Yuri Simoes Won Three ADCC Titles. Then He Went 0-2 in ONE Championship MMA. Now He's Trying Again.

Yuri Simoes never gave up a single point in the 2022 ADCC absolute. He gave up two unanimous decisions in MMA.

Three titles. Three separate brackets. Keenan Cornelius and Romulo Barral back to back in 2015. Felipe Pena in the 2017 final. The entire 2022 absolute field — Lachlan Giles, Nicky Rodriguez, Roberto Cyborg Abreu, and Nicholas Meregali — without conceding a point in any match. Meregali lost because he pulled guard and picked up a negative. The rest just got beaten.

Add four IBJJF No-Gi World titles, a pair of bracket golds at brown belt, Pan American titles, European titles. He started judo at four, switched to jiu-jitsu at nine, earned his black belt under Ricardo Vieira in 2011, and moved to San Jose to train under Caio Terra. By the time he walked out of the 2022 ADCC absolute as champion, he had the best no-gi grappling résumé in the world outside Gordon Ryan.

So naturally, he went to MMA.

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The Cross-Over Paradox

The pitch makes sense on paper. Grappling stars cross over. Some of them figure it out. Garry Tonon went 7-1 in ONE Championship before moving on to other promotions and demonstrating that elite submission wrestling can translate to competitive MMA success at the highest levels. The Ruotolo twins—João and Giancarlo—are actively doing it right now, bringing their elite grappling credentials into professional MMA. The base is supposed to transfer. You add striking, takedown defense, and the part where getting hit changes the math on everything you've spent 20 years developing.

But it's not automatic. Being exceptional at one discipline doesn't guarantee proficiency in a sport that punishes weaknesses immediately and without mercy. MMA isn't grappling with strikes appended to it—it's a fundamentally different chess match where submissions alone won't save you if your opponent stays off their back, if your footwork gets compromised by heavy hands, if the guard position suddenly becomes riskier than it was ever designed to be. Simoes would learn all of this the hard way.

Simoes signed with ONE Championship in 2020 and made his debut that November against Fan Rong—a Chinese heavyweight with 15 professional MMA fights. Three-time ADCC champion facing a journeyman with more cage experience. The judges gave it to Fan Rong, all three of them. Not close. Not a controversial decision that invited debate. A unanimous verdict that Simoes had come to an unfamiliar arena and lost.

He came back in February 2022 against Daniyal Zainalov. Split decision this time, which means someone in the building thought he won. He still didn't. Two fights. Zero wins. Both against opponents whose names barely registered in the grappling community—solid MMA fighters, sure, but not the caliber of opponent Simoes had spent the previous decade dismantling in absolute divisions.

ONE Championship released him that April. The promotion announced his release alongside four other fighters in a routine roster trim. No public explanation, no lingering drama, no "mutual parting of ways" soft-landing statement. Just: that's enough of that. The experiment ended quietly.

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The Scoring Problem

There's a version of the MMA chapter that reads as respectable—a decorated grappler willing to test his game where the risks are highest, where the ceiling on earnings is theoretically higher, where the sport claims to reward ground dominance even if the scoring rarely reflects it. There's also a version where the most accurate scorer in ADCC history went to a cage promotion and couldn't get three judges to agree with him across two fights against opponents most of the grappling world had never heard of.

They're both true. That's how careers work.

In ADCC, Simoes had built his entire legacy on control, positioning, and submission threat. Points were secondary to the point: he didn't lose. Against Fan Rong and Zainalov, he appeared to do all the right things—control the match, maintain top position, impose his grappling game. MMA judges, however, operate under a different rubric. They reward striking volume, aggression relative to the ruleset, and take-down attempts differently than jiu-jitsu judges. Simoes was operating in an environment where judges had been trained to value something other than what he'd spent twenty years perfecting.

The lack of knockout power, submission threat in the MMA sense (where the ref can stop it instantly), or willingness to engage in striking exchanges likely didn't help his scorecard argument. In grappling, dominance is dominance. In MMA, judges want to see you doing something that looks dangerous by their metric.

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The Return and the 21-Point Reckoning

He came back to grappling. ADCC 2024 in Birmingham gave him the superfight slot against Gordon Ryan—challenger for the title Simoes had the credentials to contest. After all, three ADCC titles, four IBJJF No-Gi Worlds, and a decade of never conceding a point positioned him as the most logical contender.

"Being the underdog has always motivated me and not the other way around," Simoes told Jitsmagazine ahead of the fight. "I have three ADCC titles and I'm still the underdog. I've never been favored in any of the years I won."

Ryan beat him 21-0.

Twenty. One. Points. In a single match. He had built his entire career on never giving up points. Not one, across the entire 2022 absolute run. Against Ryan: 21 of them, accumulated methodically, decisively, with the kind of precision Ryan had made his calling card. For Simoes, it wasn't just a loss—it was a repudiation of every principle that had guided his competition record.

The scorecard told a story about the gap between third-best no-gi grappler in the world and best. It was a 21-point tutoring session delivered in front of the grappling community. Simoes had been on top of the sport in his lanes. Against the undisputed best of the era, he had no lanes.

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The 2026 Scenario

And here we are again.

ADCC 2026 confirmed Simoes as the challenger for the vacant superfight title. The belt opened when Gordon Ryan retired, announcing his exit from professional jiu-jitsu competition. Ryan's framing is that any fight for it is consolation work done in his absence—his belt, his legacy, his absence the only thing making the match relevant. Simoes is challenging. Kaynan Duarte holds the title—he won the 2024 ADCC absolute and beat Simoes 3-0 in a 2019 bracket match.

So the matchup history reads: Duarte 1, Simoes 0. The Ryan superfight reads: Ryan 21, Simoes 0. The MMA chapter reads: 0-2, both by decision, released without fanfare.

Ryan has already weighed in. He called the Duarte-Simoes match a consolation prize—a fight for a belt he didn't lose, involving two men competing for his former property. Whether that's legitimate analysis or just Ryan being Ryan about everything that doesn't include Ryan is a separate question. Ryan's opinion on matches he's not fighting carries less weight than it did when he was the only person in the conversation who mattered.

But the subtext is clear: this is a fight for second place, a tournament for the runner-up position in a sport where first place just retired.

Whatever Ryan thinks, Duarte is the reigning ADCC absolute champion and Simoes has three titles. The fight is legitimate whether or not Ryan is in it. Their 2019 matchup—Duarte won 3-0—gives it genuine stakes. This isn't a rematch against someone Simoes beat before. This is a chance to avenge a loss to the guy who has the belt.

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No Clean Narrative

There's no clean narrative here. He's not a veteran getting one last shot at glory. He never stepped away—he's been going this whole time, tried MMA and it went badly, came back to grappling, got scored on 21 times by the best in the world, and is now booked for a match the previous champion already dismissed as consolation work.

It's just the next match.

Three ADCC titles. Four IBJJF No-Gi Worlds. Two MMA decisions. One 21-0 against the best. One more fight coming.

Simoes carries the credentials of an all-time great grappler into a match against the current titleholder. He also carries recent losses, a failed MMA experiment, and a 21-point reminder that even all-time greats have ceilings. Whether this is redemption or another lesson depends on what happens in the match.

The judges can take it from here.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

• ADCC 2026 Superfight Confirmed: Kaynan Duarte vs. Yuri Simoes
• ONE Championship Releases Yuri Simoes and Five Other Fighters
• Highlights: Gordon Ryan Blanks Yuri Simoes 21-0 in ADCC Superfight
• Yuri Simoes on ADCC 2024 Superfight vs. Gordon Ryan