ADCC 2022 Studies: The Big Boys

The Abu Dhabi Combat Club World Championship is as good as the world cup of submission grappling. Part of its appeal is in casting off the traditional “styles” like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Judo, Sambo and folkstyle wrestling, and amalgamating a submission fighting ruleset with a wrestling one. ADCC is the event that all the top gyms prioritise and it is, quite frankly, where all the best grappling happens. The two-year gap between events—which a global pandemic stretched to three years this time around—seems only to heighten the significance in the minds of the grapplers and at ADCC 2022 competitors were scrambling as if their lives were on the line. 

While Gordon Ryan stood astride this year’s ADCC like a colossus and is likely responsible for the explosion of interest in no gi tournaments and super fights over the last five or so years, today’s study is a chance to do some scene setting. We will begin with the big boys: the 99+ kg division and all the interesting stuff that happened therein outside of Gordon’s matches. The story of the tournament can be told by a quick look at the brackets: today I want to focus on the techniques and tactics that caught my eye.

The Flat Shin-to-Shin

Sharing his name with the author of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo is already doomed to never rise above the second suggestion on Wikipedia. Yet he stood out as a curiosity in this tournament. While he is only twenty-five years old and already has a slew of championships to his name, he fought like the least seasoned competitor in the tournament. That is to say that he was at times visibly disinterested or dejected and made meals out of matches his reputation would lead you to believe he should have no trouble with. For instance, on day two Hugo fought in the Absolute division against Fabricio Andrey, who had competed the day before in “-66kg”, the lightest division, and took far too long to smash his tiny opponent. However, Hugo did stand out for being the only man at ADCC 2022 to grapple Gordon Ryan and take him the distance. That certainly counts for something.

Hugo stands out for being a genuine heavyweight at 6’4” and 250 lbs, but for being a gumby, inverting sort of heavyweight. His two most interesting moments at ADCC 2022 came against the equally peculiar Dan Manasoui—a giant who likes sitting to his butt and entangling legs. The two had a strange contest, taking turns coming up on top and then falling back on a leg. In the course of that bout, Hugo looked for a slick little sickle (or sometimes “tomahawk”) sweep. The sickle sweep is the brother of the classic tripod sweep.

Here is Emily Kwok demonstrating a tripod sweep—she has a grip on the ankle, the same side foot on her opponent’s hip, and her opposite foot catches behind the opponent’s free leg to trip them as she pushes them back with the foot on the hip.

In the sickle sweep, the guard player has a grip on the opponent’s ankle but this time the opposite foot posts on the hip and provides the push. This means the same side foot has to go deep between the opponent’s legs to catch the opponent’s free leg.

The sickle sweep is much less seen in modern jiu jitsu, but Hugo looks for it from a fairly common position: supine shin-to-shin. This often happens from a De La Riva guard. The bottom player pummels his De La Riva hook in front of his opponent’s shin.

In the course of a lively exchange, combined with off-balances, this can lead to the bottom man sliding into a leg entanglement. Yet if there is no momentum to use and you get stuck in a flat shin-to-shin against good opponents there are not a lot of great options.

The traditional shin-to-shin is a seated position, where the guard player grips his opponent’s leg above his shin-to-shin connection. This means he can rock back to the mat, drawing his opponent’s knee forward and forcing a step, and then start entangling legs. 

A reclined shin-to-shin is pretty unthreatening by comparison because it lacks the ponential of pulling the top player forwards. But if the other leg can be kept free, it can be brought into action and Victor Hugo’s sickle sweep applied. Here is Hugo using his sickle sweep against Big Dan. While many times in the match Hugo pummelled to the supine shin-to-shin from a De La Riva guard, here he attaches his ankle to Dan’s shin first.

And then grips with his hand before Dan can step his leg clear.

Hugo’s right foot goes to Dan’s beltline and his left leg shoots through to cut out Dan’s left leg as he attempts to step back and catch his weight.

Like a lot of things from ADCC, this ultimately led to a scramble and no points were scored off it, but it was the idea that stuck with me.

