What We Learned from Fightpass Invitational 5

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 FPI 5 just finished and I have to say this was a great event. It had a lot of big names despite that fact Gordon Ryan dropped out. I think this should have been promoted more, but over on reddit it seemed to get a lot of attention. For this event they changed up the rules, which I imagine had to do with the lackluster previous events that used EBI rules. If you haven't read my play-by-play, check it out here. However the rules were a bit hard to understand. Here is a video explaining a bit of it.

Bmac explains the rules for FPI 5



Results


 Achillies Rocha def  Andy Varela via points

Hanna Goldy def  Amanda Maza via armbar

Aaron Wilson def  Christian Guzman via armbar

Vagner Rocha def  Victor Silverio via RNC

 Elisabeth Clay def  Luiza Monterio via inside heelhook

 Jonnatas Gracie def  Nicky Ryan via points

 Victor Hugo def  Dan Manasiou via americana

 Mason Folwer def  Haisim Rida via kimura

 Nicky Rod def  Yuri Simoes via points

 Nicholas Meregali def  Felipe Pena via RNC


Some of the earlier matches can be seen here.



How People Won


This is an unheard of number of submissions. As you can see there is a 70% submission rate here. I'd need to check all my old data, but I believe this might be the highest submission rate I've ever recorded. Fightpass wanted submissions and they got them. 40% of them were arm submissions followed by chokes at 20% and finally leglocks at 10%. Only 3 matches out of 10 were won on points. I'm not sure if it is even possible to get these kinds of results consistently, but I'm glad we got them for atleast 1 event. Although I'd like to see Fightpass tweak the rules a bit, they definitely did something right here. 

Looking at my stats, only the Polaris Women's GP, EBI 20(Kade Ruotolo OneFC) and WNO 14(perhaps this should be thrown out since 2 matches were sub only), had a higher submission rate.

Stats




The RNC came out on top as always, but were a variety of other submissions as well. We saw an americana which we don't see often. Some people call this a terrible move that doesn't work at the highest level, but we saw it being used to defeat an ADCC North American trials champion here. At first I thought Hanna Goldy's submission was an armbar, but watching it again it appears to be more of a dead orchard, so I put it in that category. 

I've decided to start doing more stats and try to assign each event an excitement or action rating(starting next year). In order to do that I need some stats and I thought I'd share some of them here. 

This event had 32 sub attempts, 7 subs. 



The 3/4 mount pass was the most successful here, but this is mainly due to Nicky Rod repeatedly passing Yuri in this manner and Yuri re-guarding. The bodylock was also working well for people along with the kneeslice. Halfguard passes and the Torreando were quite popular, but nobody was able to pass with them. 

 49 pass attempts; 15 passes




The single leg wrestle up and X-guard sweep were number one here. These days the X-guard sweep isn't super popular, but it proved its worth here. There were also SLX sweeps, tripod a halfguard and 50/50 sweep. We also saw a rare scissor sweep which Victor Hugo used to win his match. 

23 sweep attempts; 9 sweeps


 


The single leg was the most attempted and the most successful takedown. The single leg has proven to be a reliable bread and butter takedown in submission grappling and this event was just another example. We did see quite the variety of other takedowns as well though. Something to note is that the Tawara Gaeshi, or chest wrap in wrestling, has been seen more and more over the past few months and seems to be turning into a reliable defense against double legs. 

51 attempts; 19 takedowns






It seems every position achieved got at least 1 submission. The mount and back tied for first followed by 50/50 and sidecontrol. People were using any and all positions they could to get something going and I believe this had to do with the extremely liberal use of stalling calls and penalties.
 


The Rules


The biggest thing people were talking about during and after this event were the rules/ref. On the one hand myself and others have called for more action during matches and harsher stalling calls. However this might have been a bit too much. During these matches there were times when atheletes were penalized for seemingly little reason and overall it was inconsistent. There were very few times I felt penalties should have been given and they weren't, but there were numerous times where I felt that gave out penalties too fast. 

