The Esquijitsu of Eduardo Telles
This article is part of our “long article” requests through Patreon! A huge thank you to Alteroc (@crwate01) for this excellent topic suggestion.
In an effort to learn more about combat sports, Alteroc laid out an article format that covers three athletes from a specific sport:
An all-time great
A specialist
Someone “weird”
This article covers #3 for jiu jitsu
Brazilian jiu jitsu is a young sport compared to its older brother Judo and timeless progenitor wrestling. One consequence of that youth is that the right way of doing things isn’t nearly as well established and codified as you find in more mature disciplines. There’s still tremendous room for experimentation and weirdness, and while most of the less traditional ways of playing end up being evolutionary dead ends, competitors with odd styles do sometimes come to the fore and show that there’s still plenty of room for creativity and imagination on the tatami. One such competitor is the master of the turtle, Eduardo Telles.
A prolific competitor for over two decades, Telles has been near the center of some of the most consequential events in BJJ history. After bouncing around a bit early in his career he finally landed at Alliance HQ in Sao Paulo, Brazil as a purple belt. It was a legendary room with competitors like Demian Maia, Andre Galvao, Marcelo Garcia, Cobrinha, and Terere all on the mats under the watchful eye of The General, Fabio Gurgel as well as his mentor Jacare Cavalcanti (from whom Telles would eventually receive his black belt). Training with such killers Telles progressed rapidly, placing highly in prestigious tournaments such as the Pans and Brasilieros.
Alliance was a powerhouse team in the early 2000s, but didn’t turn out to be big enough to contain all the personalities (and egos) of its champions. In 2002 Terere, Telles, and Maia violated Gurgel’s instructions by competing for cash prizes at the upstart CBJJO world championships. Gurgel wanted the team to compete only in IBJJF (the older federation) sanctioned events, but those events awarded no prize money. The end result was Terere and Telles leaving Alliance to form their own team, TT, taking much of the top young talent with them. TT wasn’t destined to be long lived as Terere unfortunately spiraled downward into drug abuse; Telles ended up establishing his own gym, 99, which is open to this day in San Diego.
Coming up through the ranks surrounded by many of the top competitors in the world Telles had to find a way to survive on the mats. The answer he came up with was highly unusual: whereas most BJJ players strive to stop their opponents at the point where their offense starts, Telles developed a game based around stopping his opponent from completing their offensive ideas. His was a game of opportunism in which he let his opposition do what they wanted to the point of over-extension, at which point Telles was able to reverse the position gaining the upper hand. His Alliance teammates called his style ‘esquijitsu’, which loosely translates to ‘weird BJJ’. This strange style centered around half guard and most famously the turtle position, though as we’ll see Telles plays the positions as continuations of each other rather than as distinct nodes in his overall game.
Before diving in to dissect Telles’s strategy, it’s important to understand a little bit about how BJJ matches are scored. Black belt matches are ten minutes in length, and are decided either by submission (immediately ending the contest), points and advantages (which are awarded for attaining specific positions or executing certain actions), or referee’s decision (the head ref and two corner refs render a decision in the event of a tie based on who they believe was more offensive and came closer to scoring). Most high level BJJ matches come down to a contest in the guard. The bottom player playing guard will look to sweep for two points or sometimes submit his opponent, and the top player, the passer, will look to pass for three points. To complete a pass you must be fully past the legs of your opponent with no part of your legs entangled by theirs, and crucially you must have the guard player on his side or back. If you get past the legs but the guard player gets to his knees, no points for you. You do get an advantage, but advantages function as minor points that only matter if no actual points are scored for the duration of the match. If you want points, you either take the back of the man in turtle or you knock him to his side or back and establish top control.
Because your back is exposed turtle is not considered to be a very strong position by most competitors. It’s a last ditch position from which you try to get back to guard and salvage your chances in the match. While there are reversals there, they all rely on your opponent making a mistake of some sort, either placing a hand where he shouldn’t or getting too high on your back in an attempt to get his hooks in. No, the way to deal with a passer is to play guard, keep your legs between him and you, and look to set up sweeps. Certainly not to treat your last line of defense as your first.
Or, what the hell, you could just let guys by your legs and build a game around not letting them ever take your back or flatten you out, a game based on denying your opponents the final piece of the puzzle they need to score. It might even be a rational thing to do if you came up with Terere and Demian Maia since you’re unlikely to stop those guard passing geniuses the old fashioned way, especially if you’re a purple belt and they’re already winning black belt world titles. And if you worked on it day after day on the toughest BJJ mat in the world, you’d probably develop a deep bag of tricks that would work on almost anyone you were likely to face in competition. And that’s exactly what Telles did.
