AUSTIN, Texas – Roberto Sanchez didn’t know what it was like to lose a fight before he got to the UFC.

It stands to reason that on Sunday, he wasn’t prepared to have that feeling for a second straight time. Roberto Sanchez (8-1 MMA, 1-1) stopped Joby Sanchez (11-3 MMA, 1-2 UFC) with a first-round rear-naked choke at UFC Fight Night 126 in Austin, Texas, at Frank Erwin Center.

It got Roberto back on track after he was submitted with a rear-naked choke by Joseph Morales in his promotional debut at UFC Fight Night 114 in Mexico this past August. Before that, Roberto had won his first seven fights under the Legacy FC and LFA banners, and six of them had come by submission.

“I had been so dominant in my other fights, so coming off that loss, I knew I had to come in here and get it,” Roberto said after his flyweight win over Joby. “If you’re a warrior, you’re going to bounce back stronger. That’s definitely what I did. I went back to the gym and started working specifically on striking, and I did that for four, five, six months – just working on striking. I put in the work. I didn’t need to do too much striking (on Sunday), but I definitely didn’t want that to be a weakness.”

Roberto said he tried to not let his first loss get in his head going into his sophomore UFC outing.

“When you’re a fighter, you can’t worry about what you can’t control,” Sanchez said. “I know what I’m going to do, and I’m going to get in there and do it. The fight’s in my mind, but I’m not worrying about it. I already have trained for it. I know exactly what I need to do, and I just go in there and do it.”

Now that the 31-year-old Houston-based fighter is settling into what he no doubt hopes is a long UFC career, though, he isn’t thinking about splitting off from his other career.

For his day job, Roberto is an actuary in the insurance industry. He crunches numbers and stats and percentages all day. But it’s work he likes enough to not want to leave – which is a little different than a lot of other fighters in his position, who would love to focus only on training and fighting.

“I’m an actuarial analyst,” Sanchez said. “It makes sense that I’m a grappler, because grapplers take the least amount of damage. I try to avoid all damage to the head because I’ve got to take these actuarial exams, so I’ve got to hit the books and pass that one.

“If I can, I want to keep doing both. I love both my jobs.”

For more from Roberto Sanchez, check out the video above.

And for complete covearge of UFC Fight Night 126, check out the UFC Events section of the site.