SIDE CONTROL

Side control, called cento por cento in Portuguese (literally one hundred percent, because of the unrestricted pressure available), is the position arrived at after a successful guard pass and the most common position from which submissions are initiated in modern competitive jiu jitsu. The top player lies perpendicular to the bottom player with chest-to-chest pressure, the cross-face arm wrapping the head, and the underhook arm controlling the far hip. The position scores three points in IBJJF rulesets and is the gateway to mount, back control, and the entire submission library.

There are several structural variants of side control: the classic chest-to-chest cross-face, the north-south variant (perpendicular flipped 90 degrees more), the kesa-gatame (scarf hold from judo, with the body more upright and one of the bottom player's arms trapped), and the reverse kesa-gatame. Modern competitive jiu jitsu has rebuilt side control around the principle of weight management — the top player's weight should rest entirely on the bottom player's chest, with no weight on the knees or feet, forcing the bottom player to defend a static pin before any escape is possible.

The canonical attacks from side control are the kimura, the americana, the arm triangle, the cross-collar choke, the brabo and Brabo-style choke variants, and the transition to mount via the knee-to-chest mount technique. Defensively the bottom player relies on the bridge-and-shrimp escape, the underhook escape, the kimura-defense escape, and the bottom-half-guard recovery. The position is the most studied in modern submission grappling because more matches are decided here than anywhere else, and the difference between a defensible and an indefensible side control is a matter of two inches of weight distribution.