Later in the match, Hugo showed off his peculiarly “gumby” traits again by throwing up a quick omaplata from closed guard. He did this by breaking Dan’s posture and bringing his hands to the mat—standard stuff.

Hugo was able to throw his leg to his opposite hand and begin using that to get it across Dan’s centreline and start angling out.

The slick part was that he was able to throw the omaplata over his own left arm while using it to hold Dan’s head down.

Unfortunately for Hugo, Dan was able to slip out, but as he postured up you can see that they arrived in that supine shin-to-shin once again, where Hugo was flat on his back with an ankle grip below a shin-to-shin connection.

Pena and the Bear Trap

Hugo’s attempts from a reclined shin-on-shin position compared well with that of Felipe Pena. In his bout with the gigantic Josh Saunders, Pena repeatedly pummeled his feet to an inside position while holding the ankle, flat on his back. Below is an example from the very beginning of the match.

Saunders steps a foot between Pena’s legs to threaten knee cuts and engage in traditional guard passing, so Pena accepts a traditional Reverse De La Riva position—he gets slightly on his right hip, hooks his right shoelaces around under Saunder’s lead leg, and grips Saunders’ ankle or calf with his right hand.

Pena uses his left hand to fight Saunders’ right hand, which would ordinarily be checking his left leg. As Pena pushes Saunders’ wrist into his chest, he is free to throw his left leg over in front of Saunders.

Pummeling the free leg in front of the opponent from the Reverse De La Riva effectively puts a limb between them and the knee cut, stifling that technique until they can step between the legs again. Saunders’ pressure is relieved and this allows Pena to remove his Reverse De La Riva hook with his right foot and catch behind Saunders’ left leg instead. Pena tilts himself to square on his back.

By turning flat to his back, Pena can exchange his right handed ankle grip for a left handed one. This places him in that flat shin-on-shin position and completes the gripping exchange necessary to initiate his bear trap.

 If we jump ahead in the match to a better angle, we can examine Pena’s criss-cross leg hook switch. Here Pena has pummeled to a flat shin-to-shin.

Pena extends his left leg out of the shin to shin, getting slightly onto his left side and giving him room to throw his right ankle over the top, behind Dan’s knee.

From here, Pena gets both hands on Dan’s ankle and draws his left knee back towards his chest, so that his thigh pressures Dan’s shin from the front while his right calf can force Dan’s knee to bend.

Most leg attacks and entanglements operate around ensnaring the leg and capturing the knee line. Most leg entanglements also cease to be threatening when the captured fighter slips his knee line free. Notice below that Dan immediately turns and draws his knee away from Pena. Pena throws his left leg across the top as Dan does so.

As Dan turns to slip his knee, he is forced down into this very unathletic position, while Pena clings tightly to Dan’s heel in his hip pocket. Pena now has the chance of uncrossing one leg and wrestling up towards Dan’s back.

The commentators Shawn Williams and Brandon McCaghren—coming from different lineages—had different names for Pena’s pseudo-calf slicer positions. Williams called it the “bear trap” while McCaghren, being a 10th Planet guy, referred to it as a “ham sandwich.”

Pena’s third match with Gordon Ryan a few weeks earlier was somewhat overshadowed by exterior drama, but in that bout he demonstrated the same idea from numerous positions.

Here Pena has achieved a single leg X or ashi garami.

Pena switches to take a right handed grip on Gordon’s ankle.

Then pummels his left leg to below Gordon’s knee. The red line indicates where Pena would want to bring pressure across to execute a traditional reap and threaten an outside heel hook. Clearly he is not interested keeping control of Gordon’s knee line.

Driving his shin underneath Gordon’s knee and lifting the ankle off the floor, Pena is able to pass Gordon’s foot into his other hip pocket, and pummel his leg all the way through to achieve a bear trap position.

