Subversiv is one of the world’s most popular team grappling tournaments and the promotion has just announced it’s return with an upcoming event in San Diego, California on July 22nd, 2023. Not much has been confirmed about the event just yet and there’s no news about the actual lineups for each of the teams, but the promotion has confirmed that the matches will be contested under Combat Jiu-Jitsu rules. This means that open-handed strikes to grounded opponents will be allowed, and this will drastically change the potential outcome of any matches.
Their upcoming San Diego event isn’t the first time that Subversiv have used Combat Jiu-Jitsu rules though, as Subversiv 8 was a Jiu-Jitsu v MMA event that used the same ruleset. It was a resounding success in fairness, owed in no small part to the fact that the team format Subversiv uses always manages to produce plenty of exciting moments anyway. Adding Combat Jiu-Jitsu rules into the mix just gave the event a totally different feeling to their previous ones and it attracted a number of veteran MMA fighters who otherwise may not have wanted to compete.
The reigning champions from Subversiv 8 were ‘Team Sugar’, which consisted of Kyle Boehm, Ryan Aitken, and Juliana Fontoura. It’ll be interesting to see if they choose to return in order to defend their title, or if any of the individual members choose to form new teams with other elite competitors. The tournament tends to attract a lot of top competitors and they use 3-person teams with one woman and two men, only competing within their weightclass against members of opposing teams to ensure that there are no ridiculous weight mismatches.
The news that Subversiv was returning with a new event in San Diego, California on July 22nd, 2023 was announced in a post to the promotion’s official Instagram account: