You gain nothing by knowing that a couple of minutes before the fight. You'll know I'm left handed almost immediately. I gain nothing by faking with my less dominant hand, because it just delays me from getting the grip I actually want. You'll try to stop me turning into the right, which is fine, because I love my lapel side Seoi and my Sode. If you can out gripfight me and prevent me getting a grip - well done - you are a much better judoka than I am, but realistically, the second you take my lapel, I'm going to take yours. The best you can hope for is preventing me from getting the inside grip. But it's ok, I have a lapel side drop seoi that works from the outside. There are a thousand ways to best your opponent in Judo - knowing whether your opponent is a lefty or a righty 2 minutes before your match isn't one of them.
This is just simple "balance". One can take advantage on this balance. When my right hand, get your left lapel, I'll open myself for your "right hand" to get my label. Your right hand will get my label and there is no argument on that. As a right hand person, your "right arm" is what I want. What I just did is to encourage your right arm to move toward me. Of course we are not talking about "YOU" and "I" here but the general strategy "If you want to attack right side, attack the left side first". To fake that you are a left hand person while you are a right hand person will fit into this strategy very well.
We may have different tournament experience here. So we can just agree our disagreement on this particular opinion. I assume at least we can agree this much that in the grappling art, there are - major hand and minor hand. - rooting leg and attacking leg.
I'm not sure you've got that right. If you reach for my left lapel, it frees up my left hand to grab your right lapel. That's what I want as a lefty. I think you mean when two right handed opponents (or two left) fight each other and you end up with left on right because one person has won the grip fighting exchange and has effectively forced the other guy to take a left handed grip where he would normally prefer a right. That's why so many high level Judo fights end up left on right. Ok, I think I understand what you mean now. When people have done that to me, it tends to be so they can get a lapel cross grip with their weak hand and use that to feed the lapel to the other hand. It works because I end up defending the wrong lapel and their grab gets through. Back to your gi trick - I wouldn't trust that anyway - so many right handed fighters choose to fight left handed (and vice versa) because some people prefer their sleeve hand to have all the power. I'm not sure how reliable a measure that is of their fighting stance. I'd probably just check out their warm ups if I wanted to know what stance they were going to use.
When my right arm get your left lapel, in order for your left hand to get my right lapel, your left arm has to come above or below my right arm. If I keep my right arm straight, your left hand may have difficult to reach to my right lapel. Even if you "long" arm may be able to reach to my right lapel (that's not what I want), since your right arm is still far away from me. When that happen, I have to - break your left grip. - push your left shoulder back, and - invite your right arm to come in. I may have to do this over and over until your right arm start to move toward me. I agree that the stance is a good piece of information. That's why in "sport" grappling, most people will use parallel stance in their 1st round "only".
I can tell that you are very good in "grip fight". That's one of my favor tricks. It works for me many times on the mat. Sorry for the side track of OP's original post. It may be a bit too much for the OP if this is his 1st Judo lesson. I can't believe that we went from "how to tie a belt" to "how to dress Gi" to "grip fight". One ting for sure is, if there is no different opinions, there won't be any deep level discussion.
