Open Guard in BJJ: A Map for the Most Confusing Position

Quick answer: Open guard isn't a single position — it's the umbrella term for every guard where your legs aren't locked around your opponent. Spider, de la Riva, lasso, x-guard, and butterfly are all open guards. The skill underneath every one of them is the same: managing distance with your legs and grips. Don't try to learn them all — pick one that suits your body and build outward from there.

"What is open guard?" gets more confusing the more people you ask. One coach treats it as a position. Another treats it as twenty. YouTube returns a decade of technique with no obvious starting point.

The confusion is fair, because open guard isn't one thing. So this is a map, not a tutorial — what the major guards are, what connects them, and how to pick a starting point without drowning.

The umbrella term problem

Closed guard is easy to define: your ankles are crossed behind your opponent's back. The moment that lock opens, you're in open guard — a category that covers everything from sitting chest-to-chest in butterfly to controlling someone from arm's length with a foot on their bicep.

That's why the term feels useless when you're new. Saying you "play open guard" is like saying you "play music." The real question is which instrument, and nobody plays them all equally well.

Distance management is the real skill

Strip away the names and every open guard is doing the same job: controlling the space between you and a person trying to get past your legs.

• Your legs set the range. Feet on hips, hooks behind thighs, a shin across the torso — every guard uses the legs to define a distance the passer isn't allowed to close for free.

• Your grips make the connection. Without a grip somewhere — sleeve, collar, wrist, ankle — your opponent can simply back out or sprint around your legs.

• Off-balancing is the enforcement. A good guard constantly threatens to tip the passer over, which is the only thing that stops them passing at full speed.

Once you see those three jobs, the named guards stop being separate languages and start being dialects.

A quick map of the major open guards

Deliberately shallow — the goal is orientation, not instruction:

• Butterfly guard: seated, feet hooked inside the thighs, close range. The great elevating-and-sweeping guard, and the one that survives no-gi completely intact.

• Spider guard: feet on the biceps with sleeve grips, playing at mid-range. Miserable to pass, hard on your own fingers, and gi-only.

• De la Riva: one leg wraps the outside of their lead leg while your hands control an ankle or collar. The foundation of a huge share of the modern gi game.

• Lasso guard: a spider cousin where your leg threads around their arm like a seatbelt. Extremely sticky, extremely frustrating for the passer, also gi-dependent.

• X-guard: you're underneath a standing opponent with your legs scissored around one of theirs. Almost purely a sweeping position — people mostly fall over rather than escape.

There are dozens more, and new ones get named every few years. These five cover most of what you'll actually see at a typical academy.

Grips are the rent you pay

No open guard survives without grips, which makes grip fighting the invisible first exchange of every roll. The passer wants to strip your grips and establish their own before your guard forms; you want connection before they start moving.

Watch two experienced grapplers start a round: often ten or twenty seconds of pure hand fighting before anyone's hips move. That's not stalling — that's the roll deciding whether you get to have a guard at all. We cover this properly in BJJ grips and grip fighting, but the short version is simple: no grips, no guard.

Gi and no-gi redraw the map

Here's where the map splits. Spider and lasso depend entirely on cloth — take away the sleeves and they cease to exist. De la Riva survives in a reduced form. Butterfly and x-guard barely notice the difference.

So your training split matters. If you're mostly a no-gi person, the hooks-and-underhooks guards deserve your time. If you train in the gi, the cloth guards open up a slower, more controlling game. Most people eventually want some of both, but you don't have to start there.

How to pick your first open guard

The honest default is butterfly: it works in both rulesets, it's mechanically simple, and it teaches the seated posture everything else borrows from.

Beyond that, let your body vote. Long legs make spider and de la Riva feel natural. Shorter, stockier builds tend to love butterfly and x-guard, where the game happens at close range. And before any of it, spend time on guard retention — the unglamorous skill of simply not getting passed — because a guard you can't keep isn't a guard.

One guard, three or four months, before you add another. Depth beats collection.

The takeaway

Open guard stops being confusing the moment you stop treating it as one position. It's a category — a family of distance-management systems that share the same grammar of legs, grips, and off-balancing.

You don't need the whole map memorized. You need one region of it, learned honestly, plus the understanding that everyone else's fancy guard is solving the same three problems yours is.

A coach shortens the map

Guards are learned fastest in a room where someone watches you get passed and tells you why. Find a BJJ gym near you on Let's Roll →

FAQ

What does open guard mean in BJJ? It's the umbrella term for any bottom position where your legs aren't locked closed around your opponent — spider, de la Riva, butterfly, lasso, and x-guard are all open guards. It's a category, not a single technique.

Which open guard should a beginner learn first? Butterfly is the most common recommendation: it's simple, works in gi and no-gi, and teaches posture and off-balancing fundamentals that transfer to every other guard.

Is open guard harder than closed guard? Generally yes, because your opponent has more freedom to move, so you need quicker reactions and better grips. It's still worth learning early — most of your rolling life happens with an open guard whether you plan it or not.

Do open guards work without the gi? Some do, some don't. Butterfly and x-guard translate fully; spider and lasso require sleeves and disappear entirely. If you train mostly no-gi, build around hooks and wrist control instead of cloth.