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First Things First

Fresh off the Olympics comes the biggest week in grappling history. The Craig Jones Invitational (CJI) and Abu Dhabi Combat Club (ADCC) Submission Grappling World Championships BOTH go down this weekend.

Today we’re going to look at how we got here to answer, what will this week do to professional grappling?

The Origins Of The ADCC Worlds

The ADCC Submission Grappling World Championships might be the most interesting competition in all of sport. Every two years grapplers from across the world compete in regional qualifying tournaments for the opportunity to compete for the world championship. Only 16 men per 5 divisions and 8 women per 3 divisions get to compete. The only people that get paid are the ones that make it to the podium.

I know this reads like the plot of Chuck Norris movie. When you read about the tournament’s origins it sounds more fantastical.

ADCC is named as such because the first event was held in Abu Dhabi. The Sheikh of the United Arab Emirates, Sheik Tahnoon, became an MMA fan after watching the UFC in 1993 while attending university in the US. Like many, the UFC inspired him to start Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Tahnoon returned to the UAE but could not stop thinking about martial arts. He expanded his studies from BJJ to include Sambo, Judo, and freestyle wrestling.

In 1998, Tahnoon created a unique ruleset that would not favor any particular grappling style, invited 16 grapplers from different disciplines across 5 weight classes to compete for prize money larger than any other tournament was offering. The ADCC World Submission Fighting Championships was born.

Competitors were so pleased with the pageantry and prize of the event that they spread news across the world of this mysterious tournament in the desert. Their chatter attracted more competitors to apply for the tournament. Eventually, there were too many entrants to simply be let in and ADCC launched regional qualifying tournaments.

Today, the ADCC world championships are positioned to take place in the T-Mobile arena in front of ~ 20,000 fans from around the world.

With every larger-than-life story there are a few grey areas around the details.

Original Controversy

Gracie Barra is the largest Brazilian jiu-jitsu association in the world. There are 5 around where I live in Austin alone and over 1000 around the world.

In 1995, Sheikh Tahnoon started training at the United States’s first Gracie Barra Academy with Nelson Monteiro. After falling in love with the sport, Tahnoon invited Monteiro to come to the UAE and help him continue learning.

Tahnoon and his family saw value in martial arts. They wanted to foster martial arts participation in the UAE to promote a more healthy lifestyle.

In 1997 Tahnoon invested in an MMA promotion organized by his instructor Monteiro called Pentagon Combat. The event featured mixed martial arts legends like Murilo Bustamante, Oleg Taktarov, and Renzo Gracie.

Gracie, Brazilian jiu-jitsu royalty, was scheduled to fight Luta Livre representative Eugenio Tadeu. The fight was deemed a non-contest because fans started rioting.

It’s a bit unclear as to why, but we can say for certain that the fans’ rioting stems from the Gracie family’s rivalry with Luta Livre, it’s representatives (like Tadeu), and its practitioners. The riot made national news in Brazil and even CNN which was a bad look for Brazilian jiu-jitsu and disastrous for MMA.

Sheikh Tahnoon was trying to organize an MMA event in the UAE. After the riot and the negative press his father forbade it. They still saw value in martial arts and wanted to promote its benefits to their people, so they decided on a slightly more sanitized sport, submission wrestling. There the Abu Dhabi Combat Club World Championships were born.

I suspect the true origin of the ADCC World Championships is somewhere between Monteiro and Tahnoon’s two stories. What is not up for debate is why the event took off and is now facing repercussions.

Prizes, Prestige, And Amateur Play

Don’t get it twisted. The original allure of ADCC for competitors was simple. Money.

The Sheikh attracted competitors for his original tournament by offering a large prize. The competitors that participated spoke highly of their experience because they were treated well and the winners got prize money unusually high for grappling.

Over time more and more people started referring to ADCC as the biggest thing in the sport. It was never “the Olympics of grappling (or jiujitsu)” as it is commonly nicknamed today. And I can’t help but see the irony in this nickname.

The Olympics that we know today were originally designed as an ode to amateurism. Unpaid athletics.

Sports and sporting culture largely comes from leisure time. One has to be wealthy enough to buy back time so they can take up hobbies, play sports, and get good enough to reasonably compete. Prize money was thought to soil the spirit of the Olympics. Famously, Jim Thorpe was stripped of his gold medals after it was discovered he took money to play baseball prior to competing in the Olympics.

Over time the Olympics grew. Winning medals became accepted as a symbol of the country’s success, thus incentivizing countries to sponsor programs and athletes. The line between amateurism and professionalism blurred.

This famously came to a head between the 1988 and 1992 Olympic games.

