While training Brazilian-Jiu-Jitsu tonight, I noticed something interesting about how I fight and its pertinence to economics. For those who don't know, BJJ is a grappling art that has a strong emphasis on submissions. To lead up to a submission, one has to make a series of moves, which all have a certain probability of working depending on who you are going up against. Better fighters will have more counters to high-percentage moves, decreasing their expected utility, and worse fighters won't. In this sense, BJJ is a game of expected utility maximization.
For example, tonight I was trying to escape from a rather disadvantageous position, and during the match, I was trying to use one of my best escapes. My opponent believed that this was the only thing that I was thinking of, so prepared themselves to defend against this. However, since I knew my opponent and was maximizing expected utility over the entire game, I had prepared a counter that could then deal with how they were going to defend. As a result of this planning and understanding of the probabilities that each move would work, I was able to win the match.
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