This article is part of our Craig Jones Invitational 2024 coverage. To get live results, play by play, and commentary, we’ll have a live updates article running all weekend.
Craig Jones has just started to announce a brand new BJJ tournament with an incredible million dollar grand prize for the champions, out of a total of 3 million dollars in prize money available. There’s no official announcement for any of the brands involved or any confirmation of what this new tournament will be called, but Jones shared a steady flow of information through the stories on his official Instagram account. If this comes to fruition then this would undoubtedly be the biggest tournament in the history of the sport, as no promotion has ever been able to put together such an incredible prize before.
Although many fans might be skeptical about the announcement, it’s worth remembering that Jones has a long history of being brutally honest about the inner workings of the professional grappling world. Although this has generally been mostly in jest throughout his career, recent years have seen him taking aim at the issues with competitor pay in the sport. As an example, he’s heavily criticized FloGrappling’s business practices recently and has even spoken out about ADCC too. Now it seems like Jones has put his money where his mouth is, and he is either getting involved with the promotional side of the sport or is in close contact with someone who is:
Given the fact that Craig Jones has joked about a lot of things over the years, fans could have been forgiven for thinking that his BJJ tournament with a million dollar prize for the winners wasn’t real. It seems as though Jones was well aware of that himself though, as he quickly followed that announcement up with a screenshot of the actual funding for the tournament. According to the screenshot he provided, the total funding currently sits at just slightly under 3 million dollars:
That level of prize money is something that would have been considered a pipe-dream by every BJJ competitor on the planet until now. With their being just 32 spaces available for the two divisions of Jones’ new tournament, the next task would be to determine who would be given the opportunity to compete. He even shared the current list of proposed competitors and it included all of the biggest names in the sport like Nicholas Meregali, Gordon Ryan, and of course himself:
He also alluded back to one of the criticisms that he levied at ADCC in the past, as the promotion only offers the winners of each weight class a grand prize of $10,000. With a million dollars leftover after they pay out both million dollar prizes to the winners, Craig Jones has even considered paying the competitors the same amount of money they would get to win an ADCC title just to show up to his new BJJ tournament:
It can be difficult to take Jones seriously at times, and he often leans into that himself by deliberately taking things to an absurd level. This has been a genuine crusade of his for quite some time though and he’s risked quite a lot himself just by speaking out about competitor pay in the public sphere. If any BJJ competitors do comment on their pay then they generally shy away from directly referencing specific events, and it’s understandable given that they still need those opportunities to compete. If this million dollar BJJ tournament comes to fruition then Craig Jones will have had a bigger impact on the sport than the majority of competitors and promoters ever have before.