In 1988 and before, the US Men’s Basketball Team was still sending college players to represent them at the games. In 1988 they had their worst finish ever, a bronze medal. At the same time other countries were sending the best players from their domestic professional leagues.

In 1989, FIBA voted to allow professionals to play in the Olympics, thus creating the Dream Team of 1992. They outscored opponents by a minimum of 33 points per game.

Today there are only a few remaining Olympic events that professionals are forbidden from participating in. For what it’s worth, Thorpe’s medals have been restored too.

Much like the Olympics, ADCC has grown far beyond its roots. In less than 10 years the tournament went from being held in basketball courts and random gymnasiums to taking up the same arena that hosts the UFC. The pay has not followed suit.

If you win your weight division at the ADCC World Championships, you get $10,000. Second, third, and fourth get $5,000, $3000, and $1000. The absolute division get $40,000, $10,000, $5,000, $1,000. The men and women used to be paid different amounts, but this year will be the first year their pay is equal.

You can’t help but take a step back and notice the ironic, uneven trajectory of the two events. As the Olympic Games grew, pay became accepted. ADCC grew, willingly accepted the title as the biggest thing in jiujitsu (the Olympics of Grappling), but pay stagnated.

It should be noted that ADCC has claimed their goal was always to grow the sport so the pot would be bigger to distribute to athletes. Frankly, we don’t have any reason to not believe them.

At the same time, you can assume bigger prizes attract better athletes and incentivize better performances, which, in theory, will attract more viewers and generate more revenue.

With a chip on his shoulder and a beer in his nose, two-time ADCC silver medalist Craig Jones had roughly this same assumption. Now he’s trolling the ADCC World Championships.

Craig Jones Invitational

Historically, athletes that lose in the first or second round of the ADCC Worlds don’t get a dollar for competing. Craig Jones thought it would be a hilarious fuck you to ADCC if he did a charity seminar to raise funds to pay all of the first and second-round losers of the ADCC event.

He told an unnamed friend with seemingly limitless capital about his plans. The friend asked, “why don’t we just throw our own event?”

That person cut a check for $3 million dollars, Jones announced a giant tournament on the exact same weekend as ADCC, and the Craig Jones Invitational became a reality.

CJI will be 2 16-man brackets both paying $1,000,000 to the winner. Each invitee will get $10,001 to show up. That’s right, just for showing up you get 1 dollar more than the winner of ADCC gets. Oh, and the event will be streamed for free on Youtube, Facebook, and X.

Jones has a few goals in mind with this competitive stunt. He is making the event free to sell ad space and remove barriers preventing casual viewers from watching the grappling tournament. He assumes this will give us an idea of roughly how many people watch ADCC, and we can back into how much the streaming rights for the event are worth.

More importantly, he is forcing competitors to choose between a chance at $10,000 (ADCC) and a chance at $1,000,000 (CJI). There is one choice.

CJI’s Brackets And Rule Experiments

ADCC’s brackets have been decimated. 15 of the 16 competitors in CJI’s -80 KG division left ADCC for CJI. A lot less left ADCC for CJI’s +80 KG division but they claimed the previous two time silver medalist among others.

CJI’s brackets are alarmingly shocking. Generally, tournaments seed the competitors so the favored competitors face off against the least favored competitors. The way this tournament was drawn, some of the craziest match-ups between favored competitors happen earlier in the division. Two former ADCC winners in the first round of the -80KG division.

Here are the full brackets below. Apologies for the bad quality. The brackets were released live on Youtube and nowhere else I can find.

Going through each match-up is beyond the scope of this article. I will say, the athletes I favor to win the -80KG division are ADCC’s previous 77 KG winner, Kade Ruotolo; his brother, Absolute Division Bronze Medalist, Tye; 2019’s 88 KG division winner, Mattheus Diniz; and the 2023 Absolute No GI World Champion, Roberto Jimenez.

The +80KG division seems a little more clear-cut.

I see the two-time ADCC Silver Medalist Nick Rodriguez meeting current IBJJF World Champion Victor Hugo in the finals. Hugo has beaten Rodriguez in all three of their match-ups. This time the rules might push a different outcome.

CJI has a completely unique ruleset. Each match will have 3 rounds of 5 minutes with 1 minute of rest in-between rounds. The finals will have 5 5-minute rounds with 5 minutes of overtime if points are drawn after round 5. They will contest multiple rounds until one athlete is up on points.

All matches will be contested on a new field of play called the “The Alley” due to it’s 30’ x 40’ slanted rectangular walls. The Alley and CJI’s scoring are designed to force action.