Unique among high level competitors Telles never fought the pass by preventing his opponent from bypassing his legs. Instead he would let them go around or through his guard, but as they did he’d set up grips and positioning so that he was virtually guaranteed to get to his knees. This unorthodox skill set became the basis of his half guard game as well, the position from which most of his own offense originates. He is expert at finding unusual (but as we’ll see, very intentional and consistent) gripping methods that let his opponent get just so far but no further while at the same time setting up very tricky sweeping opportunities. Of course, all this relies on being able to defend back takes since his back is constantly exposed, but even the best competitors in the world were very, very rarely able to take Telles’s back in his prime. His back take defense is arguably the best ever given how often it’s been tested and how few competitors even among the all time greats of the sport were able to take advantage of his back exposure. Overall his game gives the impression of Escher’s Relativity: impossible and bizarre, but completely harmonious. Let’s dive in.
Telles All the Way Down
First and foremost for Telles the turtle position is a guard pass defense. Before we starting looking at his offensive options lets dig into why it works so well for him in defending against even the best passers in the world. It all starts with posts and framing.
In a match he should have won (a non-scored sweep for Telles would have been the difference), Telles fights off the guard pass attempt of American standout Keenan Cornelius. Keenan has strong grips on Telles’s pants and is able to turn the corner, but the frame Eduardo keeps pressed against Cornelius’s face allows him to maintain distance and work to free his legs. Unable to collapse the frame Keenan has to try and move back to his right, but Telles is ready and takes the opportunity to get his legs back under him returning to his favorite turtle.
The core of Telles’s defense in the turtle is that he is constantly framing away and posting on his opponent preventing them from collapsing the distance. What this means is that Telles always has room to hip out and reestablish his guard or turtle.
From the same match. Here Keenan stands to pass and simply walks around Telles as he hunkers down. In doing so however Telles first gets a grip on Keenan’s right pant leg. That grip alone is sufficient to keep Keenan from jumping on the back or fully closing in on the hips. A stiff arm provides sufficient distance for Telles to sit out and go back to his lazy butterfly guard.
Even if an opponent is able to clear Telles’s posts and frames, it still doesn’t mean you’ve scored. Taking his back has proven nearly impossible for two generations of top level competition. Telles’s back take defense is deceptively simple: he curls very tight and uses keeps his hands low to prevent hooks while constantly scooting his hips up his opponent’s body. The combination makes it almost impossible to get a hook in on him.
Telles’s opponent has managed to get a seat belt grip and is threatening the back. Telles simply keeps his hands low to block the legs feet from coming inside while at the same time heisting his hips. The combination renders his opponent unable to maintain the chest to back contact necessary to secure the back, and in the ensuing scramble Telles is able to shrug him over his head and take top position.
While posting and hipping away is by far Telles’s favorite method of defense, he also relies heavily on another staple technique: the Granby roll. The name comes from American folkstyle wrestling where the move is used as an escape/reversal from referee’s position.
A folkstyle Granby roll. The bottom man lifts his hips and angles them slightly to the outside of his opponent’s near leg. He then rolls across his shoulders breaking the grip and escaping to neutral.
In wrestling the Granby is seen as a low percentage technique more common in high schools than collegiate programs. In BJJ however it’s an important element of defense for almost every player and doubly so for Telles because it serves the additional function of hiding the back.
For a back take to occur, the top man generally needs to get strong contact between his chest and his opponent’s back. The initial motion of the Granby dropping the shoulders to the mat makes that contact impossible to achieve or maintain. As such the Granby is a go-to move when a competitor finds himself on the wrong end of a back take attempt as Telles so often does.
Telles has a poor score against powerful, pressuring top players, none more so six time world champion Saulo Ribeiro. Here though, Telles manages to thwart the legend’s pressure with a well timed Granby avoiding the back take and regaining his guard.
While his willingness to go the position is unusual, the defensive elements of Telles’s turtle guard game are actually fairly standard in the BJJ repertoire. The same cannot be said of his offense. No one has as varied a counter-offense game from the turtle position and related octopus half guard as Telles. An interesting comparison can be drawn to the counter-wrestling style that’s know in the US as funk.
