Depth on a hold

not measured yet

Instead of

You hold tight to the corner, where you are swingable and have no time to react.

Aim for

You hold deep, so an attacker has to expose himself fully before he can see you.

What it is

Depth is how far back from a corner you hold. Two players can watch the same choke from the same side and have completely different fights depending on how close to the edge they stand.

Why it matters

Standing tight to a corner means an attacker can swing past it and see you at the same moment you see him. That is a coin-flip decided by whoever moved first, and the person moving first is the attacker.

Standing deep changes the geometry. The attacker has to commit fully into the open before he can see you at all, and by then he is already exposed and already inside your crosshair.

What going wrong looks like

You hold right on the edge of the corner because it feels like you are covering more. What you have actually done is give the attacker the best possible version of the duel: he arrives at speed, he sees you the instant you see him, and he only has to clear one body-width of space.

What good looks like

You sit back far enough that the corner is a doorway he has to walk through rather than a wall he can peek around. He has to expose his whole body, at a distance, into a crosshair that is already waiting.

The cost is that you see less. That is the trade, and it is usually worth it on a hold where you have no support.

How to fix it

  1. On any angle you are holding alone, take two steps back from where you instinctively stopped.
  2. Ask what an attacker has to do to see you. If the answer is "lean", you are too close. If it is "walk into the open", you are right.
  3. Depth is not always correct — if you need to see early to call a rotation, trade the duel for the information deliberately, rather than by accident.