SOGI Pro: Cinco De Mayo is scheduled to take place on May 6th, 2023 and the main event will see Keith Krikorian challenging for the promotion’s welterweight title against the reigning champion Kenta Iwamoto. Krikorian is coming off an impressive win at the last SOGI Pro event, but he’ll be giving up a pretty significant amount of weight against Iwamoto when he tries to take the belt from him. Both of these men are ADCC veterans and they actually competed alongside one another at ADCC 2022, although they were in different weightclasses at the time.
Both men actually went out in the opening round of their respective divisions in the end. Krikorian getting submitted by the eventual bronze medallist of 66kg and Iwamoto losing a close match against the returning champion at 77kg, JT Torres. Regardless, both of these competitors have established themselves as being among the top grapplers in their respective weightclasses and they earned an invite to ADCC 2022 the hard way. Krikorian won the North American West Coast trials, while Iwamoto won the only edition of the Asia and Oceania trials that was held for the event.
It’s a very interesting matchup as well, because their respective styles will present difficult challenges for each other. Keith Krikorian is a fantastic leglocker with the ability to attack the back and submit anyone once he gets there, while Kenta Iwamoto is one of the best wrestlers at his weightclass with a fantastic top-game. Both of them are still young and pretty early on in their careers at the top of the sport, so naturally they’ll be developing new elements to their games at a fast pace. Iwamoto has been training alongside the great minds at B-Team Jiu-Jitsu for quite a while now and Krikorian has no shortage of elite grapplers to train alongside as a 10th Planet black belt, so it’ll be fun to see if either man can spring a surprise on the other.
The news that Keith Krikorian will be challenging Kenta Iwamoto for the welterweight title at SOGI Pro: Cinco De Mayo was announced in a post to the promotion’s official Instagram account:
