Systematically Attacking The Guillotine by Gordon Ryan: No-Gi Course Guide
Our buying assessment
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Check current price at BJJ FanaticsBased on the seller’s curriculum and cited product sources, checked 2026-10-19. This is a researched guide, not a firsthand review. Study recommendations are our editorial assessment.
In this guide
What it teaches
This course presents the guillotine as more than a single finish, with the product page describing applications for sweeping, submitting, passing, pinning, and other positional outcomes.
The technical base starts with head position, defensive hand positions, gripping, hip-to-hip connection, guillotine types, and decision-making about which variation to use.
Our assessment is that the course is best read as a positional guillotine system for no-gi: it repeatedly connects the choke to guard, passing, mount, side control, back exposure, and front headlock rather than isolating one finish.
Curriculum overview
Guillotine mechanics and selection
Covers posture, hand defense, grips, hip connection, guillotine types, and choosing the right variation.
Study this if: Builds the mechanical base before adding entries and transitions.
Closed guard attacks and fallbacks
Works from closed guard into low elbow, high elbow, high wrist, power, figure-four, and arm-in finishes, plus mount, triangle, leg-pummel, and sumi gaeshi follow-ups.
Study this if: Helps when guard guillotines fail or the opponent defends the first choke.
Open guard bottom counters
Adds shoulder-and-hip rules, head control, sumi gaeshi entries, defensive-roll follow-ups, side bodylock counters, and pass-to-side-control counters.
Study this if: Turns passing pressure and bodylock threats into neck attacks or reversals.
Top guard and half guard guillotines
Covers top open guard entries, falling and rolling attacks, knee-slide links, half-guard setups, passes to side control or mount, and failed kimura to guillotine.
Study this if: Adds neck threats while passing instead of separating submissions from top pressure.
Pinning positions and back scenarios
Looks at guillotine options from side control, locking from mount, and setups from back-related scenarios.
Study this if: Gives top players ways to attack the neck after establishing dominant positions.
Front headlock combinations
Develops defensive-hand reads, elbow rules, centerline shifts, setups against hands or no hands, misdirection, and transitions from anaconda and D’Arce to guillotine.
Study this if: Connects guillotines to front-headlock reactions and adjacent strangles.
Rolling and commentary study
Includes rolling rounds with named partners and a separate rolling commentary volume explaining the instructor’s thought process during those rounds.
Study this if: Helps connect the technical menu to live sequencing and decision points.
Who it is for
The product page says it is for practitioners at any skill level and frames the material around no-gi availability of the neck.
Consider it if you already like front headlocks, seated or open guard, hip-bump style threats, or passing exchanges where opponents expose their neck while defending position.
Buy less eagerly if your immediate need is a gi-specific collar or lapel guillotine approach, because the verified format for this product is no-gi and the source emphasizes no-gi application.
Prerequisites
The listing includes foundational chapters on chin-to-chest posture, defensive hands, gripping, hip connection, guillotine types, and selection rules, so it does not appear to assume that the buyer already has a complete guillotine taxonomy.
Our suggested prerequisite is basic comfort with common no-gi positions—closed guard, open guard, half guard, side control, mount, back exposure, and front headlock—because the course applies the guillotine across all of those contexts.
Format and research limits
The supplied brief verifies the format as no-gi and the source repeatedly positions the material in no-gi terms.
The course is listed as eight volumes and includes rolling plus rolling commentary volumes in addition to technical instruction.
Research limitation: this guide is based on the supplied product snapshot and comparison excerpts, not independent viewing; claims such as exact teaching quality, practical results, or omitted content are not verified here.
Strengths
A major strength is positional breadth: the chapter list includes guillotines from closed guard, open guard bottom, top open guard, half guard, side control, mount, the back, and front headlock.
The course also includes several finishing families—low elbow, high elbow, high wrist, power, figure-four, and arm-in guillotines—so students can compare mechanics instead of treating the guillotine as one grip.
For students who struggle when a guillotine fails, the curriculum’s follow-ups are a practical strength: it lists triangles, leg pummeling, sumi gaeshi, mount follow-ups, pass counters, and front-headlock combinations.
Limitations
The supplied product source verifies no-gi emphasis but does not verify gi-specific adaptations, collar-grip entries, or lapel-based finishing details.
If you want a narrower course devoted to one signature high-elbow guillotine pathway, this broader positional approach may feel less focused because it ranges through guard, passing, pins, front headlock, and rolling commentary.
The snapshot lists chapter start times, but this guide does not convert them into a total duration or make claims about how long study will take.
Suggested study order
Our suggested order is to begin with Volume 1’s mechanics and selection rules before jumping to positional attacks, because those chapters define posture, grips, connection, guillotine types, and when to use them.
After the foundations, consider working bottom-position entries first—closed guard and open guard bottom—then top-position entries from open guard, half guard, side control, mount, back, and finally front headlock combinations.
Use the rolling and commentary volumes later as decision-making study, after you have a vocabulary for the finishes and positional branches being referenced.
Alternatives to compare
John Danaher’s The Front Headlock System is the closest broader systems alternative in the supplied comparisons: it covers front headlock control, entries, standing-to-mat transitions, guillotines, anaconda, D’arce, go-behinds, seated front headlocks, and guard passing.
Consider Danaher’s course if your main problem is building a complete front-headlock control system, especially from standing, kneeling, and seated front-headlock scenarios; Gordon Ryan’s course is more specifically organized around guillotine use across many positions.
Marcelo Garcia’s The Marcelotine is the supplied guillotine-specific alternative, with standing entries, grounded recovery, guard attacks, passing-position guillotines, half guard, side-control-to-mount, and mounted guillotine chapters.
Consider Marcelo’s course if you want to study the Marcelotine and high-elbow style entries in a more signature-submission format; choose Gordon Ryan’s course if the draw is integrating multiple guillotine variations with sweeps, passes, pins, front-headlock links, and rolling commentary.
Bundle or individual course
This product is supplied as an individual course, not a bundle, and no component courses were provided in the brief.
Because no bundle components are supplied, our suggested decision is between this broad Gordon Ryan guillotine course and the verified alternatives rather than between buying separate component courses.
Purchase guidance
Consider buying if your training problem is repeatedly getting to the neck but not converting it into a reliable no-gi positional system for finishes, sweeps, passing, and pins.
Hold off if you only need a small finishing-detail supplement, a gi-specific guillotine course, or a front-headlock curriculum that spends more space on non-guillotine branches such as D’Arce, anaconda, and go-behinds.