A seated, side-angled guard built on one grip — an arm swum deep behind the opponent's far lat while the guard player turns off-center instead of facing forward. Where closed guard clamps and breaks posture from the front, octopus guard gives up the frontal lock entirely to chase the back, and it has been codified across three separate instructional lineages since Eduardo Telles first taught it.
In the final seconds of the black-belt medium-heavy final at the 2013 IBJJF World No-Gi Championship, Eduardo Telles was losing. He and Felipe Pena were tied 2–2 on points, and Pena led on advantages, 4–2 — the kind of gap that, with the clock running out, usually ends a match exactly the way it looks like it is going to end. Telles took Pena's back. The referee raised his hand. It was Telles's first world title as a black belt, arriving well into his thirties, after more than a decade spent competing almost entirely from a mat position every other coach in the building had spent that same decade telling students to escape from as fast as possible: turtle.
Telles had built his whole career backward from that instinct. Where the rest of the sport treated turtle as a place you survive on the way back to guard, Telles — through years of grinding rounds against training partner Fernando "Tererê" Augusto, who attacked his back relentlessly — had turned it into a place he attacked from. Out of that project came two connected inventions he eventually packaged as a single instructional series: the turtle guard, and its more open, more aggressive cousin, the octopus guard, in which the bottom player abandons the tucked turtle shell entirely, sits up on an angle, and swims an arm behind the opponent's body to chase the back from the side rather than defend it from underneath.
The 2013 final did not showcase the octopus guard's textbook entry — Telles's win that day is best read as a career payoff for the broader back-attacking system he had spent a decade building, not a single frame-by-frame demonstration of the position this article profiles. But it is the clearest, most fully documented evidence that the philosophy behind octopus guard — that a bottom player facing pressure can go looking for an opponent's back instead of just defending one — belongs to a real, title-winning competitive method, not a highlight-reel curiosity.
Closed guard controls an opponent from the front, ankles locked, breaking his posture forward. Octopus guard gives that frontal lock up entirely — it turns the bottom player side-on, swims an arm behind the opponent's body, and goes hunting for his back instead.
Octopus guard's origin traces to one person, one training partnership, and one team, all reasonably well documented across the position's own instructional catalog and independent BJJ media.
Eduardo Telles, born in 1976 in São Paulo, Brazil, earned his black belt from Romero "Jacaré" Cavalcanti while training at Alliance, alongside a training group that at various points included Demian Maia, André Galvão, and Marcelo Garcia, under head coach Fábio Gurgel. Telles's nickname, "Esquijitsu" — roughly, "weird jiu-jitsu" — reflects an approach that never fit the era's orthodox game.
The project that became the octopus guard started, by Telles's own account as related in profile pieces on his career, in white-belt sparring rounds that began from the knees rather than standing. Telles found himself in turtle constantly, and rather than treat it as a place to escape, he began building a systematic framework of escapes, transitions, and attacks out of it — a process sharpened over years of hard rounds with Fernando "Tererê" Augusto, an attacking specialist who punished any bottom player's back exposure and forced Telles to solve the position honestly rather than stall it out. Telles and Tererê left Alliance together in 2002, reportedly over a dispute about prize-money competition, and formed their own team, TT. Telles later founded 99 (NineNine) Jiu-Jitsu, based in San Diego, in 2012, where he continues to teach.
The turtle guard came first — an entire attacking system built from what the rest of the sport treated as a defensive shell. The octopus guard is Telles's further development of the same underlying idea, applied to a more open, seated structure: rather than staying tucked and low, the bottom player sits up on an angle and swims an arm behind the opponent's far side, trading the turtle's defensive compactness for a more active, side-on control built to chase the back directly.
The codifying instructional is a five-volume DVD set released through World Martial Arts, titled Turtle & Octopus Guard. The first four volumes, filmed in the gi, cover the turtle system in depth — including, per the release's own technique count, more than twenty sweeps and two dozen submissions from turtle. The fifth volume, filmed no-gi and titled simply Octopus Guard, is the discrete study of the position this article profiles. Telles has since released additional material on the same family of positions, including The Turtle Guard Revisited and, for the gi specifically, Octopus With Pajamas, both through BJJ Fanatics.
