Metagame in Combat Sports

The Metagame is something you’ve heard about in most modern computer gaming, perhaps made most famous by League of Legends. I first heard about it with Magic: The Gathering.

Succinctly, it is the ever-evolving roster of strategies that participants use to win. It is constantly shifting for a couple reasons:

We, as a community playing within a ruleset , are still making discoveries about what “works” in that ruleset.
Now and then, the rules change. Within an organization, these are usually pretty small, but they can still have dramatic effects on strategy.

Over time, if one strategy is more powerful than other types it will be over-represented, while strategies that are weak against it would be under-represented. The more common (and therefore winning) strategies can eventually be grouped into Archetypes. Something for another article.

As practitioners within a sport or rule-set - whether we win, lose, or draw - we are shaping that metagame.

Metagame changes in different combat sports

Boxing

The boxing glove once had a free thumb which allowed fighters to grasp limbs quite easily. In the 1970s and 1980s, with increasing eye-injury worry, New York state adopted a thumbless design, soon followed by an attached thumb design. This decreased the number of eye pokes, but also decreased the effectiveness of hand trapping and long-range clinches, leaning the metagame toward long-range attacks and deeper underhook and overhook clinches.

Another interesting tale is that of slipping. It might be hard to believe, but 100 years ago, the forward-leaning slip (and posture) we think of as so fundamental to boxing was non-existent in the sport. For the last century, however, it has offered a new tool for in-fighters and swarmers and, as I hypothesize, forced the jab to become the varied, crisp, and low-risk tool it is today. Apocryphally, this came from the Filipino Martial Arts, kali and escrima. American soldiers were stationed around the Philippines in the early 1900s and brought back their newfound knowledge with them, incorporating it into Western Boxing.

A diagram from a newspaper showing the famous Jack Johnson vs Tommy Burns bout, in which the former became the first black world champion. Three things of note 1) Jack Johnson’s upright posture and remarkably low guard 2) Gloves that look very much like modern MMA’s 4-ouncers 3) The commonality of clinch as a phase of combat

BJJ

Jiu Jitsu’s constant discovery and labelling of positions create a deep and ever-changing meta. As open guard diversification continued in the 2000’s so grew standing passing, favoring leg dexterity and agility. Passes like the Leg Drag and X-pass supplemented the evergreen Torreando.

Through the 80’s and 90’s, the winner of a tied bout would be the passing player. In the early 2010’s, advantages were added to IBJJF ruleset to award players for almost scoring. Very quickly, there were complaints that matches were frequently turning into double guard pull shootouts with competitors trying to win by advantage. Currently, the IBJJF penalizes grapplers staying in a double guard pull position for more than 20 seconds, forcing more movement.

Wrestling

Prior to the advent of points in wrestling, matches would continue until a pinfall or be decided by ride time. *

Because of initiatives that E.C. Gallagher (first wrestling coach of Oklahoma State) and a few of his colleagues took, they were able to codify the first points system for any grappling sport, and implemented it country-wide in the ’40s. The implications of creating a scoring system that tried to account for nuance would be deep. In the ’50s, a modified scoring system was then carried over to international wrestling, where a variation was used for the Olympics in 1960. (https://www.instagram.com/p/ByToHNuIyHc/)

A relatively recent change that I really like is the “push out” rule, which gives 1 point for forcing the opponent to step out of bounds. Now, pressuring the opponent is a viable strategy to win. This also forces wrestlers not to give too much ground as they attempt to avoid contact with their opponent.

MMA

If we were to look at the UFC in 2008 and compare it to now we would see a roughly 30% increase in strike attempts over the duration of a match. Striking also takes up more of the output when compared to takedown attempts as a ratio (28.56 strikes per TD attempt in 2008, compared to 40.6 in 2018).-

There are things outside of the match that bolster those numbers (e.g. lower weight classes, Women’s MMA, etc.) but I’d posit we’re dealing with a very different metagame where striking leans more toward volume, and takedown attempts are less likely to happen because solid TD defense is the norm.

(https://www.instagram.com/p/B16l7cRIA6X/)

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*Famously at the 1912 Olympics, there was a Greco-Roman match that lasted 11 hours and 40 minutes. The winner of that semi-final, Martin Klein, was too exhausted to attend the final and settled for Silver. A time limit would be implemented in 1924.