Gamrot vs Dariush: The Ultimate Tactical Guide
Does Gamrot's low-single thrive against a southpaw, or do Dariush's round-kicks even the score? Can Gamrot sustain wrestling off the back-foot? What role will leg-locks play? Inside Gamrot vs Dariush.
The day was March 10, 2012. 22-year-old Beneil Dariush walked off the mats having concluded one of the most successful days of his athletic career. He had just lost a razor-close match to Kron Gracie at the 2012 Abu Dhabi World Pro Championship Trials in San Diego, California. Earlier in the day, however, he had defeated 3 other black belts (in the Gi, no less). Dariush was a brown belt, with less than 5 years of Jiu Jitsu experience — it was an impressive day.
Dariush was not an unknown commodity on the more “niche” Jiu Jitsu scene. He won the middle-weight brown belt division at the 2010 World Jiu-Jitsu No-Gi IBJJF Championships, and then placed second in the absolute division. A few months after that infamous loss to Kron, Beneil was awarded his black belt and decided to leave the BJJ competition scene and make a full commitment to his MMA career. He made his UFC debut in January of 2014, carrying the reputation of a tremendous guard-player and world-class Jiu Jitsu practitioner.
8 months earlier, across the Atlantic Ocean, 22-year-old Mateusz Gamrot won his debut inside his home-country’s marquee MMA promotion, Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki (KSW). In his youth, he was a notable member of Poland’s National youth and junior freestyle wrestling teams. Throughout the rest of the decade, Gamrot would emerge as one of the greatest MMA fighters that Poland ever saw, amassing a 13-0-1 record in KSW and capturing both the lightweight and featherweight championships.
But while Dariush left the BJJ scene and cut his teeth in the UFC lightweight division, rounding out his skill-set under legendary Chute Boxe trainer Rafael Cordeiro at King’s MMA, Gamrot continued to compete in grappling. In both 2014 and 2019, Gamrot won the ADCC European Championships at 77kg to punch his ticket to the ADCC World Championships — the mecca of No-Gi submission grappling.
The journeys of both Gamrot and Dariush are interesting to compare, filled with similarities amidst polar-opposite journeys. Gamrot is a freestyle wrestler who learned the art of submission fighting as he continued to compete in grappling while his MMA career flourished. Dariush comes from a BJJ background and left the competitive grappling scene to focus on MMA and develop his striking and wrestling under the UFC banner.
Both Dariush and Gamrot are true mixed martial artists, a threat to finish opponents both on the feet and on the ground. However, it is quite evident that Dariush has become more of an all-rounder, while Gamrot invested in his grappling and has become a specialist. As the cage door closes behind these two at UFC 280, the jury is still out on who carries the advantage into this key lightweight class — the specialist, or the all-rounder.
The low-single leg takedown is seldom deployed in MMA for an obvious reason: competitors do not wear wrestling shoes, which typically make it harder for the defender to release their ankle away from the attacker. The “ideal” low-single, as taught by legendary American freestyle wrestler and OSU-product John Smith, sees the wrestler grab low on the ankle with his outside hand, while the head is positioned inside the opponent’s knee and is used to fold the opponent over as the attacker drives through the angle. This shot requires full commitment and a very exaggerated level-change that sees the attacker often drop to both knees as he penetrates. This requires a good amount of energy, and the consequences for failing (in an MMA context) could involve being stuck under a heavy sprawl or potentially even have the back taken.
In both submission grappling and MMA, where competitors might be hesitant to commit wholeheartedly to a takedown attempt, it is more common to see competitors time an opportunity to quickly scoop up the ankle and stand up with his opponent while controlling the foot and finish the takedown on the feet. Without wrestling shoes, it is far easier for the opponent to be able to pull his ankle free before the takedown is complete, however the consequences of failing are far less severe compared to failing a “John Smith” low-single. If the opponent pulls his leg out, the fighters are disconnected and they resume fighting in the same position they were seconds earlier when the shot first came: in the stand-up.
Gamrot’s preferred application of the low single is with the “head outside” method. Gamrot will set himself in a southpaw stance in order to have his lead foot on the same side as his opponent’s lead foot, before feinting a strike and diving on the ankle of his opponent’s lead leg. Positioning his head outside of his opponent’s knee, Gamrot drops to his knees as he angles himself nearly perpendicular to his opponent, pulling the ankle towards his chest while his shoulder is positioned inside the knee to essentially apply a fulcrum that awkwardly bends the knee outside and forces his opponent to topple over.
If his opponent reacts in time to get their hips pressuring down to prevent Gamrot from pulling that ankle to his chest, Gamrot will maintain control of the ankle, build back onto his feet and apply one of his finishing moves from standing. Against Jeremy Stephens, Gamrot kept the ankle in his armpit and forced Stephens to hop backwards before suddenly pulling the leg towards him and off-balancing Stephens. Against Arman Tsarukyan, Gamrot frequently looked for the tree-top finish, placing the ankle onto his shoulder and driving forward.
Much of Mateusz Gamrot’s successes and failures in the UFC have been dictated by the innate strengths and weaknesses of the low-single. It is perhaps the most readily accessible takedown in an open-stance fight where each fighters’ lead foot is on the same-side, requiring less distance to be closed by the attacking wrestler. Due to the nature of such a drastic level-change down to the floor, the low-single is moderately expensive energy-wise, but it is largely immune to uppercuts. Looking to discourage the level-change, Scott Holtzman routinely hit nothing but air as he timed uppercuts up the middle as Gamrot shot. With Holtzman committed to throwing a punch rather than defending the takedown, Gamrot could easily finish the low-single.
But the real problem with the low-single comes after the takedown is finished. Upon completing the low-single, Gamrot often finds himself in the centre of the cage, with no control of his opponent’s upper-body. Often times, all he has is control of the lower-legs (with no wrestling shoes, mind you) and a distance too great to acquire an underhook or even a wrist-tie to get some form of upper-body control. In a pure wrestling context, Gamrot could look to lace his opponent’s legs and secure the 2-points, or immediately come up and look for a turk or a half-nelson and pursue a near-fall or a pin. This is all under the circumstance of the opponent protecting their back from being pinned at all costs.
However, in an MMA context, if his opponent does not simply post on Gamrot’s head or shoulder and pull their slippery leg out while returning to their feet, then they will simply fall to their back and attempt to apply butterfly hooks to create space and scramble back to the feet. Occasionally, Gamrot’s opponents are forced to settle in either full guard or a butterfly guard, where Gamrot has yet to display his guard passing abilities in the UFC. Instead, Gamrot has opted to throw flurries with his hands, giving space for his opponents to pummel their legs inside and push off to return to their feet.
Gamrot’s inability to maintain control on the ground has indeed caused him problems in the UFC. In his promotional debut against Guram Kutateladze, Gamrot lost a decision in which he amassed only 3 minutes and 29 seconds of control on 5 takedowns. He had even more trouble against Carlos Diego Ferreira, amassing 1 minute and 5 seconds of control on 4 takedowns before Ferreira verbally submitted due to a shoulder injury. Although he encountered problems before the stoppage in a razor-close fight against Ferreira, a notoriously good scrambler and BJJ black belt, Gamrot only needed one takedown to submit Jeremy Stephens with a kimura in the first-round.
It is performances like that against Stephens that seem to give Gamrot confidence to continuously wrestle no matter his success rate up to that point in the fight. In his 5-round main-event with Tsarukyan, Gamrot shot 21 times (completing 6) on the Armenian-Russian former freestyle wrestler, rallying from a 2-0 deficit to win the final 3 rounds on all three judges scorecards as Tsarukyan appeared to fatigue amidst the fight’s gruelling pace.
Gamrot showed tremendous counter-wrestling ability against Tsarukyan. This fascinating matchup between prospects captured many fans’ attention immediately through a mind-whirling back-and-forth scramble about a minute into the bout. This scramble highlighted another advantage to being proficient at the low-single: its accessibility on the re-shoot.
In that opening sequence, as well as at several other points in the fight, Gamrot was able to defend Tsarukyan’s double-leg, and then as they both began to build up to their feet, Gamrot would relinquish his whizzer and dive on the ankle to attack a low-single. When Gamrot’s double-leg failed and he found himself in turtle beneath Tsarukyan, Gamrot would dive for the ankle as Tsarukyan attempted to circle to the back, causing a reversal in the terms of the wrestling exchange as Tsarukyan had to transition from an offensive position, looking to take the back, to a defensive position as Gamrot stood up on the low-single and attempted to use the tree-top to dump Tsarukyan to the floor.
There was plenty of other impressive counter-wrestling attempts from Gamrot in that fight that did not involve the low-single. Twice in the first round, Gamrot attempted a rolling knee bar (otherwise known in Sambo as a “victor roll”) as Tsarukyan held the rear body-lock. In round-2, Gamrot was able to hip-in and create an angle as Tsarukyan shot a double-leg, and then use his whizzer to pull Arman up onto a body-lock before hitting a gorgeous whizzer kick (or uchi mata) from his knees to put Tsarukyan on his back for a brief moment. Furthermore, Gamrot proved to be very comfortable in turtle against Tsarukyan’s front headlock, keeping his elbows off the canvas and (as mentioned) snatching that low-single, or looking for peak-outs and sit-outs off the failed double-leg. This chain-wrestling ability is a big reason Gamrot does not mind failing the original shot.
