A leg-locker from Adelaide became one of the most recognizable grapplers on earth without ever winning ADCC gold. Then, in 2024, he did something no world title could match: he pointed a $3 million tournament directly at the sport's economics and forced everyone else to answer for what they pay their athletes.
On 24 September 2017, in Espoo, Finland, a grappler almost nobody in the arena could place walked onto the ADCC absolute mat across from Chael Sonnen. Sonnen was a former UFC and WEC middleweight title challenger, a wrestler with a decade of elite fights behind him, and — for the North American audience watching — the far bigger name. The other man was a 26-year-old from Adelaide who had qualified through the trials and, two years earlier, had lost his ADCC debut in the first round.
The match lasted one minute and fifty-two seconds. Craig Jones dropped underneath Sonnen, entangled a leg, and finished with a heel hook before the wrestler could understand what position he was in.
It was the second time that weekend Jones had done something the sport did not expect. In the under-88 kg division he had already submitted Leandro Lo — a multiple-time IBJJF world champion and one of the best passers of his generation — with a rear-naked choke, then caught Murilo Santana with a flying triangle. He would not medal in 2017; he ran into Keenan Cornelius, Xande Ribeiro, and eventually Gordon Ryan and lost the matches that mattered for the podium. But the tournament had already done its work. Jones left Finland as the most talked-about new grappler in no-gi, a leg-lock specialist from a country with no ADCC pedigree, coached by another Australian almost no one outside the sport had heard of.
Seven years later, Jones would walk into the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas — not as a competitor chasing a medal, but as the man who had built a rival tournament, put a million dollars on each winner, and scheduled it directly on top of ADCC. This is the story of how a grappler who never won the sport's biggest title became one of the most consequential figures in it anyway.
Craig Jones spent a decade proving he could submit anyone in the world, then spent one weekend proving that the people who submit anyone in the world were being paid almost nothing — and that was the more disruptive achievement.
Craig Benjamin Jones was born on 17 July 1991 in Adelaide, South Australia. He came to jiu-jitsu the way most Australians of his generation did — late, and far from the sport's centers of gravity. He began training around 2006, in Adelaide, at a small academy, and for years he was a provincial competitor in a country that produced almost no internationally relevant grapplers. Australia in the 2000s was not Rio de Janeiro or Southern California. There was no local pipeline to ADCC, no cluster of black belts to test yourself against weekly.
The decisive move was to Melbourne, where Jones began training under at Absolute MMA. Giles — a physiotherapist by training and one of the sharpest technical minds in the sport — ran a program built on leg entanglements and a modern, systematized approach to no-gi at a time when much of the grappling world still treated lower-body attacks as a novelty or a dirty trick. Giles promoted Jones to black belt in 2016. Within a year, the student would be one of the most feared submission artists at the world's premier no-gi event, and the Absolute MMA name would travel with him.
That 2017 ADCC breakout reframed Jones's trajectory. A grappler who submits Leandro Lo, Murilo Santana, and Chael Sonnen inside a single weekend does not go back to provincial obscurity. Jones relocated to train in New York under John Danaher, joining the group then known as the Danaher Death Squad (DDS) — the collective built around Gordon Ryan, Garry Tonon, the Ryan brothers, Nicky Rodriguez, and others that had, by the late 2010s, come to dominate professional no-gi grappling. For a leg-lock specialist, it was the obvious room to be in: DDS had done more than anyone to turn systematic leg entanglements from a fringe tactic into the spine of elite no-gi.
Jones's years in that system coincided with his most consistent competitive stretch. But the DDS era did not last. In July 2021, Danaher publicly announced the end of the squad as a unified team, citing a tangle of factors — the location of a future school, personality conflicts, differing values, and the friction between a single team brand and the increasingly large individual brands of its members. The group fractured into two camps, both of which landed, improbably, in the same city.
That relocation — from the sport's traditional hubs to a single mid-sized Texas city, split between two rival rooms — is the geographic center of the modern era covered below. But the throughline of Jones's origin is consistent from Adelaide onward: he came up outside the establishment, learned a game the establishment underrated, and kept winning with it until the establishment had to take him seriously.
Craig Jones is, first and last, a leg-locker. Everything in his game routes toward the same destination — an opponent's knee or ankle, isolated inside a leg entanglement, with the hips positioned to finish. What separates his game from a generic "leg-lock guy" is the front half of the sequence: the entries.
The Z-guard. Jones's most identifiable position is a half-guard variant usually called the Z-guard (a knee-shield half guard, the shin framed across the opponent's torso like the letter Z). In most gyms the knee shield is taught as a defensive stopgap — a frame to prevent the top player from flattening you out. Jones treats it as an offensive hub. From the Z-guard he can elevate and sweep, wrestle up to the opponent's back, or — most dangerously — collapse the frame into a leg entanglement. His instructional Make Z Guard Great Again is built entirely around converting that defensive-looking shin frame into an attacking platform.
