gi-wearing opponents -, but there are some very good fighters with Judo backgrounds, as well.

Western boxing

The second skillset (for the sake of simplicity, I just lumped takedowns to submission grappling) no serious UFC fighter can afford to lack is good old western-style boxing. Boxing is a marvelous and deceptively simple form of pugilism. Contrasted by e.g. the dozens of different Karate strikes (moving the hand up, or down, or sideways; hitting with the knuckles, the palm, the fingertip, the blade of the hand, backhand, elbow, ...), its whole offensive repertoire is built up from six types of punches. Jab, cross, left hook, right hook, left uppercut, right uppercut. (The dynamics of performing the same strike with the leading or the rear hand are so different that it justifies talking about two different punches). But boxing completely lacks the rigidity of traditional martial arts, and these basic punches are endlessly variable by playing with angles and distances. Additionally, the Pareto rule applies to fighting as well. An overwhelming majority of fights are won by a very small set of techniques. Boxers have taken the lesson to the heart and spent their time honing the handful of punches that always work. The only type of strikes missing from boxing, that have demonstrated utility, is elbow strikes.

Box's defensive repertoire is also simple and sophisticated at the same time. Body shots are simply blocked by the elbows and forearms kept tightly to the upper body. Instead of relying only on parries and other defense moves common in Eastern martial arts, vulnerable parts like the solar plexus, chin, or ribs are constantly covered by the arms and shoulders, to provide only small and moving targets to the opponent. Attacks to the head are bobbed, ducked, or deflected by shoulder rolls. Boxing is unique among martial arts in how it uses head and shoulder moves to evade punches, which makes defense experts almost impossible to hit. Mike Tyson was a master of this in his prime, and James Tooney was an artist. Rolling with a punch - which means absorbing the energy of the punch by simply moving with it - is another very effective technique mostly missing from other martial arts. Ultimately, the superiority of boxing over other forms of striking arts stems from two sources. One is that box has evolved as a sport unburdened by philosophy and tradition. Prizefighting hasn't left much room for theories, and what didn't work, didn't get adopted. Secondly, whereas Eastern martial arts aimed to develop techniques that work equally against armed and unarmed attacks, boxing never tried to be generalistic. Blocks and rolls would be of little use against, let's say, knife attacks.

Despite being such an effective combat style, on its own, it's clearly insufficient. Pure boxers never fared well neither in MMA, where they could be taken down and finished on the ground nor under K1 or a similar set of rules, where their superior striking skills couldn't compensate for the lack of ...

Kicks

Which is the last indispensable set of techniques. The most used kicks, like in the case of hand strikes, are the simplest ones. Front kicks, roundhouse kicks, knees. Every now and then some very good kicker finishes his opponent with a more spectacular turning back kick, hook kick, or side kick, but these are rare. These listed above are basically part of almost every martial art's repertoire, so there is no style to single out as "the ultimate kicking art". There is only one type of widely-used kick that's not ubiquitous in traditional martial arts, and that is the low-kick known from Muay Thai. Again, what is true for punches, is true for kicks as well. Taekwondo and various kungfu styles developed a huge variety of kicks, and only a fraction of them is used regularly. Eight out ten kick-KOs are the good old round kick to the head.

And from the bird's eye view, that seems to be it. If the original question is formulated as "which are the most important martial art skillsets to learn?", then the answer is that one should be competent in three distinct groups: grappling, boxing, and kicking. Of course, during this super-condensed attempt for a neat categorization, lots of things fell between the cracks. Among many things unmentioned, neither takedowns, elbow strikes, nor Muay Thai clinches fit very well in these categories, and each category encompasses many very different schools.

If the question is posed as "which styles should I learn", then the answer is: learn BJJ or some other form of submission grappling and then learn a stand-up style that emphasizes a small set of simple techniques of strikes and kicks and a sparring-oriented approach. Muay Thai, for example, ticks almost all the boxes.

Observant readers probably have noticed that apart from being brought up occasionally as references to the negative,  traditional martial arts have gone unmentioned. How come, one might wonder. Are they just not good enough? My short and unkind answer is that it is exactly the case: they are just not good enough. But the topic deserves a post of its own.

Read More

War of styles: BJJ vs Wrestling

After I finished putting my affection for BJJ into a love letter, my mind was still occupied with the topic for a couple of days. I realized that I had touched on a couple of things without fully exploring them, and they merit a short sequel or two.  About how grapplers fare against stand-up fighters and vice-versa has been said enough in the previous post. Now I want to focus on the question: what is the best form of grappling? 

There are several contenders here, among which I only pick BJJ and the western (freestyle or Greco-Roman) style of wrestling, these being the two most prominent forms of grappling in the world of mixed-martial-arts, and probably the most extreme examples of their own wider groups (let's call those groups submission-focused group and take-down-focused group).

A good approach for answering complex questions is to start with an extreme example and draw general conclusions from it. What happens if a "pure" wrestler" (who knows no submission technique at all) faces with a pure BJJ practitioner (who only knows ground-fighting), all other things equal? The answer from the statistics (thanks to UFC and the like) is that the BJJ guy wins almost all the time. The reason is very simple. Wrestlers don't have the expertise in finishing moves. No chokes, no locks. A wrestling match ends when an average BJJ one starts - one fighter on his back on the floor. Additionally, wrestlers have to work against their natural instincts to turn their back on their opponent. In wrestling, it's a way to make it harder for your opponent to throw you. In BJJ, it's the best way to get yourself finished with a rear-naked choke.

However, when good wrestlers start learning submission techniques, they can catch up with BJJ'ers rather quickly. The reason for this is also the reason why moving from BJJ to wrestling is not that typical, and it's not easy, either. There is an asymmetry here. Wrestling filters for athleticism. Wrestlers are quick, agile, and have probably the best strength and body weight ratio among combat sports practitioners. They are unsurpassable in the foundations of grappling: the sense of balance, explosiveness, dominating the opponent, the use of body weight, ... From this base, learning BJJ requires learning how to move on the ground - which is truly a new skill -, and learning the techniques, which is simply a matter of practice. BJJers, on the other hand, can be experts - even if not world-class - of submission without being particularly athletic - it is actually one of the huge sources of BJJ's popularity. Improving your strength and agility is much, much harder, than improving on your technique. Someone can be a world champion in BJJ if he starts training at 18. No one will be a world champion wrestler starting at 18. Some very heavy work in your teenage years just can't be made up for once you passed the age. 

There is also the cost/benefit ratio. BJJers don't put much emphasis on what is at the center of wrestling: take-downs. The reason is that in a competition, a take-down is not particularly valuable. It scores 2 points, less than getting in a dominant position on the ground. If a wrestler tries to perform a take-down on a BJJer, the latter usually doesn't put much effort in fending it off. The attitude is: "You want to get me to the ground? I'm ok with that. Let's see what you do once I dragged you down with myself". On the other hand, learning to be very good at take-downs requires a lot of effort, and most BJJers think it's just not worth it.

To reiterate, in a match between pure wrestling, and pure BJJ - where the point is to incapacitate your opponent - BJJ wins, almost all the time. But take a seasoned wrestler and train him in BJJ, and he'll be a very, very hard opponent.

However, most of this above are true for wrestling as it is practiced today. In older times, before it has become a sport known today, catch-wrestling, or submission wrestling was very popular and it contained many submission techniques. One of its most famous practitioners, Ad Santel, has beaten the best students of the Kodokan school, the home of modern Judo. Which, by the way, spurred an immense interest in catch-wrestling among Judokas in Japan, many of whom traveled to Europe and America to learn wrestling.

But for now, I deliberately concentrated on the extremes. The wider world of grappling can be explored some other time.

Read More

The marvel of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

Since martial arts conquered the world, mostly riding on the waves of Hollywood movies from the 1960s, there have been endless debates about which style is the best. In 1993 the Gracie-family decided to settle the matter for good. 

Although few people paid attention when they organized the first Ultimate Fighting Championship, that changed quickly. The UFC offered a no-holds-barred form of competition, where under a minimal set of rules anyone could step in the octagon to match his skills against an opponent of any fighting style. Among the competitors were practitioners of Karate, Box, Judo, Kick-box, Savate, Wrestling, and other mainstream or niche martial arts. Adherents of every single one of them around the world, whose attachment to their chosen art often borders on religious, expected their style to emerge victorious. But the fighter who walked through his opponents on his way to the final victory was a physically unassuming Brazilian with a very strange fighting style. Every single match of him went down the same way. He avoided the punches with mixed levels of success until he managed to grab his opponent, dragged him to the ground, then quickly submitted him with a choke or some arm- or leglocks. The novelty wasn't in the techniques, which had already been part of Japanese Judo, Jiu-jitsu, and similar martial arts, but the approach to combat that put ground fighting at the center, instead of treating it as an auxiliary part of one's wider repertoire. The apparent lack of which made Royce Gracie's success all the more spectacular. He dominated the next 4 UFC events, proving that his first victory wasn't just a fluke.