Gamrot’s low-single seems to be more than merely a matter of preference, though. Because it does not require the attacker to actually get to the hips, the low-single can be attacked from a further range than most takedowns. Traditionally in MMA, wrestlers are forced apply their boxing to enter a range in which they can drop down and attack the hips on a level-change. This goes hand-in-hand with creating forward pressure to consistently use the striking-threat to set-up the takedowns, and the takedown-threat to set-up the striking as the wrestler pressures their opponent until they reach the fence-line and can no longer retreat nor sprawl down against the takedown.
Although he was able to land his right straight inside of Tsarukyan’s check-hook on multiple occasions later in the fight, Gamrot’s boxing has not opened up too many easy level-changes for the Polish fighter in the UFC. Although he loves to use the left overhand from southpaw to disguise his level-change to the low-single, Gamrot still finds himself shooting the majority of his takedowns from outside punching range and in the centre of the cage.
Despite almost always being the better wrestler, Gamrot has not been able to apply consistent forward pressure in the UFC. A big reason for this is due to his tendency to retreat and give ground when his opponent threatens with an attack. Tsarukyan did a good job exploiting this by using a throwaway 1-2 to get Gamrot to retreat and then cut him off with a body kick as he circled away. Gamrot will occasionally hold his ground and counter by slipping his head outside as he cross-parries the jab and splits his right straight inside, but too often his striking defence involves galloping backwards as he parries or extends outwards on the open-block, largely keeping him out of harm’s way but sacrificing octagon control.
Gamrot has a fairly good reactive double-leg when he can time his opponent squaring up their hips to throw their right hand, but he is nonetheless often forced to wrestle-off his back-foot and dive for the low single. Although there are examples of Gamrot boxing-up his opponents in KSW (such as Norman Parke), his striking at the UFC-level has largely been reduced to floating around the outside, feinting on the lead and looking to build onto 1s and 2s, and the occasional low kick. His big, committed dives for the low-single do effectively make it an “uglier” fight, while his reactive double leg can, at times, make his opponent hesitate to really commit to a power-punch, but we’ll see how this all fares against a seasoned-grappler in Dariush who also tends to thrive in uglier fights.
As he left his competitive jiu-jitsu career in the rearview mirror, Beneil Dariush enlisted the help of former Chute Boxe coach Rafael Cordeiro, credited with helping the likes of Shogun Rua, Wanderlei Silva and more reach tremendous levels of success in PRIDE FC. Under Cordeiro’s tutelage at King’s MMA, located in Huntington Beach, California, Dariush has slowly but surely developed his striking under Cordeiro’s Muay-Thai-for-MMA system.
Cordeiro’s influence was definitely clear early in Dariush’s UFC career. There was a concerted effort to forward pressuring, using his kicks to get his opposition to the cage and constantly looking to attack from double collar-ties in the clinch. Out of his southpaw stance, Dariush did perhaps his most impressive work on the counter, drawing out his opponents’ attack before taking a slight drop-step, pulling his head back as he loads his weight onto his rear-foot, and then bridging forward as he jabs from the hip and connects with his left overhand.
It was multiple variations of these pull-counters that gave Edson Barboza a good amount of trouble on the feet before Edson connected on a knee as Dariush level-changed for a single-leg in the second-round. From Gamrot’s perspective, Dariush’s pull-counter is both a threat and an opportunity; Gamrot does tend to bite off more than he can chew with his 1-2, leaving openings for Beneil to capitalize with his left overhand; but on the flip-side, effective feinting is the counter-fighter’s curse. Gamrot does a good amount of feinting on the lead, which could both serve to numb Dariush’s trigger and/or allow Gamrot to dive on the low-single as Beneil looks for his pull-counter.
Beneil’s counter-striking can only be reliable in this bout so long as it is surrounded by a more nuanced game-plan of forward pressuring. Dariush has largely been a forward-pressure fighter throughout his UFC career by virtue of volume and counter-striking. He is not the most technical ring general — with proper footwork, taking small steps to restrict the opponent’s space, taking good angles, appropriate shot selection to cut-off the opponent’s movement, using feints to maintain initiative, etc. — which has allowed better ring-cutters such as Drew Dober to put Beneil on the back-foot.
There has certainly been a more reckless approach to Beneil’s striking as his confidence has grown throughout his most recent 7-fight win-streak, but he has a good opportunity to display any improvements to his ring generalship in this one. Dating back to his 2016 match-up with Michael Chiesa, Beneil has really effective low-kicks. Gamrot’s low-kick defence thus far in the UFC has largely been the traditional “ignore them” method, but even if Dariush is not able to accumulate fight-changing damage to Gamrot’s legs, the low-kicks are a great tool for cage-cutting.
Previously, Dariush has looked to the round-kick to the body as his preferred cage-cutting tool (to mixed success). As a southpaw, the roundhouse kick has been a big part of his game, but despite boasting a black belt in Cordeiro’s Muay Thai system, Dariush consistently lands out of his position after throwing his kick. At times, he will throw the left hook as a means of discouraging his opponent from taking advantage of the position, other times his opponent will capitalize by landing a punch or absorbing a body lock. Gamrot will switch-stances, but the majority of this fight will likely be an open-stance match-up (Dariush in southpaw, Gamrot in orthodox), maintaining an opening for Dariush’s body kick if he can set it up retract it safely to a balanced stance.
For most switch-hitters, the ability to fight in either stance can be a great advantage against a single-stance opponent. For Gamrot, however, it has caused some problems. Gamrot is clearly more comfortable striking from an orthodox position, but tends to shoot the majority of his takedowns from southpaw. He simply could just be more comfortable wrestling with his right foot forward, or he goes southpaw simply to have his lead foot on the same side as his opponent to access his favourite takedown, the low-single. This tendency to switch to southpaw when he wanted to shoot caused Gamrot major issues in his two hardest fights, against Kutateladze and Tsarukyan, as he needed to go southpaw to shoot his low-single, but every time he switched, Kutateladze and Tsarukyan blasted him with body kicks.
Through 5 fights in the UFC, Gamrot has fought uniquely orthodox fighters. With Dariush being southpaw, Gamrot will have access to the single-leg from the same stance he strikes from; the question is if he is as comfortable attacking the low-single on his left side (I assume he’s comfortable enough). Dariush will likely still look to hammer in his body kicks into the open-side considering the success Kutateladze and Tsarukyan had going to the body.
He can’t eat too many, but Dariush’s kicks certainly present an opening for Gamrot to initiate his wrestling. Dariush still most commonly throws his low kicks to the thigh as opposed to the calf (despite the calf kick having a longer reach, being harder to catch and more damaging if it connects). Meanwhile, one of Gamrot’s most significant moments against Tsarukyan came late in the fourth-round when Gamrot was able to catch the body kick and then attempt to transition to a double leg, eventually coming up on a rear body lock and taking Tsarukyan’s back.
If and when Dariush does find himself beneath Gamrot, this is where the excitement begins. He hasn’t spent a lot of time on his back but Dariush is truly one of the best bottom-players in the UFC. After falling off Tony Ferguson’s back, Dariush found himself in a perpendicular half-guard with an underhook on Tony’s left leg. Beneil showed great flexibility pummelling his left leg under Tony’s chest and isolating the leg, working his way into a dominant saddle position (aka inside sankaku), with the cross-grip on the Tony’s left leg and both of Beneil’s leg’s controlling on the inside (although he did not opt to triangle his own legs to really secure the position).
Although he was not able to finish the heel hook, Dariush caused visible pain to Tony and nearly ended the bout if not for Tony being a psychopath.
Dariush has many weapons off his back but I would not be surprised to see him play the leg-lock game with Gamrot, even if just to sweep. Of course, Gamrot has solid leg-locks himself, so there should be some interesting leg entanglements in this one. Dariush should likely try to avoid the 50/50 position (having a cross-grip on the opponent’s leg with both of your own legs on the outside, offering the opponent equal access to the same position on the other side) if he can.
If Dariush gets on top, it’s harder to expect how it plays out. Dariush’s top game in the UFC has largely consisted of him sitting in half-guard and throwing small shots until his opponents get frustrated and try to shrimp away and ultimately give up their back. Gamrot is quite clearly one of the better scramblers in the UFC, so I wouldn’t expect much static action with him on bottom or on top.
Dariush may still look to wrestle, but it would not be taking the path of least resistance against Gamrot. Even when Tsarukyan, an explosive 25-year-old athlete, perfectly timed his double-leg as Gamrot stepped in to punch, Gamrot showed remarkable instincts and heavy hips to stop the shot. Much of Dariush’s wrestling game consists of him pulling his opponent onto the fence with his double collar-ties and working his way down to an over/under lock, pummelling inside to a double-under body lock, and then dropping onto the legs. It is a very slow and methodical process that has caused some fans to label him a “boring fighter” despite his striking being wildly entertaining.
It is hard difficult to imagine this process working on a grappler at the quality of Gamrot. Dariush will also jab his way down to a single leg, and he could find moments of back exposure from numerous positions against Gamrot, but I imagine his best path to victory is in the striking.
There are clearly several questions heading into this fight as Gamrot has yet to fight a southpaw in the UFC, and Dariush has yet to really face a persistent wrestler at the caliber of Gamrot. It would appear that Dariush has a path to victory no matter where the fight goes, given his level of sophistication off his back, his scrambling ability, and his comfort within wild, messy fights.
But Gamrot will push a pace that few others really can. Thank you for reading and don’t forget to subscribe to the Fight Guide for weekly fight previews.