The K-guard entry. The other signature entry is the K-guard — a bottom position in which the grappler creates a "K" shape with the legs while controlling an arm or the near leg, using it as a launch point into leg entanglements, back exposure, and inversions. The K-guard rose to prominence in the same late-2010s window that leg-locking went mainstream, and Jones is among the athletes most associated with weaponizing it. From the K-guard he threads into the leg entanglements where his finishing game lives.
The finish. Once inside, Jones's tools are the modern leg-lock canon: the heel hook (inside and outside), the toehold, the kneebar. He is comfortable in the deep leg-entanglement positions — inside sankaku (the "honey hole" / inside senkaku position), and the 50/50 and its cousins — where the fight becomes a question of who controls the inside line and who can break grips fast enough to expose a heel. His control of these positions is patient rather than frantic; the calm is part of the brand, and part of why the finishes land. His instructionals Down Under Leg Attacks and Battle Tested Down Under Leglocks codified this game for a generation of no-gi hobbyists.
The competitive résumé. Jones's ADCC record is the spine of his reputation. After a first-round loss to Rômulo Barral on his 2015 debut, and the 2017 breakout that produced no medal but enormous attention, he assembled two silver-medal runs:
Two ADCC silver medals, across two different weight classes, without a gold, is an unusual profile. It marks Jones as a grappler good enough to beat almost anyone on a given day and to reach the sport's biggest final twice — but who, at the very last hurdle, ran into opponents who solved him. Outside ADCC he collected Polaris titles across roughly 2018–2021, a run of high-profile superfights, and a submission win over former UFC fighter Donald Cerrone in a Combat Jiu-Jitsu bout in December 2021. He is not the most decorated grappler of his era. He may be the most watched, and — as the modern era shows — he became the most economically consequential.
The story of professional grappling's economics has a before and an after, and the dividing line is August 2024.
To understand the after, start with the split. When DDS dissolved in July 2021, Jones did not chase a spot in Danaher's continuing camp. Instead, later in 2021, he co-founded B-Team Jiu-Jitsu in Austin, Texas, alongside Nicky Ryan, Nick Rodriguez (Nicky Rod), Ethan Crelinsten, and Seth Belisle. Danaher, Gordon Ryan, and Garry Tonon set up New Wave Jiu-Jitsu in the same city, minutes away. Two of the best no-gi rooms on earth, born from the same team, now training as rivals across town from each other. B-Team's identity was a deliberate counterpoint: still ferociously competitive, but flatter, looser, and more openly irreverent than the disciplined DDS culture it had come from. That irreverence — Jones's in particular — would become a business strategy.
Jones had, by the early 2020s, built a public profile that dwarfed his medal count. His social media was relentlessly self-deprecating and provocative; he was as likely to go viral for a prank or a needling comment about a rival as for a submission. Inside the sport, that persona was often mistaken for unseriousness. What it actually did was give him leverage — an audience independent of any promotion.
In 2024 he spent that leverage. Jones announced the Craig Jones Invitational (CJI), a no-gi tournament held 16–17 August 2024 at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas — the same venue that had hosted ADCC 2022. The structure was unlike anything the sport had seen. Two 16-competitor divisions, under 80 kg and over 80 kg. And the money: $1 million to the winner of each division, $10,001 to every single competitor who stepped onto the mat, and a $50,000 bonus for the best submission. The event also raised a reported sum in excess of half a million dollars for charity.
The number that mattered was not the million-dollar top prize. It was the $10,001 floor. For decades, the open secret of elite grappling was that even ADCC — the sport's most prestigious event — paid its competitors modestly relative to the training investment required to reach it, and paid nothing at all to most of the field. CJI paid everyone, and paid the winners a life-changing sum, and it did so on the same weekend as ADCC 2024 (17–18 August). Athletes were forced to choose between prestige and money. Several of the sport's best — including the Ruotolo brothers and Nick Rodriguez — chose CJI.
They were rewarded. Kade Ruotolo won the under-80 kg division and Nick Rodriguez won the over-80 kg division, each taking the million-dollar prize. Jones himself competed only in an intergender superfight against Gabi Garcia, a bout engineered more for spectacle than sport. The competitive substance was in the divisions; the point was in the payouts.
The economic argument CJI made is the one that outlasts any single result: if a first-year event run by one grappler and his backers could pay every athlete more than the sport's flagship had ever offered, then the flagship's payouts were a choice, not a constraint. Every major promotion now operates in a world where that comparison is public. A second edition, CJI 2, followed on 30–31 August 2025, again at the Thomas & Mack Center, this time restructured around a team format won by B-Team, with a separate six-figure women's openweight prize taken by Helena Crevar and a Jones superfight against Chael Sonnen. Whatever CJI becomes, the 2024 edition already did the irreversible thing: it moved the floor.
Five moments, each verifiable, that map Jones's arc from unknown to institution.
Jones submitted Lo, a five-time IBJJF world champion and elite guard passer, by rear-naked choke in the opening round of the tournament. For an audience that had never heard of Jones, this was the introduction — a leg-lock specialist choking out one of the best gi competitors alive.
A heel hook in one minute and fifty-two seconds against a former UFC title challenger, in the absolute division's opening round. The finish became one of the most-replayed clips of the event and, later, a widely dissected teaching example of the outside heel hook against a wrestler's base.
Jones's first ADCC final. After a run of finishes, he lost on points to the Marcelo Garcia–trained Diniz. The silver medal confirmed he belonged at the top of the division; the loss defined the pattern that would repeat.
Having moved up in weight, Jones beat one of the most celebrated gi competitors of the era to reach a second ADCC final. He then lost that final to Kaynan Duarte on points — a second silver, in a second weight class.
Not a match but the moment. Kade Ruotolo and Nick Rodriguez each won $1 million; every competitor was paid; the event ran head-to-head with ADCC. It is the single most cited data point in every subsequent argument about how grapplers should be paid.
White belt sees Craig Jones and wants to learn heel hooks immediately — and, at most gyms, is told to wait, because heel hooks are banned at white belt in IBJJF competition and dangerous when applied without control. The white-belt lesson from Jones is not the finish. It is the Z-guard: learn to frame the knee shield and not get flattened.
Blue belt learns that the leg lock is not a cheap trick but a system with entries, controls, and finishes — and that the entries (Z-guard, half guard, the scramble) matter more than the heel hook itself. Blue belt is where a student first drills the inside position and learns to control before breaking.
Purple belt starts to see the whole chain: how a knee-shield frame becomes an entanglement, how a failed sweep becomes a leg entry, how the K-guard feeds the same finishes from a different angle. This is the rank at which Jones's game becomes legible as a network rather than a collection of moves.
Brown belt studies the control, not the submission — the grips and hip positions that keep an opponent trapped in the entanglement while their heel gets exposed. The brown belt learns why Jones looks calm: the finish is never rushed, because the position is already won.
Black belt understands the counter-game — how to defend the inside line, how to hide the heel, how to win the entanglement rather than merely survive it. At black belt, the Jones game is a two-way conversation, and the question is who controls the inside space first.
1. Chasing the heel hook before controlling the position. The most common leg-lock error, and the one Jones's game is built to punish. A heel hook applied without securing the hips and the inside line is a heel hook the opponent spins out of — often into your own exposed leg. Control the entanglement first; the finish is the last thing that happens, not the first.
2. Treating the Z-guard as a resting position. The knee shield looks defensive, so beginners use it to stall. That surrenders its entire value. The Z-guard is a launch point — to sweep, to wrestle up, to enter the legs. If you are not threatening something from it, you are just waiting to get passed.
3. Reaching for the leg and giving up the underhook. Diving at a leg entry without accounting for the upper body lets a good passer flatten you or take the back. Elite leg-lockers, Jones included, win the upper-body battle — underhooks, frames, angle — before or during the leg entry, not instead of it.
4. Ignoring the reap rules until competition day. Much of the modern leg-lock game lives in positions that are illegal under IBJJF rules at lower belts and legal under ADCC/no-gi rules. Drilling a game you cannot use in your next competition, or learning entanglements without learning which knee-reaps are legal in your ruleset, gets athletes disqualified. Know the rules of the event you are entering.
5. Copying the persona instead of the game. Jones's public irreverence is downstream of a decade of disciplined training under Giles and Danaher. The calm in his finishes is drilled, not innate. Imitating the attitude without doing the repetitions is a way to lose politely.
At open mat this week, take the Z-guard as your only starting position for three rounds. Start every round in bottom half guard with the knee shield framed across your partner's torso, and give yourself exactly three permitted outcomes: elevate-and-sweep, wrestle up to the back, or enter a leg entanglement. No other escapes. When the frame gets flattened — and it will — reset and start again.
Then isolate the entry-to-control step and stop there. From the Z-guard, enter one leg entanglement and win the inside position, then release without finishing. Twenty entries, no submissions. You are training the part of the game that actually decides the match: getting inside and controlling. If you can consistently reach a controlled inside position from the knee shield, the heel hook is a formality you can add later, under a coach who can teach the finish safely.
Craig Jones sits at the intersection of the modern no-gi leg-lock game and the sport's business.
Jones is what the leg-lock era looks like when it grows a business brain. The techniques on this map are the game; CJI is what happened when the person who mastered them decided the athletes deserved to be paid for it.
Publication date will be set at Sanity ingest. This log will be appended to over the life of the article. Any factual corrections will be dated and specific.
Publication draft prepared 2026-08-05. Awaiting hero image (needs permissioned photo — placeholder pre-launch). Two-pass edit not yet complete. Source-check pass required before status: scheduled in Sanity.
Known open items: