MMA veteran Jason Von Flue is one of just a handful of people in the grappling world who actually managed to develop a totally unique submission that was named after him, the Von Flue Choke. The choke is most often used as a counter to a guillotine, once the defender on top makes their way to either half-guard or side-control. It’s an incredibly useful technique that pretty much all submission grapplers have in their arsenal today but it was completely unheard of just a few decades ago. It’s still one of the rarest no gi submissions because every high-level grappler knows how to avoid it now, but it took many people by surprise in the beginning.
Von Flue himself has 2 officially recorded submission wins by Von Flue Choke and the first of them came at a WEC event back in 2003, where he put Nick Gilardi to sleep with it. According to him, that only came about because of a chance encounter with a BJJ legend:
“I go by Pedro Sauer’s school and he’s there and I tell him (I’m on) Chuck Liddell’s team so… and he lets me on the mat for free, even loans me a gi… I’m there for a couple of hours class right and my calf is just wrecked and I remember just wrecking shop on his blue belts and maybe his purples.”
It was Sauer who actually gave Von Flue the crucial first technique that led to him developing the choke he later became famous for:
“He shows this counter to a Guillotine choke from inside guard where you just come over, lock it in, and put so much pressure that they’ve gotta release the Guillotine and loosen their guard up… and I liked that.”
Then Jason Von Flue continued his travels shortly after and at the next place he was teaching, he was able to start turning that guillotine defense into what later became known as the Von Flue Choke:
“I liked that defense. So I go out to Michigan with these guys, show them a bunch of basic Jiu-Jitsu for a month. I play around with this and I figure out how to do this from half-guard… So I come back home, I played around with this, choked some guys out with this from half-guard, and I hit everybody on the team except for Chuck with it. Everybody was saying it was BS and it only works for you, and then in WEC 7 and 8 in August and October that year… Chris Irvine and Nick Gilardi, I put them both to sleep from half- guard with this choke.”
The full interview with Jason Von Flue where he explains how he developed the Von Flue choke was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of the MMA history podcast:
