Jackson explains GSP’s strategy at 111
When he did pass his guard and he got his submission holds on, did Dan Hardy tap? No. so you…
When he did pass his guard and he got his submission holds on, did Dan Hardy tap? No. so you do that a couple of times you say ‘OK we get this armlock, we get that armlock’ [he doesn’t tap]. At that point you’re like well, every time we go to get the mount we’re getting dumped and Hardy is getting out and we’ve got to work to take him down again.”
“So obviously going straight after it isn’t the answer… GSP has amazing ground and pound from the guard, he can really hit hard. So once we took him down and saw that [submissions] weren’t going to work I wanted him to do some damage. I wanted him to hit him, to crack him, to mess him up a little bit.”
A [non-choke] submission hold is really just a methodology of breaking somebody’s will. If you put an armbar on somebody, their arm is popping a little bit but they can still turn out of it, their will isn’t broken yet – outside of a choke of course, with a choke you can still have the will to fight but pass out. By staying in the guard and inflicting a lot of damage and then going for the submission hold, I thought that might be the way to soften him up, break him up a little bit and then get that submission hold.
You would have to ask Georges (why he appeard to let go of a potentially injurious sub) but my sense of it was that he let it go because Hardy just wasn’t going to tap. The referee wasn’t going to stop it because it was already cranked so far and Hardy wasn’t tapping. Keeping a hold on like that isn’t really going to do anything at that point. He let it go to look at other options for finishing the fight. Hardy is just super tough and he has rubber joints.