I am a huge fan of Marcelo Garcia, not because I play a similar game nor do I have a similar body type, but due to the fact that his flow while competing is very impressive. The way he transitions from one move to next almost effortlessly and he seems to always have a counter move to any defense or counter that the opponent might try to impose on him. There are, in fact, two athletes, in my opinion, that seem to possess the highest level of transition in the sport and those are Marcelo Garcia and Rafael Mendes.
As much as Marcelo is talented, I do not believe he is just letting the moves flow as he goes. Marcelo is so good because he has a solid, fully fledged out, and mapped game. He is not only good at individual moves, he is also good at selecting good moves that work together and forming a solid game around them. He has two basic criteria for selecting moves: they have to be simple and they have to be easy to chain together.
Marcelo believes the organization of the game must revolve around getting to a finishing position and never stop advancing, avoiding the stalling game of winning by one advantage or scoring only once. If you are very good at passing half guard then you also need to be good at submitting people from side control or mount after you pass, he says.
We need to develop sequences of moves and always advance. When an opponent counters, we must transition to another sequence. Ideally we would have most of the opponent’s reactions mapped on our heads so that we do not need to think on what to do next, we just switch. This is not so hard to do, since most moves have a finite amount of counters or general ways one can escape. Just by training you can catalog how people are shutting your game down. Of course sometimes we may need to improvise, there is no perfect strategy that will guarantee a win every time.
Maybe you are reading this and thinking “yeah, this is called forming a game”, but not all practitioners have that mentality, they just come to training and never really make an effort to develop an efficient and organized game. This is exactly the reason why people resonate so well with John Danaher’s systematic approach. He is basically teaching a well proven game with a lot of transitions already figured out and he tells us how to interconnect those systems.
It is not about just forming a game, it is about selecting moves, strategies, transitions and forming one that is very efficient then honing it to almost perfection. This is why Marcelo Garcia is one of the best grapplers ever. And he is not the only one with a similar mentality. Many high level athletes do something similar. This is reason enough for us hobbyists to do the same.