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu became a phenomenon almost overnight. Today, UFC is one of the most-viewed and most widely-known martial-arts events. BJJ has become ubiquitous, not only in the octagon, but also in movies, among celebrities, and most importantly among the dojo-s all around the world. But have the Gracies achieved their goal of proving that BJJ is the best fighting style of all? The answer is yes and no. UFC (and MMA-events in general), as good a controlled experiment in the field as imaginable, demonstrated repeatedly that an expert grappler will most probably beat a fighter of any other style if the latter has zero experience in ground fighting - for the reasons I'll try to inspect later. But the days are long gone when someone being very good only in grappling alone can get to the top. Royce Gracie of the 90s teleported to the present wouldn't last a minute against the world-class fighters of today. Everyone recognized that some form of grappling (BJJ, Sambo, Judo, ...) is an indispensable part of a fighter's repertoire at least as much, or even more than boxing-skills. Today's UFC champions are all expert grapplers, without exception.

Where had BJJ been before?

How did this happen? Humans have practiced and developed martial arts around the globe since at least ancient times. The idea that something completely new can still come up seemed naive, almost foolish. The answer to this question I think is twofold. First of all, as mentioned above, the core of BJJ's technical repertoire wasn't new at all. What new was is the sole emphasis on ground fighting. And - here comes some pure historical speculation - that is something that that in former times had less chance to appear. Ground fighting is only practical in one-on-one situations. During a raid, in battle, even on the street where attackers could jump on one at night, one can expect to face multiple opponents. Being entangled with one attacker on the ground leaves one completely exposed to the second one. Relying only on ground fighting skills pays off only in a ring. Prize-fighting has been around for millennia, too, but only modern times are peaceful enough to let people decouple sport fighting from survival skills. This does not mean to belittle the efficacy of BBJ. In a one-on-one situation, that arose even in older times frequently enough, it's proven to be superb.

Efficacy

And now, let's go into some speculations about why it is superior to stand-up styles. I think it has multiple, related reasons. These are the following: the asymmetry between grappling and kicking-punching styles, the way it's practiced, and - surprisingly enough - the more limited technical repertoire.

By asymmetry, I mean that stand-up fighting is more vulnerable to grappling techniques than the other way around. If a grappler can close the distance and drag his opponent to the floor, the stand-up fighter has very little chance to disentangle - that would require skills matching his attacker. Pull down a world-class boxer or karateka to the ground, and his hard-earned skills are rendered useless. It has been proved countless times in the octagon with boxing-legends like James Tooney, who lasted maybe a minute until choked unconscious by Randy Couture. Stand-up fighters often harbor the illusion that they could knock out any wrestler or grappler who got in punching range before he could grab them. This belief again has been proven to be false. Actually, it's very hard to knock someone out. The grappler may suffer one or two blows to the head before he manages to lay his hands on his opponent, but they are very rarely enough to end the fight, and then the striker has no time to land another punch.

The other part of this asymmetry is that humans seem to be much more in their element with punching than with grappling. Anyone can swing his arm and break a nose with a little luck. My former boxing coach said once that a complete beginner can give him a black eye if he drops his guard at the wrong time. But put someone on the mat for the first time, and he won't have a clue what to do if he's not supposed to use his fists. Human instincts in grappling don't go further than brute-force strangling. Give someone 6 months of boxing, and he will win against a complete beginner (all other things being equal) most of the times - but not necessarily all the time, especially if the opponent is more aggressive and mentally tougher. But train someone in BJJ for the same duration and he will win 10 times out of 10 against someone with the same physical abilities - aggressivity notwithstanding.

The second advantage of BJJ is the training-style. According to my experience, half of any training session is free fighting with constantly changing partners. This puts very hard selection pressure on both the fighters and the techniques. No technique that is ineffective gets to the mainstream, regardless of how "elegant" or effective it looks. This is in very stark contrast to how traditional martial arts are taught, where a frequent answer to a student's question inquiring about the technique is: "because it has been taught like this for a hundred years". Techniques don't get tested immediately against opponents who do their best to counter them. Consequently, the world of traditional eastern martial arts is full of cringe-worthy black-belts. Such "masters" don't exist among BJJ-ers, or not for long at least. No one will want to put on a brown-belt if his ass gets kicked by blue-belts at every single class. The "am I a fraud?"-complex that plagues many karatekas ("can I actually defend myself outside of the dojo?") is completely unknown in the BJJ world (or as a matter of fact, in the world of boxing, wrestling, thai-box, or any kind of art that focuses on actual fighting instead of forms and katas).

