The 2021 No-gi worlds finished a few days ago, so I thought I'd go over some things I saw and talk about some trends.
New faces
With the addition of heelhooks, some people entered that previously hadn't participated in No-gi worlds. People like PJ Barch and Oliver Taza decided to compete which is great. It nice to see less of a divide between the IBJJF and professional grappling.
On top of new people coming from the pro scene I'd say the adult division was mostly filled with new comers who have received their black belts in the last few years or so. These new athletes seem to have adapted to the new rules and are hungry to prove themselves. I believe the only champion that was able to successfully defend their title was Roberto "Cyborg" Abreu. I believe that as others speculated, the new rules turned things on their head and some of the athletes were able to capitalize. It seems many were motivated by WNO and were requesting spots on up coming shows after their performances. I'm not mad at that. If you are going out and submitting people at No-gi worlds that should earn you a chance to earn some money at WNO.
Wrestling
Just like at the WNO championship, wrestling up from the bottom proved to be an effective strategy. This does give some credence to Keenan's statement years ago "No-gi is imploding", but I don't think it's a bad thing. It may not looks as beautiful as a berimbolo, but it certainly is effective.
It wasn't only from the bottom wrestling proved effective. From the standing position lots of people were going after takedowns. It seemed like many people have been working hard on their takedowns and used those skills to secure victory.
My guess is that in the future those who neglect their wrestling will start to fall further and further behind. Even in the lighter weight classes I saw more people wrestling.
How people won
Let's looks at how people were winning. This is a breakdown of the men's adult matches(it was hard find info for the women). Unfortunately a few matches I couldn't find results for so it isn't 100% accurate, but it should be close enough to draw some conclusions.
The most common way to win was by points, which is fine. Sometimes points victories are exciting and other times they're boring, but at least something happened. Unfortunately the next most common win was decision, advantage, penalty or close out. It was unfortunate to see so many of these, but it seems like this is better than before. Unfortunately I don't have older stats to compare it to.
Chokes were the most common submission with 28 wins. Legs were next with 17 leglocks. This seems to be quite an increase and shows how much the rule change influenced the matches. In third were armlocks. I don't know what happened and why there were only 3. My guess is there were fewer people passing to side control and the mount and most were going straight to the back. This has been the trend for the last decade or so, but that seems to be slowly changing from what I've seen. However in this event no so much though.
Leg locks
Reports of the death of leglocks have been greatly exaggerated. Once it was announced that heelhooks were going to be allowed in the IBJJF, 2 things were theorized. Either the leg lockers would beat everyone or the old guard would simply learn leglock defense and continue to win. Neither happened at the 2021 no-gi worlds. The leglockers weren't as dominant as people speculated, but people's defenses weren't extremely sharp either. It seems people worked more on their offense than their defense. Many people why aren't known for their leglocks seemed to have picked up a few new tricks during quarantine.
On top of that I was surprised by the variety of leglocks. It wasn't just inside heelhooks, we saw anklelocks, toeholds, kneebars and even a calf slicer.
What people were right about was the death of the 50/50 see-saw. People were more reluctant to enter the position and when they did they often got finished. Before this was a great way to stall the match and steal the win, but not anymore.
Overall
I haven't watched every match yet, but I think overall this was a good event. This is the first world no-gi championship with the new rules and I think it changed things for the better. Some people thought it would descend into leg spaghetti and boring matches, but I don't feel like that happened. When the leg locks worked they were great and when they didn't people moved on from them fairly quickly. I felt the leg locks actually helped increase the pace of the matches and stopped things from turning into stall-fests. The only thing that would have improved it is more big names. Many people I would have loved seeing didn't show up. Perhaps in a few years no-gi worlds will increase in popularity and it will be a tournament that everyone has to do. Its not quite there yet right now. Last but not least here is a fun video of AJ Agazarm getting thrown around by Max Gimenis
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