The day after Bellator 192, I am off on another Jiu Jitsu tournament tournament with Tameem Hamoui. This time, we are headed to the NABJJF All Americas Tournament in Cerritos, CA.

There was only one guy in Tameem's black belt division. In their match, Tameem gave up a takedown early. Within a minute, he had his opponent 100% sunk in a kneebar. His opponent ended up rolling off the mat while still sunk deep in the kneebar and the ref stopped the match and restarted it on the feet. Tameem pulled guard on him and went to kneebar his opponent again. This time his opponent gave up the sweep to avoid the submission. A short time later, the opponent went for an armbar on Tameem. Tameem looked pretty safe in the position he was in, but a bad escape attempt put him deeper in it and he ended up tapping to the armbar.

The black belt open division was supposed to start an hour and a half later, so we decided to go eat and come back for that.

In the black belt open, Tameem's first opponent was a heavyweight. Tameem chose not to wrestle with the bigger opponent and pulled him into his guard. After stuffing a few pass attempts, Tameem reversed his opponent and took his back to go up 4-0 in the match. His opponent eventually spun out into Tameem's guard, but could not pass Tameem's guard or do anything to close the 4 point lead before the 10 minute time limit was up.

The final of the black belt open was against the same guy from Tameem's division. This worked out perfect as Tameem was not happy with his earlier performance and was hoping for a rematch. This match was MUCH more competitive with Tameem aggressively attacking with his bottom game and his opponent going for jumping/scrambling passes instead of commiting to a tighter game that would allow Tameem to control his opponent in his attacks instead of trying to catch him in a scramble (side note: when I'm not in great shape, scrambling is what I hate the most. It just SAPS the energy from you and when you don't have much energy to start, it's a problem!). The two nullified each other for the first half of the match, but his opponents cardio was phenomenal. He kept up the scrambles for the entire 10 minutes, eventually landing some passes in the latter half of the match as Tameem started to wear down. In the end, Tameem lost on points but was still much happier with his performance than he was in the first match.

The good thing is, we figured out a couple of things that Tameem can work on to improve his game and his tournament results. There are a couple of tournaments in February for Tameem to get back onto the 1st place podium!