After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It
I bring up funk wrestling because the strategic idea behind the style is almost perfectly analogous to Telles’s grappling. Namely, that rather than prevent an initial attack you let the attack happen but turn it to your advantage as your opponent tries to finish. Some of the positions are even quite similar. For example, here’s the standard bearer of a generation of American funk wrestlers, Ben Askren, reversing his opponent Jake Herbert off a takedown attempt:
Herbert gets in deep on a double, but with Askren that’s just the beginning of the fight to score. Askren goes over the top and passes Herbert’s leg maintaining a strong underhooking grip. In the ensuing scramble Funky Ben is able to come up under the Wildcat and sneak out the back, turning in to score.
Compare that sequence to this one from one of Telles’s myriad IBJJF matches:
Having gone to turtle, Telles is ready for his opponent to reach over the top to try and consolidate his position. Telles pulls in on his leg grip and comes out the back, turning in for the 2 point sweep.
Other opportunistic wrestling style reversals make appearances in Telles’s praxis as well. Take for example the close cousin to the Granby, the Peterson roll.
Similar to a Granby the Peterson roll involves escaping the hips to the outside and rolling sideways, only in this instance an arm is trapped to roll the top man with you.
Telles hits variations of these arm trapping rolls all the time as opponents get their arms too deep under his body while getting their weight too high over his back.
Telles’s opponent has his left arm deep under Telles’s shoulder. Eduardo traps the arm, lifts his hips, and rotates to turn his opponent to the mat and jump across his body to top side control. There are many variations on this theme in his praxis, but all involve catching his opponent over committing and taking advantage to roll to top position.
Telles’s system isn’t limited only to the classic turtle position. His landmark DVD on his ideas was called Turtle and Octopus Guard. The octopus guard as envisioned by Telles is a form of hybrid turtle/half guard in which rather than play for the traditional underhook, the guard player tries to swim his arm and head under his opponent’s far side arm.
Telles showing his trademark Octopus position. The connection to turtle happens because the guard player typically comes all the way up onto his knees facing down to complete sweeps.
In addition to the arm coming around the back, Telles commonly plays the position by attacking the far side leg as here in one of his best wins against future 3x Mundial champ Otavio Souza:
Telles in his unusual hybrid turtle/half guard. Souza’s right leg is entangled and Telles has managed to secure the Gracie Barra standout’s left leg with an overhooking grip. Completing the transition up to turtle completes the sweep.
From the same exciting match, one which saw several rounds of back and forth sweeping, Telles is again deep in his half guard. Unable to get a full overhook on Souza’s leg he makes do with a pants grip, but the sweeping idea is the same: come up to turtle and walk into Souza to complete the attack.
In addition to attacks which start in half and end up in turtle-esque positions, Telles will also go the other way transitioning quickly from turtle to attacks which are more formally part of his half guard system (though again, regarding them as separate positions is the wrong way to think about his BJJ).
Once again on the bottom in turtle Telles smells the chance to get his right arm all the way under his opponent’s arm pit. At the same time he sits out and shoots his right leg across his opponent’s hips and turns hard to his right sweeping for 2.
In addition to his preference for turtle, another oddity of Telles’s game was his love of kneebars. Leg locks are currently de rigeur, but in Telles’s developmental years they were still rare and frankly rather frowned upon by the BJJ elite. But Telles never let that stop him from playing the legs, which he would do from top position or from his favorite turtle.
Telles’s opponent commits a cardinal sin of top turtle play and lets his leg come between Telles’s. Not needing a formal invitation Telles immediately rolls through and pulls the leg straight to finish the knee bar.
Of course, it wasn’t always sunshine and roses for the Turtle Master. The problem with centering your game around an inherently inferior position is that against top level opponents who don’t make mistakes you’re just constantly worse. That showed throughout Telles’s career with his terrible scores against all time greats like Saulo Ribeiro and Roger Gracie.
Telles in his turtle against one of the best to ever do it in 11x world champion Roger Gracie. The grip Telles has on Roger’s left leg might be the start of a sweep against a lesser opponent, but against a talent like Gracie’s it’s the prelude to a tap. With Gracie’s balance on point Telles is unable to better his position as Roger steps across his body. Trapping Telles’s far arm, Gracie rolls forward to finish quickly with an arm bar.
There is no Genius…Without Madness
Aristotle
Eduardo Telles is not an all time great Brazilian jiu jitsu competitor, but by eschewing convention and building his game around underdeveloped positions he did something perhaps greater for grappling posterity than winning Mundials or ADCC: he pushed the technical frontier of the art and showed what was possible from positions others simply dismissed as worthless. Had he modeled his game after his friends Terere or Maia he might have had greater success on the mat, but we’d be left without his innovative play; some of his ideas have become standard ways to approach the positions he championed over his long career. Always in the trenches if not always on the podium, Eduardo Telles is a fierce competitor and a true original of the sport.