No-Gi Grand Slam: Jaworski 1 Win From History
Three wins down, one bracket to go. Pawel Jaworski, the Academia Gorila black belt who became the first Pole to win ADCC gold last month, walks onto Mat 6 at PalaPellicone this afternoon carrying a run no one in IBJJF no-gi history has ever finished. The 2025 No-Gi Worlds is already his. So are the 2026 Brasileiro No-Gi and the 2026 Pan No-Gi, both won with open-class gold stacked on his weight-class title. The European No-Gi Championship is the fourth and final leg, and closing it out would make him the sport’s first-ever no-gi grand slam champion for a single season. His opening match is against Britain’s Samuel Thomas F. Gibson at 2:30 p.m. local time, first on the 16-man medium-heavyweight bracket. Four wins in two days stand between him and a record no belt promotion, medal count, or sponsorship deal has ever measured.
What the No-Gi Grand Slam Actually Requires
IBJJF runs four marquee no-gi events across a season: the No-Gi Worlds, the Brasileiro No-Gi, the Pan No-Gi, and the European No-Gi Championship. No black belt has ever won all four in the same season. Jaworski’s run so far:
- 2025 No-Gi Worlds — medium-heavyweight gold
- 2026 Brasileiro No-Gi — medium-heavyweight and open-class gold
- 2026 Pan No-Gi — medium-heavyweight and open-class gold, via a heel hook in the semifinal and a triangle choke in the final
- 2026 European No-Gi — in progress, medium-heavyweight only
The open-class doubles at the Brasileiro and the Pan weren’t required for the grand slam, but they explain why bookmakers in the no-gi world stopped treating Europe as a formality. At the Pan, he didn’t just win his weight class — he beat three more opponents in the open final, finishing with a knee bar, a heel hook, and a referee decision. That’s seven matches in one weekend with zero defense-only rounds.
Jaworski’s ADCC gold last month kicked off the run he’s trying to finish in Rome.
The Opening Match: Jaworski vs. Gibson
Gibson, who competes for Arma, drew the first slot against the tournament’s biggest name — not an enviable position on a 16-man bracket. Jaworski’s medium-heavyweight path requires four consecutive wins across two days: the opener Saturday, then quarterfinal, semifinal, and final on Sunday, with the final slated for 4:54 p.m. local time on Mat 4. Registration for the event closed weeks ago once it hit capacity, and FloGrappling is carrying all five tournament days live.
Two names in the bracket matter more than the rest. David Salem Garmo, the Pan No-Gi silver medalist at this weight, has already shown he can take Jaworski past the first exchange. Luan Perote Veras is the name European coaches keep bringing up privately as the closest style match to Jaworski’s own leg-lock-heavy guard game. Neither is guaranteed to reach him — the bracket has to cooperate first — but if either one does, Sunday afternoon gets a lot more interesting than a coronation.
His hand went up in Krakow in September. Rome is a different mat, same question: can anyone stop him.
Why the Leg Locks Keep Working
Jaworski’s reputation got built on heel hooks, and it’s not hype. At ADCC in September, he submitted his first three opponents with leg locks before closing the final against Sweden’s Marlon Tajik on a penalty — a guard so active the officials ran out of patience with the stalling before he ran out of options. Felipe Costa and Gabriel Brod both tapped to inside heel hooks in the earlier rounds, the same entry he’s used against a dozen other black belts over the past eighteen months.
What makes it hard to coach around isn’t the finish — everyone at this level has seen an inside heel hook — it’s the setup. Jaworski doesn’t chase the leg from a committed single-leg X; he baits it from a loose 50/50 that looks defensive until the opponent tries to pass, at which point the entanglement tightens on its own. Coaches who’ve scouted him describe the position as “a trap you walk into while trying to escape a different trap.” That’s the kind of detail a stat sheet never captures.
The inside heel hook that opened his ADCC run — the same entry he’s taken into every bracket since.
Watch the Krakow final below for the full sequence that made him Poland’s first ADCC world champion.