Two later black belts extended the position into different corners of the sport, and each is worth naming because each released his own standalone instructional rather than merely borrowing Telles's terminology. Craig Jones, an Australian black belt and two-time ADCC finalist, built a version of the position — sometimes marketed under the tongue-in-cheek name "the reach-around" — into his no-gi competitive game and released it as The Octopus Guard, later revised as Octopus Guard 2.0, both through BJJ Fanatics; Jones's version leans harder into the back-take and leg-entry branches of the attack tree than Telles's original gi-rooted material. Adam Wardzinski, a Polish black belt competing for CheckMat, built the position into his half-guard game specifically and released a five-volume instructional, Octopus Guard Engineering, also through BJJ Fanatics — a gi-oriented treatment that pairs the underhook with the crossface-denial half-guard frame he is separately known for.
Three independent black belts, three separate instructional releases, spanning gi and no-gi — that is the position's codification case in full, and it is unusually well distributed for a position this specific.
Octopus guard is defined by a small set of hard constraints. Meet them and you are in octopus guard; drop any one and you have slid into a neighboring position — most often half guard, turtle, or a generic seated guard — that plays by different rules and opens a different attack tree.
1. A side-on, off-center hip angle — not a frontal square-up. The bottom player is not facing the opponent squarely, the way a closed-guard player is. The hips and torso are turned, angled toward the side the swimming arm is working, so that the opponent's centerline is no longer lined up with the guard player's own. This single detail is the position's structural signature: everything else follows from the fact that the guard player has already partially rotated off the front of the opponent's body before the position's core grip is even established.
2. A deep underhook, swum to the far lat rather than merely hooked under the armpit. This is the position's namesake mechanism. Rather than settle for a standard underhook — arm under the armpit, hand on the shoulder blade — the guard player threads the arm further, reaching past the armpit to grip behind the opponent's far side, at or near the lat muscle low on the back. The reach is what earns the name: an arm that wraps around and past the near shoulder the way a tentacle wraps around an object, rather than one that simply props against it. A shallow underhook that stops at the shoulder blade is not yet an octopus guard; it is a head-and-arm control waiting to become one.
3. Elbow tight to the opponent's back, weight leaning into the grip. The deep underhook alone does not hold anything if the elbow floats away from the opponent's spine. The guard player keeps the elbow pinned against the opponent's back and leans body weight into the connection, which does two things at once: it prevents the opponent from posturing straight up and escaping the reach, and it begins loading the opponent's balance toward the guard player's angle, which is what eventually produces the back take.
4. A free hand and a base that supports the turn, not a locked leg clamp. Unlike closed guard, nothing here is locked shut with the legs. The guard player's base — a post on the mat, a knee shield, a hook on a hip, depending on the entry — supports the rotated, side-on structure and prevents the opponent from simply driving forward and flattening the position. The legs are doing structural work, not clamping work; there is no ankle lock behind the opponent's back holding the position closed the way there is in closed guard.
5. Continuous off-balancing, not a static hold. As with most modern control positions, octopus guard is isometric rather than restful. The underhook keeps pulling and loading as the opponent tries to posture, frame, or drive forward, and a guard that goes static for more than a moment gives a strong passer room to flatten the angle and strip the reach.
The parent-position link that matters here is genealogical, not mechanical: the octopus guard is frequently taught as an option that opens out of closed guard — clear the opponent's hands, sit up beneath his shoulders, and swim the near arm behind his far lat before he can reset his posture — which is the entry this article's parent link reflects. But once the arm is swum and the hip angle turns, the position stops behaving like closed guard in every mechanical sense that matters.
Closed guard is frontal and symmetric: the guard player faces the opponent squarely, locks the ankles behind his back below the belt line, and uses that clamp to break his posture forward, toward a cross-collar choke, an armbar, or a triangle — attacks that all live on the front of the opponent's body. Octopus guard is side-on and asymmetric: there is no leg lock behind the back at all, the guard player has already rotated off-center, and the entire mechanism points not at the front of the opponent's body but around and behind it. The objective changes with the geometry. Closed guard's endgame is a submission attacked from the front. Octopus guard's endgame, in the large majority of documented instructional material, is the back take — a fundamentally different destination that closed guard's frontal clamp cannot reach without first opening and converting into an entirely different guard.
It is also worth being precise about a common point of confusion, since the position is frequently generalized in casual conversation: not every underhook taken from half guard or turtle is an octopus guard. The defining feature is the depth of the reach — past the armpit, to the far lat — combined with the deliberately turned, side-on hip angle. A standard underhook that stops at the shoulder blade, played from a square base, is a different (and more common) control that shares a family resemblance but not the specific grip this position is named for.
An octopus guard held to the constraints above opens into a small number of attack families, consistent across Telles's, Jones's, and Wardzinski's independently released treatments of the position.
The back take. The primary, highest-percentage objective. As the opponent tries to posture out of the deep underhook, the guard player's angle and elbow pressure are already working to rotate his hips past the opponent's, and the underhook itself becomes the first hook toward a seatbelt grip and the back. This is the attack the position exists to produce, and it is the one that shuts down pressure-passers most consistently in instructional material on the position.
The kimura. A common defensive reaction to the deep underhook is for the opponent to bring his own far arm across his body to block the reach. That defensive arm placement is, structurally, the exact setup for a kimura grip, and both Telles's and Craig Jones's material treat it as a standing branch of the same tree rather than a separate technique.
The front-headlock family. When an opponent tries to flatten the position by driving his head down and forward rather than posturing up, the guard player's existing underhook and body position are already close to a front headlock, opening into a guillotine, D'Arce, or anaconda choke depending on exactly how the opponent's head and arm are positioned.
The sweep. When an opponent over-commits weight forward to resist the underhook rather than posturing away from it, the loaded angle from constraint five can be released as a sweep to the top position — a hip-bump-style redirection of an opponent who has already given up his own base fighting the reach.
Every other listed technique across the position's instructional catalog — calf slicers when a leg gets entangled during a scramble, transitions back into half guard or turtle when the underhook is stripped — is a bridge into one of these four families or an exit into a neighboring position, not a fifth stand-alone attack.
Octopus guard's visibility in 2026 tracks two separate audiences, because the position spread through gi and no-gi competition along different paths and through different teachers.
In no-gi, Craig Jones is the position's most recognizable modern face. Jones — a two-time ADCC finalist, with silver medals at the -88kg division in 2019 and the -99kg division in 2022, the latter following a semifinal win over Nicholas Meregali before a final loss to Kaynan Duarte — built his own version of the underhook-and-swim mechanism into his no-gi bottom game and packaged it as Octopus Guard 2.0, marketing material for which credits the position, by name, back to Telles. Jones's competitive resume across a decade of ADCC, EBI, and superfight appearances is well documented independent of any single technique; his instructional treatment of octopus guard is best understood as evidence of how far the position has spread inside elite no-gi grappling, rather than as proof that any one specific submission or back take in his career record is traceable to it frame by frame.
In the gi, the position's clearest recent validation belongs to Adam Wardzinski, a CheckMat black belt who built octopus guard into his half-guard system and released it as the five-volume Octopus Guard Engineering. Wardzinski's own competitive record over the past several seasons is unusually strong: he won the IBJJF World Championship heavyweight black-belt title in June 2024 — reported as the first male European-born competitor to win an IBJJF adult black-belt World Championship title, finishing all four of his matches that week by submission, including a head-and-arm choke over Vinicius Liberati in the final — and repeated as heavyweight world champion in 2025, defeating Leo Ferreira in that final before an unannounced, on-the-mat retirement immediately after the win. Those results, combined with Pan Championship and European titles across the same two seasons, are frequently cited as a Grand Slam-level run. Available match coverage of both finals does not specify octopus guard as the technique behind the finishing submissions, so this record should be read as career context for a competitor whose signature system includes the position, not as a claim that any specific submission in those finals came directly from it.
The wider instructional market backs up both threads: BJJ Fanatics carries Telles's original material, Jones's no-gi-focused releases, and Wardzinski's gi-focused system side by side, which is unusual for a position this specific and is itself evidence that the grappling community treats octopus guard as worth a standalone curriculum rather than a footnote inside half guard or turtle.
The position's clearest fully sourced example belongs to its inventor, and it is presented here as career context rather than a frame-by-frame technical breakdown, for the reasons explained above.
Tied 2–2 on points with Pena ahead 4–2 on advantages, Telles took Pena's back in the closing moments to win his first black-belt world title. The finish is a documented, dated result — the technical detail of exactly which entry (turtle-rooted or the more open octopus mechanism) produced the back take is not independently confirmed in available match coverage, so it is offered here as validation of the back-attacking philosophy behind both positions rather than a clean technical demonstration of octopus guard specifically.
Wardzinski's back-to-back black-belt Worlds golds (June 2024 over Vinicius Liberati, 2025 over Leo Ferreira) are the clearest available evidence that a competitor whose system explicitly includes octopus guard can win at the sport's highest gi level. As above, the finishing submissions in those finals are not confirmed to have come from the position directly, so this entry is career context rather than a single decisive bout.
A caution belongs here in the same spirit this outlet applies to other positions with a thin match-archive record: several online highlight clips are captioned as "octopus guard back takes" without a dated, named, cited source behind them. Those clips are real footage of the position's mechanism in action, but without a verifiable event, date, and scoreline attached, they are left out of this section rather than printed on the strength of a caption.
White belt learns the deep underhook before anything else — reaching past the armpit to the far lat, against a partner who is only trying to strip the arm and posture up. Most white belts stop the reach too early, at the shoulder blade, and end up with a standard underhook rather than the position's namesake grip.
Blue belt learns to turn the hips off-center instead of staying square to the opponent. The realization that the position depends on an angled, rotated base — not a flat, frontal one — is the blue-belt shift, and it is the same shift closed-guard players make when they first learn to break posture with grips instead of muscle.
Purple belt starts reading the opponent's defensive reaction — arm across the body invites the kimura, head driven down invites the front headlock — rather than committing to the back take regardless of what the opponent gives up.
Brown belt treats a stripped underhook as a transition cue into half guard or turtle rather than a crisis, and starts chaining the position into scrambles rather than playing it as an isolated hold.
Black belt plays the underhook and the opponent's balance simultaneously, several moves ahead — loading the back take before the opponent has fully committed to defending the kimura, the way Telles's, Jones's, and Wardzinski's own instructional material each describe reading the position's branch points in real time.
1. A shallow underhook mistaken for the real grip. The single most common entry-level error. Stopping the reach at the shoulder blade instead of continuing to the far lat gives up the position's entire mechanical advantage — the opponent can posture out of a shallow underhook far more easily than a deep one, because the deep reach is what pins the elbow to his back and denies the posture in the first place.
2. Staying square instead of turning the hips. A practitioner who keeps a flat, frontal base while trying to hold the underhook is playing a static grip, not octopus guard. The turned angle is what converts the grip into off-balancing pressure; without it, the position is just an arm hanging on for as long as strength allows.
3. No plan for the opponent's defensive arm. When the opponent brings his far arm across his body to block the reach, that arm placement is a live kimura setup — a practitioner who does not recognize it and continues chasing the back alone is leaving a high-percentage submission unattacked.
4. Losing the elbow connection. The underhook and the pinned elbow are a single mechanism, not a backup pair. A guard player who holds the hand position but lets the elbow float away from the opponent's back gives up the pressure that prevents posturing, even with a technically deep grip.
5. Treating the position as a finishing hold rather than a transition. Octopus guard, like turtle before it, is built to produce the back take, not to be held indefinitely. A practitioner without a plan for converting the underhook into hooks and a seatbelt grip — or for exiting into half guard or turtle if the reach is stripped — is holding a position with no destination.
At open mat this week, isolate the reach itself. Fifteen-minute round, one rule: from a turtle or knee-shield half-guard start, you are only trying to establish and hold the deep underhook to the far lat with the elbow pinned to your partner's back, while your partner is only trying to strip the arm and posture up. No back takes, no submissions attempted. Expect to lose the grip constantly — that is the expected result at this stage, not a sign you are doing it wrong.
Add a second round in which you hold the deep underhook and are allowed exactly one objective — the back take, and nothing else — against a partner defending fully. Isolating the single finish forces the hip-turn and elbow-pressure mechanics that the kimura and front-headlock branches build from later. Repeat weekly for six weeks before adding the kimura and front-headlock counters — the branch points only make sense once the base reach is reliable under resistance.
Octopus guard sits at a crossroads between the sport's frontal guards and its back-attacking systems — reachable from several directions, aimed at one destination.
The lesson the map teaches is the same one closed guard's own map teaches: no position in jiu-jitsu is an island. Octopus guard is the specific, named answer to a question closed guard eventually asks every bottom player — what do you do once the frontal clamp opens and the opponent is still on top of you — and the answer, in this case, is to stop facing him and start swimming around him.
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.
Known open items: