What We Learned from EBI 10th Anniversary

It is hard to believe but EBI has been around 10 years now, but here we are with the anniversary show. This time it is an absolute with some names in it. It looked like it was mostly a New Wave vs 10th Planet event, which calls back to the old DDS 10P rivalry. This was likely due to the event being in Austin, but surprising none the less. Lets take a look at the bracket and the results.

Bodoni beat Baker, Moody beat George, Leon beat La Montagne, Manasoiu beat Choldrey, Aitken beat Nez, Pana beat Sabino, Nikolov beat Lucas, and Allam beat Leduc in the first round. In the 2nd round, Bodoni was able to defeat Moody, Manasoiu defeated Leon, Aitken was about to overcome Pana and Nikolov beat Allam. In the semi finals Bodoni had to go up against teammate Big Dan and lost to him by inside heelhook. Aitken beat Nikolov by ankle lock. Going into the final both men looked good, but Big Dan had to be the favorite because of his size. However he wasn't able to threaten Aitken with subs in regulation and it went into EBI over time. In OT Aitken was able to catch him in a RNC and win the whole thing. Ryan Aitken is the champion.

There were also some super fights, so I'll go over them as well. 

Musab Raza def. Sean Magnus via EBI OT

Sean McCleary def. Robert Randall via RNC

Lauren Sears def. Ally Wolski via kneebar

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How People Won

Before I start it should be noted that the super fights weren't included here. It is only the main tournament matches. We got a 50% sub rate at this event and you can't really complain about that. 35% were leglocks and about 7% were chokes and armlocks. All of the orange was EBI overtime wins. 

They did change one thing about this EBI tournament is that the times were different each round. The opening rounds were 6 min and then 8 min and finally 10min. This actually did seem to help and helped keep the pace up. Perhaps for the lighter weights it wouldn't matter, but for the larger men, those shorter times helped keep people moving. 

Stats

Surprisingly the ankle lock came out on top here. Over the last couple of years we have seen the ankle lock gradually become more and more popular and here it was the #1 sub. We also got 2 inside heelhooks as well. 

The double leg was #1 here followed by the single leg. Overall thought there weren't many takedowns due to the fact that you could easily just sit to guard and there were some matches with large size mismatches. 

The sub sweep was at the top here. For those that aren't familiar, a sub sweep is a sweep that happens because someone attempted a submission. Here it was mostly leg lock attempts. The second most popular sweep was the bodylock wrestle up. 

The bodylock pass was the #1 pass here at EBI. That was followed by the kneeslice pass and the smash pass. These types of pressure passes seemed to work especially well in the absolute division. 

The back, 50/50 and the saddle all tied with 1 submission. Side control and the mount seem to be having some problems this year and people can't convert those positions into submissions. We'll see if this changes later on, but as of right now, those and knee on belly(which I'm not sure if I've ever recorded a sub for), are struggling. 

We got a 5.9 action score and a 2.69 technique score. These aren't bad numbers and shows that this was a decent event action-wise. I expected this to be lower since there were heavier fighters, but this isn't bad at all. 

I'll be changing some things about this in the future to help create a more accurate measure of activity during the events. However I want to wait until the end of the year to do this and I'll be experimenting a bit behind the scenes. 

Overall

 

This was a great event that had a surprising outcome. Ryan Atkin is certainly very good, but I don't think many expected him to win, especially with the weight discrepancy between him and others. There was a good amount of action and submissions, so I can't complain. The bigger guys are always a bit slow when it comes to action, but things weren't too bad here. It was also nice to see some new blood. Aitken has really been making a name for himself on the EBI/CJJ circuit and this might have earned him a spot in ADCC. This was a great addition to the EBI catalog and definitely worth checking out.

Year to Date