Generally grappling is scored with points that accrue for competitors that successfully complete moves. CJI will use boxing and MMA’s 10-Point Must System, where the winner of a round gets 10 points and the loser gets 9 or less. According to Smoothcomp, Judges will be awarding points for the following:

1. INITIATING ACTION - the highest reward is for initiating action. Attempting takedowns, guard pass, sweeps, submissions, etc. Judges will give the highest reward to the competitor who is aggressive, the one starting the action and attacking that leads to scrambles.

2. CLOSE SUBMISSIONS & DYNAMIC ACTION - Dynamic Action is takedowns, sweeps, passes, etc. After initiating action, progressing through control and position to sub attempts weighs heavy on judges.

3. POSITIONAL CONTROL/DOMINANT CONTROL – This is the last factor. If all else is equal, the competitor who controlled the match positionally or dictated the pace of the match will be rewarded.

Refs will take points away for passivity, stalling, and fleeing after warning athletes for those infractions. Stalling can be called from any position if the referee says there is no attempt to progress, escape a pinned position, or stay active. Athletes won’t be penalized outright for pulling guard, but if an athlete's back is touching the ground for more than 3 seconds without any connection to the opponent they can be warned for stalling.

The main difference between CJI, ADCC, and almost every other grappling event is the rest periods. ADCC regulation matches are 10 minutes with 1 potential 5 minute overtime. Finals matches are contested over 20 minutes with a maximum of 2 10 minute overtime periods.

I’m interested to see how athletes adapt to the new pacing and the strategies that emerge from this ruleset. You have to wonder what other events will now try to adopt this rule system and The Alley for competitions. I’m not exactly sure if continued fracturing of the sport of grappling is a good thing. I’m happy to see disruption in my sport, but I am concerned about the collateral damage that could be caused by this weekend.

Competition’s Consequences

Earlier this year we discussed the rise of Craig Jones. He seamlessly glided from athlete to entrepreneur before landing on power broker.

At a bare minimum, how could you have anything but respect for him?

Seeing athletes from low-paying sports grow into business successes is inspiring. A random kid from Australia is arguably the hottest commodity in the sport and he never won a major title!

So far, Jones’s disruption has only been a net positive for grappling competitors. Not only is there now another high paying tournament, but, ADCC organizer Mo Jassim confirmed all ADCC athletes will be compensated just for showing up. I’m not sure how much this weekend will continue to benefit other grappling promotions though.

Over this past year Jones has had a very public spat with media company FloGrappling. Jones wants athletes to get paid more. He takes issue with Flo generating revenue from him and his colleagues' labor without them working to spread the split more. I think it’s reasonable to say that athletes are, at the very least, entitled to the content that you use them to create.

I don’t think that is necessarily grounds for Jones going scorched earth.

Jones has joked around with the idea of fans forgoing their FloGrappling subscriptions. He says CJI is going to supersede ADCC so people no longer need to subscribe to FloGrappling. He’s even teased that this could push them out of business.

I’m all for competition and innovation, and I certainly wouldn’t mind paying less for Flo, but I don’t really want a world without a centralized library of essentially every important grappling match. It certainly beats the shit out of scouring the internet for grainy videos of partial matches.

So, just like CJI has forced ADCC to innovate, I hope this weekend pushes Flo to improve as well. I don’t really want a world without Flo, their promotion WNO, and the rest of the content they create. You shouldn’t either. Frankly, if the sport is going to continue to grow, we need a company like Flo providing regular dedicated grappling coverage.

I don’t necessarily think grappling will ever be “mainstream”, whatever that means, but the sport is ancient. Primal and visceral. People have been watching grappling since the Greek Olympics and participating in variations of wrestling for seemingly all of mankind’s history. Mark Zuckerberg won’t stop posting on social media about doing BJJ and Craig Jones can get his rich friend to throw $3 million at a random new tournament he’s starting. The money and interest is there, we, as a sport, need to do a better job onboarding new fans and participants so more people can safely enjoy the activity.

I think there is room for CJI and ADCC to coexist. After all, ADCC has more divisions than CJI. There’s no reason that ADCC can’t continue on every 2 years with CJI putting on a super event every year.

Eccentric wealthy people have been trying to pour money into mixed martial arts and grappling for decades. ADCC was literally created because MMA was too violent and its culture pushed the money away. I sincerely hope that this current feud between ADCC and CJI elevates grappling so more people want to put more money into sponsoring, watching, and participating in grappling. Again, the money is there.

I’m just as interested in the cultural fallout from this weekend as I am the matches. I’ll be glued to a screen for the better part of this weekend. We’ll be here to breakdown what the settling dust will mean for the future of ground fighting next week.

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