Double Tap

Make your opponent think they’ve successfully defended your submission, and as soon as they drop their defenses, slap it on again.

Let’s say you fail a submission attempt. What then? Do you abandon the attack and move on to something else?

That might work. That’s what most people would do.

Or, hear me out…

…you could be a total lunatic and try the same submission AGAIN.

When their submission attempt is defended, most grapplers will either try to force the finish or move on to something else. But there is a third choice:

Make your opponent think they’ve successfully defended your submission, and as soon as they drop their defenses, slap it on again.

I first stumbled onto this trick long ago, and it made my chokes so much more effective. It was only a few years ago that Drew Foster informed me there is a name for this tactic: the double tap.

The double tap works because of a Jiu-Jitsu “social contract.” A social contract is an unspoken gentleman’s agreement: an informal rule we don’t talk about, but by mirroring the behavior of others, we adopt and internalize it nonetheless. (We talked about these in BJJ Mental Models episode 324.)

A quick hack for building any new gameplan is to look for social contracts that aren’t actually formalized as rules, and violate them. People often treat social contracts and rules as interchangeable, even though they're not.

The double tap is an example of how breaking social contracts isn’t always unethical or “mean.” Sometimes, breaking a social contract merely means exposing someone’s bad habit and making them pay for it.

When your opponent successfully defends a submission, the unspoken social contract is that you either a) keep trying to finish that submission, or b) move on to something else. Your opponent doesn’t expect you to do both.

If you abandon your submission, they will almost always abandon their defense. That’s the social contract, the unwritten rule.

After you drop your attack, they’ll expect you to attempt positional advancement or a different submission. The last thing they’ll expect is you hitting Ctrl-Z and spamming the same submission again.

Maybe one day, the double tap will become so commonplace that people will wise up to the trick. At that point, it wouldn’t be effective anymore, because it would no longer be a pattern interrupt that deviates from expected behavior. But today, it is, and you can catch a lot of great grapplers off guard with this simple trick.

So the next time you roll, try this: if they defend your submission, lay off the attack for a bit. Wait for them to assume it’s over and drop their defense. Then slap the same attack back on. Try it and write back, let me know how it goes.

On the podcast:

• Ep. 292: The Paradox of Control, feat. Jesse Walker
• Ep. 324: Breaking Social Contracts, feat. Josh "Kintanon" Wentworth
• Ep. 389: The Double Tap, feat. Drew Foster

Further study:

• Pattern Interrupts