So, since I had mentioned doing a tournament, I thought I should give an update.
I did okay, pulled off a silver in my gi divison. Kinda bombed the no-gi division, though.
Here we are mugging for the camera.
I've put a couple of the matches on youtube, and will put them here, but I must admit that they're pretty boring as far as jiu-jitsu matches go.
The first one, a win for me, was a pretty plodding, tactical affair. I won on points, outlasting and wearing down my opponent. I found that I had quite the nervous adrenaline dump due to it being my first tourney in 7 years, so watching it after the fact, I definitely didn't perform as well or as aggressively as I would have wanted to.
The second match is a loss for me. I started out well, was surprised when clinching up to find that I was stronger than my opponent, and got the takedown. Unfortunately from there, I found my conditioning to be lacking, and my opponent gradually wore me out to the point where his submission win was inevitable.
I think one of the problems for me is that I am training in a small club, where I am pretty close to the top dog. There is a purple belt who runs the classes, who I am competitive with, and can tap him out once for every two times he taps me out. Then there is a brown belt who drops in, who is just super slick, but I can make him work for his wins.
After that, there are two who have blue belts, like I do, but I have soooo much more experience in the rank that they've never been able to catch me, and then another dozen white belts, who I simply toy with whenever I want to win.
So I think, when it comes to training for competition, I just don't have enough people to really push me into tournament-shape.