A Polish Breakthrough That Started the Run
Jaworski’s ADCC gold didn’t happen in a vacuum. He shared the Krakow podium spotlight with Helena Crevar, who claimed her own ADCC title in the same event window, and the pairing of two first-time champions from different corners of the no-gi world turned a single tournament into a bigger story for the sport’s growth outside its usual American and Brazilian strongholds. Polish grappling media, largely ignored by the international no-gi calendar before this year, ran wall-to-wall coverage of a hometown black belt beating a Swedish veteran in his own country.
That home-crowd energy doesn’t travel to Italy. Ostia isn’t Krakow, and Jaworski won’t have a few thousand Polish fans chanting his name between rounds. What travels instead is the tape — every opponent left on his European bracket has now watched the same ADCC footage everyone else has, and none of them have found an answer to the setup on film. Scouting a leg lock game is one thing; stopping it live, under two-day tournament fatigue, against someone who’s done it four tournaments running, is a different problem entirely.
Two first-time ADCC champions from Krakow — Crevar and Jaworski both turned one tournament into a season-long storyline.
Academia Gorila’s Bigger Week in Ostia
Jaworski isn’t the only reason his academy flew to Italy. Academia Gorila currently leads the European No-Gi team standings with 43 points, ahead of CheckMat’s 22 and ECJJA’s 21 — a gap built one bracket at a time by teammates most casual fans haven’t heard of yet. Martyna Kapuscinska, a rookie black belt from the same academy, is chasing her own third major title of the season this weekend, a storyline running in parallel to Jaworski’s on an adjacent mat.
That depth matters more than it looks on paper. A single standout can get hot for one tournament; a team that’s stacking points across weight classes and gender divisions in the same event is running a program, not riding a hot streak. Academia Gorila’s coaching staff built their no-gi curriculum around exactly the entanglement-heavy leg lock game Jaworski uses, and it shows up in how many of their competitors end matches the same way he does.
Kapuscinska’s own title run at the same event — Academia Gorila’s depth on full display in Ostia.
What’s Actually at Stake Beyond the Trophy
No no-gi grand slam has ever been won because the four events have never lined up for one competitor to clear all of them in the same season before. Injuries, weight cuts, and scheduling conflicts have broken every previous run before it reached the final leg — usually at the Pan or the Euro, the two events closest together on the calendar. Jaworski’s own body has held up through a Pan No-Gi weekend that included seven matches and an ADCC campaign three weeks before that. Fatigue, not a better opponent, is still the most realistic way this ends without a trophy.
A win today and tomorrow also changes the market for Academia Gorila’s no-gi seminars and its international member pipeline — gyms chase affiliation with whoever is currently unbeatable, and “first grand slam champion” is a title that sells instructional content for years, not months. That commercial reality isn’t why Jaworski is competing, but it’s why his academy flew a full roster to Rome instead of sending him alone.
Champion in Krakow. One bracket left to make it a grand slam.
The Rest of His Season, in One Frame
Jaworski’s 2026 hasn’t been limited to IBJJF brackets. He’s also taken superfight bookings against MMA-adjacent names, including a widely discussed clinch battle with Rafael Lovato Jr. around a ONE Fight Night card — a reminder that his leg-lock game translates outside the strict no-gi ruleset too. Promoters have taken notice of a Polish black belt who can fill a bracket and still draw eyes to a standalone match.
The clinch game shows up in superfights too — not just IBJJF brackets.
None of that cross-promotion matters if he loses on Mat 6 this afternoon. The grand slam doesn’t care about a crossover resume; it cares whether Gibson, then whoever survives the next two rounds, then whoever’s left standing Sunday, can find an answer Jaworski hasn’t already drilled a hundred times. Based on everything he’s shown since September, that answer hasn’t shown up yet.
Results from Rome should start landing on FloGrappling’s live coverage within hours of each match. Check back on our No-Gi Weekly roundup for how this bracket fits into the rest of the sport’s packed October calendar, and revisit his Pan No-Gi double gold run to see exactly how he got here.
Sources
- Pawel Jaworski Enters European No-Gi With First Grand Slam In Reach — MiddleEasy, bracket details and event schedule
- European IBJJF Jiu-Jitsu No-Gi Championship 2026 — official event page, dates and venue
- 2026 ADCC World Championship Results — BJJ Heroes, Jaworski’s ADCC campaign
