So you didn't take Wu Tang's advice and forgot to protect ya neck.
It ain't all bad,
The guillotine has many applications from all sorts of positions in grappling and if you got an arm and a neck, buddy you got a guillotine.
As a newbie, you won't necessarily stop getting the dreaded headlock slapped on you, but you will be better at defending and escaping. Plus you got us, and we're always here to help. So let's get to it.
There are two main points to applying the guillotine, therefore, it makes sense that there are two main points to address when escaping or deconstructing a guillotine:
1. Hips
2. Posture
In the guillo-game for beginners, you can either be all the way in with your hips up or all the way out with your posture up.
Kind of like an old-fashioned seesaw.
Hips
To execute a strong, textbook guillotine choke you must have your hips joined with your opponents which creates an anchor point for the upper body to squeeze. Without the connection of hips to hips, your opponent can seek to pass around your guard and submit you with a Von Flue or settle in a dominant position.
Naturally, to defend or escape the guillotine we need to minimise the amount of contact the guard players hips have to our own.
If the guard isn't yet closed, it is possible to use this to your advantage and pass the guard as shown.
Gives new meaning to joined at the hip!
Moving on to the other side of the seesaw is...
Posture
Urijah Faber is no stranger to a guillotine and famously said that to implement a deep choke, you should be looking directly at the square of your opponents back. What this means is that your opponent's posture must be so broken that their head is well beneath your line of size and buried under your arm. Additionally, this lends to the hips again.
As the defender, you gotta keep your chin up and sit above your hips beneath you. This will kill the guillo and keep you out of a good many other submissions.
So keep your posture up and if the seesaw (you) falls forward, try to negate and separate the connection of the hips.