Finally, I made a surprising statement above about the positive effect of the more-constrained toolset. It manifests in multiple ways. First of all, because kicking and striking are not part of the repertoire, you can spar at 90% every day without serious risk of injuring your partner or getting injured yourself. In boxing, the fighters either hold back during sparring sessions or spend more time recovering from concussions or fractured ribs than in the ring. The second reason requires a bit longer explanation. In stand-up fighting styles, a big part of the defense techniques are developed against the style's own attacks - and vice-versa. A sparring session between advanced Wing-Chun or Kali practitioners looks very impressive. The opponents stand at close quarters and exchange blows and parries with such speed that spectators can only see a blur. But those parries were developed for exactly that types of strikes and they are much less effective against, let's say, a boxer's hook or upper-cut or a thai-boxer's roundhouse kick. Put an experienced karateka, a boxer, a Wing-Chun student against someone whose rhythm, style, simply the way he moves his body are radically different from the one he got used to, and you will see instant confusion and drop in confidence. This phenomenon might exist in the grappling world, but to a much lesser extent. To put it simply, there are only so many ways to twist an arm or place a choke - the "beauty" of a move or the adherence of it to some abstract principle - in short: style - are just meaningless there.

Popularity

The efficacy alone is not enough to explain BJJ's popularity. There is also a "fun"-factor in it. It is a cerebral sport. Techniques have counter-techniques that in turn have their own counters, and so on. Aggressivity plays a smaller role than to most martial arts. Few people enjoy boxing-sparring, especially at first, but almost everyone I have seen trying it did enjoy rolling (sparring in BJJ) - especially at first. There is something in it that makes you feel placed back in your childhood. For reasons elaborated above, it also has a very quick learning curve. Usually, the moment a "master" starts explaining to you that his art makes strength and weight difference irrelevant, is the moment you should politely turn on your heels and leave the dojo. But because of the natural human inaptitude in grappling, a strong 100kg man with no prior-experience could be completely at the mercy of a semi-advanced 70kg BJJ-practitioner. This is of course changes quickly, and between two experienced fighters weight matters as much as it does in boxing or wrestling.

The practical nature of BJJ is also more appealing to modern people. The relationship between master and student is much more informal than the rigidly hierarchical ones found as the default among eastern traditions. There are no formal exams - the master sees you perform every day and will grant you the belt when he thinks you deserve it. There are no katas, no endless repetitions of basic techniques against imaginary opponents, no infusion of a particular philosophy. But there still is a sense of belonging, the atmosphere of a dojo, and a natural hierarchy built on performance demonstrated every day.

Criticism

You can never satisfy everyone... Despite its huge success, BJJ, or rather the competition rules of BJJ competitions, are under heavy criticism nowadays - even from the Gracie-family. Many argue that it has become too "domesticated", too sportlike. Like Judo or Karate, it has lost its edge as a tool for self-defense. As usual, there is some truth in the criticism. Many dojos concentrate on ground-fighting to the extent that they don't even practice take-downs - as they don't score high in a competition. And many techniques in BBJ work only with the assumption that the opponent is prohibited from using his fists.

But the flipside of the coin is that these restrictions make the practice safe. As explained above, you can have a go at your partner at almost full throttle. Great boxers are not great because they know some "lethal moves" no one else does, but because their strength, speed, timing, sense of rhythm, and mastery of basic techniques surpass that of others. The same applies to any other martial art. People who are overly impressed by the brutality of certain styles (like Krav Maga), would better accept the fact that some of the most effective ways to incapacitate opponents will be never mastered by anyone. You will run out of training partners long before you practiced the art of eye-gauging to perfection. 

Final worlds

I went through all the reasons why I find BJJ marvelous at length, but I think reiterating the best ones is not a bad way to wrap it up. It's a no-nonsense martial art. It's one of the most effective forms of self-defense, and it gives usable skills from day one. It hits the sweet spot between efficiency and safe practicability. It improves strength, agility, flexibility, endurance, and concentration skills. It keeps you on your toes and mentally fresh every day. But it is also something you can practice even in your senior years. And finally, and most importantly, rolling with your partner on the ground like a kid while trying to outsmart him at every move is pure, raw fun.

Read More

Rolf&Alexandra Becker: Dickie Dick Dickens

 

Dear listeners, don't forget to turn on your radios next time to follow the spectacular, sensational, and astonishing adventures of the most dangerous man in America, Dickie Dick Dickens!

- with these words and a cliffhanger ends every episode of the story of a larger-than-life thief who rises to be the most famous gangster of the 1920s Chicago, if not the world.

Read More