The 6th edition of the Eddie Bravo Invitational (EBI) was a great success. For the first time ever, the event was on UFC FightPass.
16 of the best grapplers in the world competed in an open tournament which had favourites such as 2015 ADCC Champion Yuri Simoes, Polaris champion Garry Tonon, ADCC bronze medalist Rustam Chsiev, Matheus Diniz or DJ Jackson, with aa $50,000 up for grabs.
In EBI,every match ends by submission. In overtime, the match restarts with one of the grapplers behind the back.
20 year old Gordon Ryan came in as a late replacement and to the surprise of many, won the whole tournament submitting Yuri Simoes in the semi final and Rustam Chsiev in the final.
Yuri Simoes’ teammate, Kim Terra (Caio Terra’s brother), didn’t appreciate Some of Ryan’s instagram posts which he deemed disrespectful and Terra openly threatened him:
“Watch out man, Don’t think too highly of yourself. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. The way you are marketing this is kind of aggressive. You never know who you might run into when you are not surrounded by your buddies. Btw, congrats on the win. You looked good, just don’t ruin it all with bad posts.
Terra has since then apologised and all is ok but some other people had said that Gordon Ryan tapped to Yuri Simoes rear naked choke attempt during their first overtime.
If you view the video below at the 11:55 mark, you can see that Ryan wiggles his had at one point near Simoes’ leg but doesn’t tap.
This has been called a ‘Brazilian Tap’ or a phantom Tap which is the act of tapping out just once, or tapping discretely out of the referee’s field of vision, in order to get out of a submission (so the opponent lets go of the hold) and then carrying on fighting and hoping to continue the fight and win.
It is a subtle form of cheating and is frowned upon within the MMA and BJJ communities.
At UFC 117, when Anderson Silva caught Chael Sonnen in an triangle choke submission, Chael executed the “phantom tap” in hopes that Anderson would let go of the triangle. but the referee saw it clearly and Chael tried to keep fighting but the ref was having none of it and Silva won the fight.
Ryan answered his critics on his Facebook:
It’s come to attention that
#1, some people think I tapped against yuri in ot. And 2 that yuri was tired and had a hurt leg so it wasn’t really a convincing victory. Let me explain… first I’ll start by saying that the choke was very tight and at one point I wasn’t sure if I could escape. That being said I knew he was gassed and I knew I wasn’t about to tap. If I did tap, it wouldn’t be on his leg, it would be on his arm where eddie bravo was watching and asking me “are you ok?” Haha
#2 if you rewatch closely I don’t even hit his leg.
#3 if I was tapping, I would have aggressively tapped until the match was stopped. The point at which some people are saying I tapped made no difference in the match. Eddie bravo didn’t stop or pause; didn’t even see it as far as I know. And yuri was definitely still trying to choke me unconscious just as hard as he ever was, so nothing changed. At the end of the day I know I did not tap. And for those people who know me know that the last thing I do is cheat to win grappling matches. If lose in the purest way possible, (submission) then so be it. Also it seems like yuri hurt his knee pretty bad at some point. That sucks and I hope he is back to 100% asap. He is the man for sure and has won some of the biggest events in the sport.
Look atbthe 11:55 mark:
