What We Learned From the 1st Asian & Oceania ADCC trials

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The first Asian/Oceania trials have just finished and we have 5 more people headed to ADCC 2024. These trails were a bit less hyped than some others, but we still got to see a few big names in them. Let's look and see who won.


  Results



Men's



-66kg Ethan Thomas (2nd Minoru Takeuchi, 3rd David Stoilescu)


-77kg Kenta Iwamoto(2nd Rys Allen, 3rd Tomoshige Sera)


-88kg Izaak Mitchell(2nd Roberto Dib-Farias, 3rd Kaya Rudolph )


-99kg Declan Moody (2nd Anton Minenko, 3rd Ben Hodgkinson)


+99kg  Josh Saunders ( 2nd Ricky Luzny, 3rd Tito Carle)



Women's




-55kg Adele Fornario(2nd Kanae Yamada, 3rd Joyce Ip ) 


-65kg Wang Jue(2nd Shakira Pacana, 3rd  Thi Tuyet Trang Nguyen)


+65kg Hillary Loh(2nd Nadine Dixon, 3rd Jyssica Lian)



Izaak Mitchell cleaned house as expected. He beat a game Roberto Farias in the finals to get his spot in ADCC. Adele Fornario looks improved as well compared to her last run. Unfortunately this won't get herr a spot in ADCC, but the way she looked I'm guessing she will win her division during the 2nd trials. Kenta Iwamoto won his division again in impressive fashion. I believe this is his 3rd time winning, so can someone get this man a black belt. Josh Saunders was the favorite and won again. He lived up to expectations and beat everyone handily. Declan Moody made good use of his time at B-Team and won the -99kg division and will be going to ADCC for the first time as well. Also Rys Allen looked very good and hopefully we see more of him in the future. You know I'm a sucker for Judo.


 


How People Won



These stats are only for the semi-finals and finals, so this might not be representative of the whole event. Unfortunately this event didn't have brackets on Flo grappling, which made tracking down the individual matches much more difficult. Due to this I only did stats for a small portion of the actual bouts.

As you can see most matches were won on points. This might seem a bit bad, but honestly semi-finals and finals matches tend to be more tactical and don't usually garner as many submissions as the earlier rounds due. Here we have 4 neck submissions and 1 arm submission. There were no leg submissions and in fact very few were even attempted. This is a change from what we usually see, but perhaps these competitors wanted to try a different strategy. 


Stats



As I said before these are only the stats from the semi-finals, finals and 3rd place matches. Here the RNC came out on top with 4 submissions. The only other submission was the armbar. The inside heelhooks was tried a few times, but it wasn't able to be finished. 

 



The single leg was the big winner here with 5 completions. The double leg, mat return, ouchi gari, kneetap, snap down and deashi barai tied for next with one each. The throw-by was also in there, but it was more of a stumble. It is always nice seeing a wide variety of takedowns and I think this shows people are spending more time trying to improve their standup skills. 


The lumberjack sweep was the only thing that scored at this event. There were a few other sweeps attempted, but honestly it seems like there wasn't much going on from the bottom position. 



Passes from half guard were the most successful followed by the bodylock, float, and 3/4 mount passes. It seemed that flattening people out from half guard was the key to people's success here, however even that worked less that half the time. It seems for these trials, pressure passing was one of the key's to victory.  


The back was the most successful position in terms of finishes, but also scoring. The mount has become more popular in the last 1-2 years, but it seems like most people can't turn the position into a finish.



Overall

The event itself was fairly good, but it lacked some names. It was great seeing people like Izaak Mitchell and Kenta Iwamoto, but many of the divisions lacked big name pro grapplers, which I think too away some of the prestige of winning. However the overall level in this region is rising and getting better every single trails. Despite the lack of names the matches were good. We got to see wrestling, leglocks, chokes, armlock, escapes, etc. The athletes put their all into the matches and perhaps some of the unknown grapplers will be "names" during the next cycle. Now that most of the favorites have won I wonder who will enter during the next Asia trials. I guess we will find out in a few months. 

Year to Date

There have been a few changes since the last event, but I imagine the final totals for this year will be fairly close to what we have now. Be sure to watch more my year end breakdown later this year.



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