This tournament was an attempt by Rickson Gracie to change the BJJ rule set to make BJJ more palatable for the public.
Some highlights:
- 3 minute rounds.
- Pulling guard gives you -1 point, pass, mount, back mount etc. gives 1 point, sub attempt 3 points.
- Heel hooks allowed.
- Each weight class had 4 competitors and 3 matches.
- Competitors included Marcelo Garcia, Xande Ribeiro, Leonardo Viera, Jacare and Rafael Lovato Jr.
It would be really cool to see something like this format take off again after the huge success of CJI.
Not really a fan of a “sub attempt” being worth three times that of anything else. Will make for sloppy sub attempts if this ruleset were to be used for general competitions (rather than an “exhibition” tournament).
Definitely think pulling guard should be penalised though (unless it is a pull straight into a sweep/sub).
Happy to see attempts at alternate scoring in general though.
Also, as a Judoka it’s nice to see Komuro getting involved and recognised!
Yeah the sub attempt scoring could be easily abused by pulling closed guard and doing things like collar chokes, sloppy arm bar attempts, triangles etc. I suppose here the concept was so new that no blatant abuse was done yet.
The idea of promoting subs more is of course in the right direction, so it would be cool to see further rulesets towards this direction. Maybe less points, only award points for the first 3 attempts, require that the sub attempt lasts at least 10 seconds or something like that. Definitely not easy to get right.