An MMA Fan’s Guide to

The Craig Jones Invitational

Since Abu Dhabi Combat Club was founded in 1998, the winner of the ADCC World Championship has been recognized as the best grappler on the planet. No gis, no ban on leg attacks, no belt restrictions. ADCC now holds eight Trials tournaments for every world championship, offering any grappler on any continent the chance to earn his way into the big tournament. In many regards, ADCC is the purest form of competition and every two years, grappling nerds sit down and devour a hundred or more matches over the course of two days.

ADCC is the pinnacle of grappling. No one involved in the Craig Jones Invitational hates ADCC. Many of the competitors battled their way through the grueling ADCC trials to earn a spot at the 2024 World Championship. The Craig Jones Invitational exists due to a dispute over revenue split.

Even after a decade of watching ADCC, studying its competitors, and shouting about it to any MMA fans who will listen, this writer was shocked to learn the figure. Athletes risk and lose ACLs in front of larger arenas every two years and yet the prize money for first place in the male divisions remains $10,000, and the best female grappler in the world gets only half of that.

Veterans of the debate over the UFC’s pay structure will be familiar with the ADCC counter-argument: go and fight somewhere else, no one else will pay you more. Well, that Aussie scamp and ADCC medalist Craig Jones found a mystery party with money they didn’t need, and the Craig Jones Invitational was born. $10,001 to every participant, two $1million prizes on the line in two absolutely stacked tournaments. And it just happens to be taking place the same weekend as ADCC. 

It is a bit much to try to give you an overview of who each of the thirty-two competitors in two tournaments are, but the -80kg tournament is the real attraction so we will run down some of the favourites and dark horses there, and the cool stuff they do.

Note: All the clips analyzed in this article have been uploaded to FloGrappling’s Youtube page where you can enjoy entire ADCC Trials supercuts.

The Ruotolo Brothers

Undoubtedly the favourite of the competition is Kade Ruotolo. At ADCC 2022, Kade became the youngest ADCC champion in history at 19, submitting every opponent he met in just his first ADCC appearance.

Kade’s twin brother Tye was able to compete three years earlier at ADCC 2019 and drew attention for his unique guard passing at just sixteen years old. This stood out particularly because with a couple of notable exceptions—JT Torres and Gordon Ryan—it had been getting less common to see effective guard passing at the highest levels of no gi grappling.

The basis of the Ruotolo A game is using lateral movement to flank the opponent’s guard, without giving up a meaningful entanglement. Everyone wants to work on legs from the bottom, and the Ruotolos do a terrific job of hiding theirs behind them, or standing on the opponent’s feet, or running around to north south and burying their head in the opponent’s belly button. Theirs is a style that has been described as “tactical disengaging.” They grip on their own terms and they make you reach out wildly if you want to make a grip of your own. Kade will rip your arm like he’s starting a leafblower and leap into a D’arce if he catches you reaching.

Tye Ruotolo’s performance against Garry Tonon in ONE Championship gave the Cliffs Notes on the Ruotolo style. In the short finishing sequence there are a couple of key points to note.

Once Tye has Tonon on the ground, he quickly frees his leg and steps around Tonon’s guard towards north-south. Running to north-south is a straight forward attack that still works at the highest levels, but most of the opponents who are good enough to be facing the Ruotolos will be able to make some attempt at guard retention. Notice in the gif below that Tonon hip rolls to get Tye back in front of his guard, but in doing so he drops Tye into a deep stack pass. This is something that Lachlan Giles pointed out the Ruotolos doing ahead of his ADCC 2022 match with Kade.

Stack passes are seldom seen as a primary means of attack, but as a follow up attack off the opponent’s guard retention they work fantastically. The figure below shows how Tye used Tonon’s recovery to set a D’arce choke that he then used to force the submission.

Tonon has hip rolled and Tye has dug in on the underpass, with his right hand gripping Tonon’s right trap and his left hand lifting Tonon’s hips (a). Tye’s right knee slides in on top of Tonon’s left elbow (b). Tye drives forwards into the stack so that Tonon’s hips fall away from him (c). Notice that Tye’s right knee has forced Tonon’s left elbow across his body. Tye brings his left hand back to push Tonon’s elbow a little further (d), then he locks his hands and begins the process of finishing the D’arce choke (e).

Opponents quickly learned that the last thing you want to do against the Ruotolos is sit down without grips. For a lot of competitors getting worked out would mean a drop off in results, but the Ruotolos carried on improving at a tremendous rate. Kade effectively had a wrestling match with PJ Barch, who wrestled D-1 at University of Pennsylvania and was known as the wrestler of that year’s ADCC bracket. Kade scrambled beautifully and used the turtle to avoid having points scored against him, before snapping up an overhook armbar in the last minute of the match.

