Lessons from the CJI:

The Invention of “Pitcraft”

For the veteran MMA fan, it might have felt as though we had only recently seen a sloped fighting surface attempted in combat sports. The Yamma pit was a disaster that tripped fighters over at the ankles and then prevented them from getting up.

In fact, it was a full sixteen years ago that Yamma Pitfighting debuted and died on the same night. Yamma was doomed from the start because they decided on a heavyweight tournament full of geriatric names, and the tournament bouts were one round each to convince the commission to let it go ahead. But more than that, the largest part of MMA is the play-off between fence wrestling and the wall walk. No matter how much you hate fence wrestling or grappling generally, more strikers have been saved by wall walking their way up to their feet than you can count. Wall walking is possible because of the sturdy ninety degree angle between fence and floor. An angled surface has proven—so far—impossible to wall walk on.

That has not changed, but the context has. The Craig Jones Invitational was a grappling tournament and the issue that every grappling tournament has is that wrestling is a vitally important part of grappling, but whole matches can be lost to tedious, often ineffective handfighting. Some no-gi competitions have even brought in a “get down” rule which puts the fighters in a moderately even position on the ground, but this is an intervention in the match that rewards the competitors with a position for nothing.

The other problem is that the tedious wrestling period is often extended by grapplers playing the edge of the mat. It is constantly being debated how going out of bounds should be handled and this year ADCC was still letting scrambles play out on the floor, off the mats. The sloped pit has already proven itself superior to the open mat in grappling competition for the same reason that the cage is superior to the ring for MMA: it contains the action. If ring-outs are not a goal of the game, any venue that does not serve to contain the action is detrimental to the contest.

A vertical wall mat could be wall walked just as a fence could—most smaller MMA gyms do their cage wrestling exclusively against wall mats—but then every match would simply become MMA cage wrestling. A shallow slope, as in the Yamma, trips the opponent easily and then he is pinned on a slight incline. The steep slope of the Craig Jones Invitational meant that even if the grapplers stumbled back onto their butt, they would soon slide down onto the floor and back into a traditional ground fight.

So the pit contained the action, and prevented wall walking, but it also created an urgency. The very first match of day one demonstrated this. Any time Nicky Rod picked up a leg, Max Gimenis had to attack off his whizzer and attempt a throw or to at least shuck Rodriguez off, because if he was run into the slope on one foot, he was almost definitely falling over and sliding down to bottom position.

Kade Ruotolo’s match against Andrew Tackett was another great example. Ruotolo had to time his throw, but Tackett running him towards the slope put a ticking clock on that and made Ruotolo sell out on his best attempt.

Throughout CJI there was no chance to chill out along the fence, fighting off the single like Jose Aldo did when he is taking a breather. A similar urgency exists in sumo: the moment one wrestler gets strong pushing grips and starts forcing his way forward, the other wrestler has to time his throw before his feet leave the dohyo. The stakes are raised so the attacks are more committed and frequent.

A World of Possibilities

If this event were a one-off, a “pit meta” would not need to evolve. But with Craig Jones announcing that CJI 2025 has secured funding, there are a million little reasons for competitors to continue studying the pit and making the most of it. And this brings us back to a constant theme of my work over the last decade: ringcraft. The idea that where action happens in the ring or cage is as important as the techniques themselves.

In CJI there were several occasions where takedown or flanking attempts were thwarted, but maneuvered the opponent into a weaker ring position for a follow up attack. A great example would be Pat Downey attempting a slide-by against Luke Rockhold, getting nowhere close to Rockhold’s back, but placing Rockhold on the uneven footing of the slope and dragging his legs out on a re-attack.

There is still so much to explore with the slope, and it was notable that two of the competitors who had made the commitment to constructing and training on a slope showed some of the slickest looks. William Tackett went out in the first round of the +80kg tournament, where he was massively undersized, but demonstrated the effect of pace and pressure in an arena that rewards pushing the opponent to the edge.

For many fans the idea of the pit brought the possibility of Anthony Pettis style running-up-the-wall type techniques. While there was not a lot of that going on, William Tackett walked up the ramp to get a beautiful back take on Rocha.

Joao Rocha had adopted the “Volkanovski position”—which Alexander Volkanovski used to stifle Islam Makhachev’s brilliant back bodylock. Without the ability to drive Volk forwards, and with Volk so hard to lift out his doubled over position, Makhachev actually wound up pulling Volkanovski down on top of him by mistake.

The difference was that with the slope, Rocha’s hands were out ahead of him, his head was not pressed into the fence with his hands free to work. And Tackett was able to jog up the slope and hop onto his back in a way that would be impossible on a vertical fence panel.  

