I usually only cover larger events, but I've enjoyed the Emerald City events and they seem to have big name competitors. In my opinion that seems worth covering and including in the stats. EBI is one of the most popular events in grappling history and helped launch the careers of Gary Tonon, Craig Jones, Gordon Ryan, etc. Its has been gone for years, but now with its return lets see if it can create new stars. Both events use EBI rules which have somewhat fallen out of favor with the grappling community because of stalling, but perhaps they have found a way to fix it.
New Rules
At the qualifying tournament for EC they implemented a new rule. This mollywop rule basically bypasses overtime and gives the win to one competitor and they completely dominate the other. This seems to decrease the stalling and especially the defensiveness that occurs under EBI rules. In my opinion any event that uses EBI rules, should include this.
For the EBI tournament they made 2 changes. Firstly they added stalling penalties that took away from your riding time in OT, which gave people an incentive not to stall during regulation. Secondly they added at "get down" rule, which they took from combat juijitsu. This rule basically says that if there is no takedown or guard pull after 30 sec there will be a coin flip. The winner chooses to be on top or on bottom and then they restart on the ground. At first I didn't like this rule, but it did actually improve the matches by making stalling on the feet pointless. It wasn't used often because as things got close to the 30 sec mark most people pulled guard.
Both of these rules seemed to have a positive impact on the matches and I didn't see much stalling, except for one match. After the competitor lost ride time he became more agressive and was submitted, so IMO the rule did its job
Winners
The winner of the Emerald City Invitational was Kieran Kichuk. He was an underdog comming into this and nobody had him winning the whole thing, but he managed to pull it off. Unfortunately he wasn't able to hit any subs in regulation, but he hit a beautiful triangle armbar in overtime against Gianni Grippo. His leg lock game and triangle looked very impressive.
You can watch Kieran win the qualifier here
The winner of EBI 19 was Alan Sanchez. He was also one of the lowest seeded competitors, but he has shown a lot of improvement since the last time I saw him. His back takes and guard looked to be improved as well as his leg lock game. His "dead orchard" submission on John Combs was a thing of beauty and not something you often see hit on high level competitors.
Watch Alan win the EBI qualifier
Both of them have made names for themselves in these tournaments and I'd like to see them on more shows. They were both exciting and active. Its always good to see some new blood in there shake things up.
How People Won
For these events I decided not to count overtime submissions. Some people will say a sub is a sub, but since the person didn't earn the position for the purposes of the stats I'll record all OT wins as decisions. The number of RNCs is already high in the cumulative stats for the year and I feel by counting OT sub wins it will just artificially inflate those numbers. I also only counted the main card matches and didn't include the undercard fights. Enough of the disclaimers, lets get into the submissions.
Emerald City Invitational 4
EBI 19
Trends
There were a lot of interesting new trend. One trend I was happy with was leg lock defense. I know it looks like a lot of people were finished with leg locks and that is certainly true, but if you watch the matches you'll see intelligent defenses and counters. Many of the leg locks came from counter attacks or amazing setups. When people we just dropping back for a leg their opponents were defending the correct way and escaping. At the ADCC trials that wasn't always happening, but here it seemed like everyone put time into learning how to at least defend leglocks.
Building on that many people took it a step farther and were doing counters to leg lock attacks. Many times when people would enter outside ashi and attempt an outside heel hook their opponent would reverse it on them and go for an inside heel hook. The most exciting counter however is the berimbolo/crabride style counters people were using. Pablo Lavaselli is particularly impressive when it came to this counter and I'm sure he made a lot of leg lockers afraid to attack.
On the attack side of things the false reap made quite a few appearances and seems to be the flavor of the month entry into heel hooks. I think this will only increase in the future due to the easy transition into it from the reverse de la riva. I don't know if this will become something that will stick around for a while or be forgotten in a few years, but I'm sure it will be used more and more this year at least.
Speaking of attacking the lower body, leg locker vs leg locker matches are becoming much less rare. There are many more leg lock specialists now and others who, although they don't specialize in them, are very good at them. You can't win these tournaments with only leg locks anymore. The new generation knows all about leg locks, so they won't be making the kinds of foolish mistakes that happened in previous EBIs.
Lastly more and more people are wrestling. Oliver Taza was much more aggressive with his stand up than I'd seem previously and it seemed like more people were willing to engage in stand up battles than before.
Standouts
Of course the winners Alan Sanchez and Kieran Kichuk looked very good. Both were near the bottom when it came to who was going to win, but they managed to get it done and get the win. They didn't have big names, but they showed they could hang with some of the best in the world. I hope they are invited to more pro grappling events, so we can see more of their games.
Pablo Lavaselli also really impressed me. I'd heard his name before, but I hadn't really paid attention to him. His grappling was really beautiful and dynamic. I thought he was only a gi player, but his no-gi game is very good and its a shame we don't see him more on the pro circuit.
There were a few other people who were doing interesting things too such as Nick Ronan and Frank Rosenthal that are worth checking out.
Overall
I liked both of these events and although EC had few subs it was fun to watch. Over the years it seems like EBI has started to get a bad rap despite that fact that most of the EBI events have been very good. I'm happy they seem to have at least tried to address the problems. The rule changes seemed to help and there wasn't the same type of stalling that you usually see these days in EBI tournaments. Hopefully this will continue and instead of having 2 different sets of rules, the mollywop rule, the stalling rule and the get down rule are all used in future tournaments. Not every match was great, but there was nothing that was so terrible I feel I need to complain about it. Everyone looked like they were trying to finish even if they couldn't always achieve their goal. Hopefully more shows are coming soon and we can see some of these people back on the mats again.
Year to Date Stats
Here are all the submissions this year so far. We are about 25% of the way through the year and here are how things are shaping up so far.
Comments
Post a Comment