Against Gordon, Pena used these bear traps to get into the 50/50, but also used them to break Gordon down when he stood to untangle the 50/50. Each time Gordon stood in 50/50, Pena would keep Gordon’s foot in his hip pocket and leg press Gordon’s knee out until he fell. Whenever Gordon’s free leg came close enough, Pena underhooked it and began attacking that leg instead.

A final example against Saunders came off the deep De La Riva hook. Notice that Pena’s left foot on the inside of Saunders’ far hip blades Saunders’ stance away from Pena.

This allows Pena to pummel his right leg behind Saunders’ left knee and begin attacking Saunders from behind with no fear of having his guard passed.

Pena kicked his right leg through and then threw it over to start buckling Saunders knee again.

This time though, Saunders turned back into him, giving Pena the 50/50, from which Pena came on top and began to work in earnest.

Nicky Rod and the Rody Lock

So far we have been applauding big men who play guard for their creativity and leg dexterity, but these qualities are just as important in passing the guard. In fact in 2017 and 2019, the guard retention of athletes in ADCC far outperformed the guard passing. With the exception of Gordon Ryan and JT Torres’ 2019 runs, passing seemed to have largely stagnated in the face of new guard tactics and a focus on leg entanglements.

Nick Rodriguez proved a welcome surprise this year. In 2019 he slapped and shoved his way to a medal in the big man division just by winning the standing portion of bouts. Since then he has been working at the B-Team to become a surprisingly technical, far less spazzy athlete. His performance this year carried him to the finals against Gordon Ryan and his body lock passing won him nearly every bout along the way.

While the body lock pass is fairly simple, Nicky Rod displayed two of the finer points in his bouts. First let us look against a fairly typical body lock pass against John Hansen. Rodriguez has forced butterfly guard, achieved double underhooks, and flattened Hansen’s back to the mat.

He begins dropping his left hip to the mat in order to free his left knee.

With his left knee in the middle he can kick his right leg high over Hansen’s left

Covering Hansen’s left knee with his right, he can force half guard.

But here is the crucial point: before Hansen can accept and consolidate a flattened half guard, Rodriguez coils his trailing leg, bringing his heel to his butt and evading the half guard that Hansen could normally fall back on after failing to prevent Rodriguez capturing his knee.

Rodriguez’s pass against Ramos in the opening round was slicker and demonstrated some of Rodriguez’s newly earned technical ability. Instead of forcing the half guard, Rodriguez kicked his right leg back, freeing it from Ramos’ left butterfly hook.

And brought it back in on top of Ramos’ right butterfly hook.

This is sometimes called “shelfing” the leg and was something that Wallid Ismael apparently did way back in the day. It links well with the idea of the shin pin that Rafa Mendes and now Gordon Ryan both use. The idea is that if you can “cross grip” with your feet, shins or knees—right to right or left to left—you’re a lot closer to passing the guard than you would be square in front of the opponent. Here is Nicky Rod himself demonstrating it from the arse side in his excellent instructional:

The really slick bit was how he capitalized on this position. Immediately stepping over the knee line with his left leg, he didn’t wait for a moment to consolidate (as you would expect a big, methodical grappler to) but rather stepped immediately over to mount as Ramos was panicking about the pass.

And in spite of the body lock pass being a huge part of his success, it was with an opportunistic application of traditional half guard shoulder pressure that Rodriguez surprised and passed Felipe Pena in the semi-final.

It is easy to lose sight of one phenom’s improvement for the arrival of another in grappling—particularly in the year that Gordon Ryan won a medal in a third weight class and Kade Ruotolo won his division at nineteen years old—but Rodriguez hit the scene as an athletic freak who got by on aggression. His super fights after the last ADCC were still simply him spamming cartwheel pass attempts and throwing flying knees disguised as “knee cuts”. For him to get to the finals of ADCC on methodical, well applied no-gi guard passing when almost no one else can speaks volumes about his focus these last few months and years.

We are already a month out of ADCC 2022 and there is still so much to say. Keep your eyes on the Patreon page because I am still studying the divisions and attempting to find trends and come up with ways to discuss linked techniques and tactics.