Kit Dale's BJJ Half Guard Pass
When this Jiu Jitsu clip first went up on the magazine in September 2014, the caption underneath it was barely a sentence long: Kit keeps doing his thing, check out his latest half guard pass. The…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
When this Jiu Jitsu clip first went up on the magazine in September 2014, the caption underneath it was barely a sentence long: Kit keeps doing his thing, check out his latest half guard pass. The "thing" in question was Kit Dale, the Melbourne black belt who had spent the previous couple of years cheerfully arguing that the rest of the jiu jitsu world was overcomplicating its own learning, walking through how he came out the back side of an opponent's underhook game and finished the pass. Twelve years on, the pass itself looks technically simple. The framing around it — that there was a smarter way to think about positions like this than memorising sequences — has turned out to be the part worth keeping.
Kit's pitch back then was unfashionable and faintly heretical. He didn't drill. He didn't believe in repping a technique six hundred times before live training, didn't believe in building muscle memory around fixed sequences, didn't believe a young player needed to spend three months mastering a single pass before adding another. The way he talked about half guard wasn't "step one, step two, step three" — it was a set of pressure and angle problems the top player had to solve, with the specific finish depending on what the bottom player gave him. The clip we ran here was Kit walking through one of those readings on the mats: how the hips stack, where the underhook gets stuffed, why the trailing leg comes free at the moment the head pressure shifts. The detail was there, but it was always in service of the read.
What's quietly survived from that approach is the principle, not the specific pass. The half guard hasn't gone anywhere. It's still the bottom position most experienced gi players retreat to when their first guard fails — the one Bernardo Faria built a competition career on, the one Lucas Leite and Tom DeBlass still teach to packed seminar floors, the one that hides knee shields, deep half entries, dogfight scrambles and lockdown variations underneath what looks like a single shape. A passer who only knows one route through it gets stuck the first time their training partner shifts. A passer who understands what they're actually fighting for — head position, the bottom hip, the far underhook — can pick the route at the moment of contact. That was Kit's point.
The decade since has been kind to the reading. Tainan Dalpra and Roberto Jimenez pass half guard in IBJJF gi finals with the kind of pressure-and-angle game that looks improvised and is actually a deep concept hierarchy you only see if you've watched the same competitor work through ten different bottom players. Gordon Ryan, in no-gi BJJ, treats half guard almost as a transitional problem to push through rather than a wrestle to win — every contact point chosen for where it forces the bottom player's hip to go next. Mikey Musumeci hits hand-fighty, lighter passes against half-guard players who outweigh him by twenty kilos because he's reading openings the way Kit was reading them in this clip, not running a sequence. Even the kids coming up under Atos and Art of Jiu-Jitsu look more like conceptual passers than rote drillers — fewer fixed routes, more reactions.
The drilling debate, for what it's worth, has settled into something quieter. Most serious BJJ black belts now do both. They drill, because that's how movements get cheap; they think, because that's how movements get chosen. Kit was right that the game can't be memorised in sequences. The rest of the field was right that you still need reps. The settlement, twelve years on, is the boring middle: drill the entries, train them live, watch the specific opponent in front of you, pick the pass at the moment of contact instead of three steps earlier. That's what he was showing in this video. He just said it louder, and Australian-er, than most.
For the rest of us watching at home, the takeaway from a short clip like this hasn't aged. Half guard is the longest-staying position in adult-onset Brazilian Jiu Jitsu — the one your training partners will be in on Tuesday night and the one they'll still be playing in 2036. Knowing one pass against it is a tactic. Reading it well enough to pick a pass on the fly is a skill. Kit was, even then, pointing at the second thing.
See you on the mats.
Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 25 September 2014. Refreshed for 2026.