William Tackett’s younger brother, Andrew was the star of the event. While he went out in the semi-final against Kade Ruotolo, in a match that is being touted as the most entertaining ever, Kade was the tournament favourite, Tackett was only known to hardcore grappling nerds. Tackett cut through established names in the tournament like a bandsaw through a misplaced finger, and he did all kinds of playful work off the walls as he did it.

In our pre-event profile of Andrew we highlighted his side-to-side guard passing and running to north-south. Against Nicky Ryan he used the ramp to elevate his legs like Ric Flair would “use the ropes for leverage” on a pin in professional wrestling. Notice the upward cross ankle grip that we focused so much on in the preview.

As absurd as it seems, Ronaldo ‘Jacare’ Souza was able to walk on the fence over his opponent’s guards multiple times in mixed martial arts. A more successful attempt later in the Nicky Ryan match saw Tackett perform a tumble turn off the wall as you would when swimming lengths.

Make no mistake, front flips and back flips rank firmly in the “Bullshit” tier of guard pass, but Tackett’s biggest weapon is pace and his successful passes are always the second or third attempt in a chain. Using something outlandish as the initiator when you already expect it to fail at least makes the process more fan friendly.

Higher Ground

Razzle dazzle is always going to be a selling point of the pit. If someone does anything approaching a “pit technique” in Karate Combat it gets highlighted from a dozen angles because innovation is always exciting.

But returning to that cursed Yamma Pitfighting event in 2008, one of the talking points in the build up was the notion of “higher ground”. This appeals to military historians and anyone who is interested in fighting on a larger scale. Modern technology has moved individual fighting and actual warfare further and further away from each other, but the idea of occupying the high ground is something that dates from the days of clubs and heavy rocks. Those who have read their Musashi will know all about getting the higher ground, putting the sun at your back and so on. Yet sporting contests have always sought to literally level the playing field.

We are left playing with traditional martial artists’ theories on differences in elevation. For instance if you are standing higher on a staircase than someone else, you should be able to kick them in the face more easily and they should be able to grab your legs without changing level.

That is why it was fascinating to see elite grapplers using the ramp to free themselves from single legs. Whenever Andrew Tackett’s opponents attempted to initiate a takedown towards the ramp, William Tackett could be heard telling Andrew to run up the wall.

Felipe Andrews was one of the smallest men in the +80kg tournament, and when he met Ignacio Santos—a gigantic powerlifting ball of a man—he used the ramp multiple times to unsettle a strength-on-strength contest. Early in the bout Andrews demonstrated that even if Santos had his leg, running up the ramp allowed him to get over the top of Santos and effectively sprawl level to the floor, while his feet were still planted or moving him around.

It makes sense that if you can run your feet around the top of the ramp while pushing into the opponent he probably cannot climb the ramp to get after you. Tackett attempted this a couple of times against Kade Ruotolo who, wisely, stepped back from underneath him and tried to let Tackett fall on his face.

Later in the Andrews - Santos match, Andrews wound up in a similar position: standing on the ramp with his body almost parallel with the floor. This time Santos was able to keep his back straight but duck under Andrews’ arm to get deep on his hips and pull him straight onto his butt. So getting higher on the ramp takes your feet further away from the opponent but still puts him underneath you, in a strong upright position that he might have to compromise to get under your arms out in the centre of the mat.

The instances of grapplers getting run toward the ramp and tripping over it vastly outnumbered those instances of grapplers running up it and denying their opponent.

Andrew Tackett demonstrated a very slick last minute recovery when he could not run the ramp. Hitting his butt momentarily, Tackett planted the leg Nicky Ryan was holding and placed his far hand and leg on the ramp.

We examined Tackett’s effectiveness from the turtle in our preview—he swept two opponents at the trials including Oliver Taza. Here Tackett effectively performed a turtle on the slope, before pushing off it to change direction and run out to space.

Now, this could have all just been Andrew Tackett “spazzing out” in a way that worked out in the end. That is the thing about the pit: it was new to everyone and there are no established rules yet. But wall walking and many other innovations in MMA began as happy accidents. Grappling is full of shifts in the tournament meta that come about because someone fell into a position in training and asked “how can I put myself there again?”

Ultimately, I owe the pit an apology. Or perhaps I don’t. The Yamma pit made for a wretched night of fights. But this pit? The Karate Combat inspired “Alley?” Well it managed to kill many of the biggest problems with submission grappling in one fell swoop. And with the prize money of the CJI blowing everything else in the sport out of the water, you can expect to see smaller events using their own pits and a whole host of pit specific tactics to develop out of that.