Tonight was the first ever Polaris squads event took place today and after 80 minutes of grappling saw Team UK & Ireland defeat Team Europe 1-0.
The new structure featured teams of 8 grapplers face off against each other with 2 mixed weight categories. Each grappling bout was 5 minutes long, with 1 point awarded for a same weight submission and 3 points for a lower weight submitting a higher weight.
The only submission of the night was when Tom Halpin submitted Dinu Bucalet with a very slick entry from a reverse triangle.
During the half-time interval, we saw a superfight between Ffion Davies & Magdalena Loska which saw the Welsh superstar make it look relatively easy. Davies made relatively light work of Loska’s guard and took an extremely nice back entry after only 3 minutes. From here she secured a body triangle and secured a fast win by rear naked choke.
Most of the match-ups were exciting and featured some close calls, specifically by Tarik Hopstock who came close on a number of occasions. Marcin Held notably bent Ash Williams knee backward from a nice kneebar from bottom half guard. Although Williams was able to fight once again after this so it can’t have bothered him too much. Lastly, Bucalet almost made up for his earlier mistake when he looked to have Williams in a reasonably extended armbar which was stopped by the referee after they had rolled out of bounds.
Review of the format
The format is new so cannot be perfect, but I felt the 5 minute rounds were not long enough for a submission only format. As mentioned earlier most of the matches were exciting but featured some stalling when grapplers realised they were an underdog and just needed to defend against their opponent.
If I were to change the rules I would make submissions worth a standard 2 points and then feature an IBJJF scoring system during the match. If you were to win your match by points, your team would be awarded 0.5 points. By doing this, even if a grappler were to stall to a loss, he would give up 0.5 points instead of nothing. In the same scenario, submissions are still valued at 2 points which is worth 4 points victories.
By changing the rules, I think it would make the matches more open rather than just 5 minutes of submission hunting by high level black belts. As we can see there was only 1 submission in 16 matches.
Summary of the new ideas & promotion
Overall it was a pretty good attempt at Europes answer to Quintet. I would like to see the changes made outlined above, but even then there might be some negatives I have not thought about.
The quality of the grapplers on both sides was really good, although it would have been nice to have seen Polaris regular Frederic Vosgrone to see how he would perform in this low time limit, submission only format.
