- Rigan Machado has proposed a radical rules overhaul for Jiu-Jitsu: steep point thresholds tied to the clock, plus a “double disqualification” if neither fighter scores.
- The idea borrows from wrestling’s technical fall, a mercy rule that ends a match once one athlete builds a decisive scoring margin.
- Machado argues the current ruleset produces matches where ten minutes pass with “only one advantage or maybe two points” — a product problem, not just a sporting one.
- He has already tested rule innovations through League Jiu-Jitsu, the organisation he helped create, and frames the changes as a way to keep top talent in the Gi.
- The proposal comes from a genuine pioneer: Machado is recorded as the first black belt graded by Carlos Gracie Jr., with Pan American titles and an ADCC medal to his name.
Rigan Machado thinks the single biggest problem with competition Jiu-Jitsu is not the technique on the mat — it is the rules wrapped around it. Speaking on a recent podcast, the veteran instructor laid out a fix that borrows directly from wrestling’s playbook: force athletes to score, or end the match early.
The Proposal: Score, or You’re Out
Machado’s core argument is that more scoring makes for a better product, and the way to guarantee scoring is to build hard thresholds into the clock. He described a system where a competitor who fails to hit a points target inside a set window is simply out of the match.
Create a rule about, hey, in the first four minutes he have eight points, you already going to be out. In the other eight minutes, he have five points, you out.
– Rigan Machado –
The proposal also includes bonus points — a throw that lands in mount, for example, scoring the six points plus an additional two — and, most strikingly, a scenario with no precedent in the sport: if neither athlete manages to score at all, both would be disqualified.
Imagine that after eight minutes nobody has scored any points. Both guys get disqualified and they’re out of the game. That makes the guys think, “Oh, we have to score. We have to push each other.”
– Rigan Machado –
That last idea is the logical extreme of his position — that a draw, or a decision won on a single advantage, is a failure of the format rather than a legitimate result.
What a Technical Fall Actually Is
The concept Machado is reaching for already exists in wrestling, where it is called a technical fall. It is a victory condition satisfied by outscoring an opponent by a set margin — a mercy rule, essentially. In American scholastic and collegiate wrestling, a 15-point differential ends the match immediately, regardless of the clock; in freestyle and Greco-Roman, the traditional threshold is ten points.
The effect is the same in every variant: a wrestler who is dominating cannot be stalled out or coasted against, and a lopsided contest ends when it is decided rather than dragging to the buzzer. That is exactly the dynamic Machado wants to import into Jiu-Jitsu, where stalling and inactivity are persistent complaints about every major ruleset.
Why Rigan Machado Thinks Jiu-Jitsu Needs This
Machado’s framing is explicitly about the spectator, not just the athlete. He argues that the current ruleset produces matches where ten minutes pass with almost nothing scored, which gives commentators nothing to build on and viewers no reason to stay.
If you want to make the sport more professional, you can’t have people watching 10 minutes of a match and seeing only one advantage or maybe two points. That’s not exciting.
– Rigan Machado –
For Machado, the stakes are the long-term health of the Gi game. He has watched top competitors drift toward No-Gi, MMA and other combat sports, and he sees a professional, action-driven ruleset as the thing that could reverse that. It is the same logic behind League Jiu-Jitsu, the organisation he helped create, where he has already experimented with rule changes of exactly this kind.
Can a Grappling Pioneer Move the Rules?
Machado is not an outsider shouting from the cheap seats. He is recorded as the first black belt graded by Carlos Gracie Jr., the Gracie Barra founder and one of the central architects of modern sport Jiu-Jitsu, and his competitive résumé includes Pan American titles in 1996 and 1997 and an ADCC bronze medal in 2000.
Whether his specific thresholds — eight points in four minutes, double disqualifications for scoreless matches — ever reach a major ruleset is another matter, but the underlying idea has real momentum: several grappling promotions have already been experimenting with action-focused scoring. Rigan Machado is simply arguing for the sport to go further, faster.