The list of Ruotolo innovations keeps growing by the day. Most recently, both finished opponents on the same night with an arm-in rear naked choke / arm triangle from the back that people are now calling the Ruotolotine.

At ADCC 2022, the Ruotolo twins made the same choice the Nogueira brothers used to in MMA: Kade got the glory at -77kg, and Tye got the short straw and competed up in weight. Tye went out early in the -88kg division but ended up winning a bronze in the Absolute division, where he was more severely undersized. At CJI, Kade will have the target on his back as the man to beat, but Tye will get a chance to flex his skills at the appropriate weight once again. Placed on opposite sides of the bracket and with a million dollars on the line, an all Ruotolo final is a very reasonable possibility.  

Jozef Chen

This year’s hottest new attraction is Jozef Chen. In his fourth year as a competitor, Chen smashed through the ADCC European trials taking out Tommy Langaker, Oliver Taza and Polaris champion, Mateusz Szczecinski.

The thing that has drawn most eyes is his tripod passing, which has similarities to what Demian Maia used to do in MMA. With an underhook and a headpin, Chen will raise his hips high over his opponent’s butterfly guard—almost into a headstand.

It looks as though a light breeze might send him over the top, but by climbing so high over the opponent and dropping his weight through his shoulder he has removed most of their ability to move him around with their hooks. The beauty of it is that by pummeling his legs Chen can drop himself straight into mount off the pass. Like most things in grappling, the high tripod isn’t completely new—Roger Gracie was doing something very similar in the gi as a brown belt—but Chen has his own quirks and no one else has done it with anything like this level of success for a long time. The high tripod must be one of grappling’s most aesthetically pleasing techniques when you see Chen pull it off.

Another pass that Chen makes use of that doesn’t seem to get the same attention is a backslide over the De La Riva hook. Marcelo Garcia used to sit to his butt over the DLR hook and threaten the guillotine to get the opponent to let go of his leg.

This is another pass that sets up a secondary pass. In this instance you will notice that Chen completes the pass with a stack just like Tye Ruotolo did against Garry Tonon. We could get into Chen using the cross “leg hug” / “thigh drag” follow up which is becoming a very commonly seen passing position but we might be getting too in the weeds.

In case I’m losing those MMA fans in the audience, here is a gorgeous finish from the ADCC Trials. Jozef Chen is essentially a robot trained up on BJJ instructionals and his execution of the front headlock dilemma is perfection. He gets the front headlock, and threatens to go behind. The opponent throws his right arm out to stop him going behind them, and Chen gets elbow deep on a high-wrist guillotine.

Watch the change in wrist position (below). This high-wrist guillotine is an innovation from Gordon Ryan but you will see Craig Jones use it in competition as well. You will notice that the neck is almost entirely encircled by one arm—like in a rear naked choke. Where a guillotine is usually a two handed choke, in the high wrist guillotine one hand does the choking and the other hand stops the opponent from getting away.

While he never used the high wrist guillotine, you can see the go-behind / front choke dilemma played at the highest levels of MMA during Tony Ferguson’s incredible lightweight run—particularly his fights with Gleison Tibau and Abel Trujillo.

Though Chen is known as a top player, he had a match against Tye Ruotolo in ONE Championship a couple of weeks ago and stifled the great guard passer with his two-on-ones and leg entanglements. Perhaps the two men were playing a bit more conservatively, with a possible million dollar match up just weeks away, but it certainly showed that Chen is a threat off his back as well.

Andrew Tackett

Andrew Tackett gained some niche fame in the niche sport of grappling by taking on and submitting Gordon Ryan’s three hundred pound training partner, Dan Manasoiu on a reality show back in 2022. Andrew is another CJI sibling as he and his older brother William both qualified for ADCC through winning trials and then jumped ship when the CJI offer came in.  

Pace and lateral movement are Tackett’s main weapons. In keeping with our theme of the old becoming new again, Tackett makes a great deal of use of an upward cross ankle grip. This is a great way to initiate side-to-side passes with the quickest of touches.

When Tackett uses this grip his opponent often throws their other leg over the top and he ends up in this crossed up passing position that Leo Vieira used to make use off back in the early 2000s.  

But the palm up cross grip is also great for consolidating and completing passes. Tackett will use it to push the opponent’s near knee out of his hip crease. Or he will punch through to a scoop grip underneath the leg and use it to turn the opponent away.

He was able to pass into a cradle against Andy Varela in this way.

ADCC is not a pure jiu jitsu tournament because of its peculiar rules that offer some advantages to grapplers from traditional wrestling styles. One of these is that pulling guard will not get you punished…until the finals match or the super fight. This led to Gordon Ryan leaving his leg out and politely asking Andre Galvao and Nick Rodriguez to take him down in 2022.

Equally significant is that once the points period starts—in the latter half of a match, going to the turtle immediately prevents points being scored from a takedown or guard pass. Some of the most accomplished grapplers in the world have not been able to take advantage of this rule in the heat of the moment. Andrew Tackett’s bottom game scrambly, built around the turtle, and results in either a sweep or a return to the feet.

Nowhere was this more clear than when he met Oliver Taza in the finals of the trials. In the points period, Taza came inches from completing a single leg that would probably have won him the match. Tackett based on his shoulder, on his head, on his hand, and desperately fought to keep himself from winding up on his back. Finally Tackett was able to catch Taza’s arm and roll over to top position.

Nicky Ryan

The younger brother of the seemingly unstoppable Gordon Ryan, Nicky was a wunderkind. There was a time when John Danaher was suggesting Nicky would be capable of bigger and better things than even Gordon. He went to his first ADCC in 2019 as a teenager and ran up against the brick wall of Paulo Miyao, and has competed sporadically with a good number of injuries since.

Nicky Ryan is a little like Jason Rau, the world’s greatest grappler in a gym scenario. Before teams filmed all their rolls and uploaded them to Youtube, men like this would be akin to cryptids. Guys like “Boris” out of Renzo Gracie Academy who manhandled the best pros in a room full of world champions, or the “Big Dave” who was Roger Gracie’s toughest roll and never competed. Today, thanks to The B Team’s online presence, I have a folder full of Nicky Ryan doing insane things to world class competitors, in the gym.

Every now and again Nicky Ryan turns up to a superfight and does something amazing in a competitive setting. Against Dante Leon in 2021, he suddenly showed an ability to wrestle. Nicky is particularly good with what he terms a “GSP double leg”.

Georges St. Pierre had a lot of different tricks but towards the latter end of his career he would shoot a double leg, get elbow deep on the opponent’s thigh, and then take the opponent towards the side of his head as if running the pipe on a single leg takedown. This clip shows him taking Penn down towards his head, and moving to do the same against Thiago Alves but changing direction and running Alves over in traditional double leg style.

Nicky Ryan’s bout with Dante Leon was also part of a trend towards “wrestling up”. Traditionally this meant coming up on a single leg when the opponent was reluctant to engage, but Nicky was threatening his leg entries and then powering his way up into a legitimate double leg takedown.

Turning up to ADCC 2022 with enormous expectations on his shoulders, Nicky wrestled to a standstill with Renato Canuto, gassed out and went out in the first round. When the North American Trials came around this time, Nicky turned up playing the guard that made him famous to begin with. Arm drags and leg entries were almost enough on their own to carry Nicky to six submissions.

With such a large field it is impossible to justice to everyone in the tournament, but I shall attempt to make a whistlestop tour of the rest of these brackets.

Jason Nolf has one submission grappling match on his record but it would not be surprising to see him make it through a couple of rounds here. Nolf is a three time Division 1 wrestling champion and ended up losing out to Kyle Dake in the Olympic trials back in April. With a little extra time on his hands, Nolf took his first grappling match in June, won it, and signed up for the CJI. This is something of a throwback to the original ADCC tournaments where the goal was to open it up to all grappling styles and Mark Kerr won four gold medals with the “base style” of wrestling. But if you have seen Nolf wrestle you will have clocked that he is far from just a takedown artist—he is a great pinner, uses the cradle well, and hits creative reversals from referees position, all important stuff under ADCC’s rules.

Levi Jones-Leary was a longtime gi specialist who finally bit the bullet,took off the pyjamas, and entered the ADCC Asia and Oceania trials in May. I write this with the kindest of intentions: he looked like a gi grappler with no gi on. De la riva guard and bolos to the back. You can just sort of tell when someone has mastered the game using the gi and then has tried to adapt that control to a game that is characterized by its lack of control. It makes for a unique style and it was marvellous to watch. Also worthy of praise was Jones’ use of K-guard which is a very sturdy no-gi guard already.

Roberto Jimenez turns up in a couple of the best grapplers’ highlight reels because he will take any match at all, even at massive size disadvantages. When he is competition-ready he makes the -77kg division in ADCC, but in the last couple of years he has been grappling above 90kg and in Absolute divisions, with a great deal of success. His match with Kade Ruotolo in 2021 will show you what he is capable of.

Recently he has been bringing back the closed guard in no gi and he is particularly notable for using underhooks from closed guard to swing his hips out and look for the back. This is not commonly seen and results in odd looking moments like Kade Ruotolo flopping to the bottom of mount seemingly out of nowhere but actually to avoid giving up his back.

Renato Canuto is a multiple ADCC veteran with a slick and aggressive style. His match with Garry Tonon in the opening round of ADCC 2019 is a classic, and he ended the Nicky Ryan hype train in 2022, sending Nicky home in the first round. Big on armbars, but great all over.

Tommy Langaker and his training partner Espen Mathieson have been wrecking European gi competitions out of their gym in the small town of Haugesund for years, but in 2023 he dived two footed into no gi and won both the Euros and the Worlds. Earlier this year he grappled Kade Ruotolo in ONE Championship for Kade’s ONE title, and he lost a decision that many observers thought he deserved to win.

Like Levi Jones-Leary, Tommy got famous for playing De La Riva and turning upside down in the gi, then had to deal with the lack of a jacket when he switched to no gi. One of the slick little no gi De La Riva movements that you will see Langaker, Jones-Leary, Mikey Musumeci and others playing in no gi is using the De La Riva to off-balance the opponent just enough to make them back-step, then scoop gripping the back leg.

The above clip makes it easy to see what Langaker is doing, but this clip from later in the match shows a better outcome.

He suffered losses to Andrew Tackett and Jozef Chen recently but as one of Jiu Jitsu’s great innovators he’s likely to have learned from the footage.

Lucas Barbosa, Eoghan O’Flannagan and Matheus Diniz are the big boys of the -80kg tournament. Their performances seem likely to hinge on their nutrition as much as anything else. All three are veterans of ADCC’s -88kg class, but with the choice of grappling +80kg (effectively openweight) or -80kg in the CJI, they decided they’d rather be the hammer than the nail. For American readers, 8 kilograms is about 18 pounds, and none of these men were looking doughy at 88kg to begin with.

Barbosa is a big strong top player with the classic ATOS collar tie, collar tie, high double leg stuff on the feet. He competed all the way up at -99kg in 2019. Diniz is a dynamic top player with a good amount of Marcelo Garcia influence clear in him. Lots of flanking and knee cuts, but he is also my go-to example for regular people who get stuck in closed guard in no gi.

O’Flannagan was the great surprise of 2022. A brilliant leg locker from the UK, he has some creative entries and a very formidable guard if the opponent comes down to their knees, which he showed off against the legend, Xande Ribeiro. In a tournament where all the favourites prefer to stay on top and pass, O’Flannagan might be the guard purist. When he got on top against Ribeiro he immediately backstepped on a leg lock and fell onto the bottom, where he was more comfortable.

Andy Varela lost to Andrew Tackett in the trials, but when Tackett pulled out of ADCC, he got the ADCC invite. After accepting the ADCC invite, Varela got the CJI offer and immediately jumped ship. As a grappler? He is becoming the new Tex Johnson—always getting attention for losing his temper and striking opponents instead of his grappling, which is a shame because he’s good. He has drawn Jozef Chen in the first round, but while Chen is the flavour of the month Varela had a very close match with Chen just last year.

Magid Hage is given no chance to win but he is an inspirational story and one of this writer’s favourites to watch. Hage has been around in the competitive jiu jitsu world for what seems like decades. Rocking up in an oversized t-shirt and knee sleeves, he entered four ADCC Trials events and lost in the finals each time before getting invited to ADCC 2022. His tricky game involves a lot of knee levers from half guard and razor armlocks / shoulder crunches to create sweeps. Here is the legend, Lachlan Giles praising Hage’s sly looks.

And that is just the usual style of each competitor. CJI is taking place in the Karate Combat pit and experimenting with a three round, 10-point-must judging system.

ADCC 2024

We haven’t even touched on the +80kg tournament taking place at the CJI, with another million dollar prize. But more importantly, ADCC is still taking place the same weekend. There was simply no point in anyone in the -66kg trying to take part in the -80kg CJI tournament, so that bracket remains incredibly strong. Whoever wins is likely to be the subject of ONE Championship champ, Mikey Musumeci’s next tearful, post fight rant.

The man in the toughest spot this weekend in Giancarlo Bodoni. He was the -88kg king at the last ADCC, and as a member of John Danaher / Gordon Ryan’s New Wave team, he is committed to competing at ADCC this time. A number of the best grapplers in his division have gone to CJI, so he is stuck in a less interesting tournament when he would have a great chance at a million dollars in either the -80kg or +80kg CJI tournaments.

That being said, Bodoni’s division still has a couple of compelling storylines. Taylor Pearman has stepped into Eoghan O’Flannagan’s role from last time around: having smashed through the European trials, leg locking every opponent he met. Charles Negromonte is a longtime Roger Gracie training partner who finally put it together and got to ADCC through the trials at age 36. And Izaak Michell has some of the best wrestling in the sport of submission grappling, despite no amateur wrestling pedigree to speak of.

Every two years grappling fans get one beautiful weekend of elite no gi matches, and this time around we seem to be getting two at once.