The other problem was the fact that there were no points in regulation, but points in OT. This combined with the penalties meant that most of the matches ended with negative points, which always looks bad. On top of that people could get negative points during the match, but couldn't earn positive points until OT. This creates a huge problem, especially in matches such as Nicky Rod vs Yuri. Nicky was clearly winning the match, but went into OT with -1pt because he pulled guard, despite that fact that he had takedowns, guard passes, the mount, etc. It is important to penalize inactivity, but it is just as important to reward grappling technique. 

In order to fix these problems, I'd recommend adding points to the regulation period and if you want a sub only section make it short. Perhaps 1-3 min in a 10 min match would be enough to let people pull guard, go for an imanari roll or just feel out their opponent without worrying about losing points. After people should be able to score and inactivity penalties should be available. This time I feel like everything worked out, but the way the rules are set up there is huge potential for robberies.  

Another thing that I believe would help would be to replace penalties with a shot clock. A 20-30 second clock that penalizes someone that doesn't attempt a scoring technique is preferable to a penalty. It gives the athlete a chance not to lose a point and it makes it harder for referees to interfere with the match. Even if the ref starts the clock on someone he shouldn't have, it can be argued that you should be trying a scoring technique every 30 sec anyway. It also stops situations where the ref just keeps penalizing someone who has been winning most of the match, in the last few seconds. I believe this would be more fair and less susceptible to bad refereeing. Admittedly this would require some thought into who would control the clock, how it would be displayed on screen and to the athletes, what constitutes an attempt and what types of actions should and shouldn't start the clock. 

Overall I hope Fightpass continues in this same general direction, but they tweak somethings for the sake of fairness and sportsmanship. Very few events have the guts to try a new ruleset, so I commend them for experimenting to find a more exciting ruleset. 

Measuring Action



When I first started I just gave stats for submissions, which I think was useful. However people wanted more, so last year I expanded it to failures and successes, so you can see the success rates of techniques. Next year I'm going to try to come up with an action rating for events that will hopefully be able to give ratings on how exciting an event is. I hope this will be able to show which rulesets and events produce the most excitement in a more objective manor. I'll leave some of what I'm working on for this event down below. 

The matches here were 15 min, however to make things more fair, matches that ended in submission are counted as only half of the total match time(7.5 min). If we add everything together this way we get a total base time for this event of 97.5 min. If we divide that into 5min chunks of action we get 19.5 slices of time. Let's see the averages of what happened in those intervals.


1.64 submission attempts per 5 min

0.35 submissions per 5 min

2.51 pass attempts per 5 min

0.76 passes per 5 min

1.17 sweep attempts per 5 min

0.46 sweeps per 5 min

2.61 takedown attempts per 5 min

0.97 takedowns per 5 min


Total Action 

7.93 actions per 5 min

Total Technique(completed moves)

 2.54 techniques per 5 min


Hopefully this gives you a clearer view of the event and hopefully in the future I will have yearly averages of all these so you can see how each event compares to others. 





Overall


This was a fun event to watch. It had names and it had subs. You can't ask for much more in an event. The rule changes were a bit weird, but I think they are on to something. The overall amount of action can't really be denied, but in the future these rules may yield some bad results. Here though we saw lots of takedowns, passes, sweeps and submissions. I was worried about a few matches and they exceeded my expectations by quite a bit. I expected Yuri and Nicky Rod to be a bit boring, but it was actually very good. I also expected Vagner vs Victor to be a snoozefest, but it was actually action packed and even ended in a submission. 

As said above the refing was distracting and IMO it did alter the matches, but in this case I think it was for the better. I'm hoping Fightpass continues to experiment with the rules until the find a better ruleset, but I think their experiment yielded a great event. 

As I said previously, I'll update the year-to-date stats later this week. 

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