One of the most traditionally practiced chokes in jiu-jitsu, the triangle was responsible for timeless moments in MMA history, from Royce Gracie, Anderson Silva and Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira’s legendary wins over Dan Severn, Chael Sonnen and Mark Coleman, to Nate Diaz’s unforgettable X-rated win over Kurt Pellegrino.
As the sport evolves, however, triangle chokes have become rarer.
The UFC promoted 495 fights in 2025. Only two of the 83 submission finishes were triangles: Ignacio Bahamondes claimed a bonus for his victory over Jalin Turner, and Joseph Morales won a tournament on The Ultimate Fighter with his choke of Alibi Idiris.
RIZIN had zero triangle chokes over 110 bouts this year, and PFL saw three of the 51 submissions over 245 fights come via triangle choke with Taha Bendaoud, Vinicius Cenci, and Omar El Dafrawy successfully catching their opponents. ONE Championship only saw two triangles in 126 MMA contests (Sardor Karimboev and Norika Ryu), and KSW registered four fight-ending triangles in 109 contests, courtesy of Viktor Cervinsky, Piotr Kacprzak and Oleksiy Polischuck (twice).
Overall, of 1085 MMA bouts that took place under the banners of the five major MMA organizations (UFC, PFL, ONE, RIZIN and KSW), only 11 of the 211 tap-outs in 2025 were by triangle choke.
“Honestly, this is shocking,” said Morales, who earned one of the finishes in the UFC. “I had no clue. I wish somebody would tell Dana [White], and he would have gave me the 50K that night [laughs]. But that’s pretty cool I didn’t know that. That’s amazing.”
Cenci, who scored one inside the PFL cage when he beat Caruso in under two minutes back in June, explains why it’s so hard to do triangle chokes in MMA these days.
“I think the triangle is a very basic jiu-jitsu submission but 90 percent of the time you have to be on bottom, in guard, and that’s a bad place to be in MMA,” Cenci said. “It’s also a very risky position to attempt, because if it doesn’t work, you’re in big trouble. Everyone is already more aware of it today, and few people take the risk because of that fear of being on bottom. Once you’re on bottom, people just scrambling any way they can to get back to their feet and don’t even think about submissions. I think that because of how vulnerable you are when trying a triangle, people end up not going for it.”
Cenci said jumping for a guillotine in his fight with Brent Primus led to his defeat, and seeking such moves are dangerous. However, he still felt confident enough to try the same thing against Caruso.
“[Caruso] put his head in, and I went for the guillotine,” Cenci said. “I looked at my coach and asked, ‘Can I?’ They said, ‘If you’ve got it, go for it!’ I tried the guillotine and as soon as he slipped out of the guillotine, I pushed his arm inside and locked the triangle. He tried to slam me, and I ended up tightening the triangle even more. For me, it was one of the most beautiful submissions of the year, man.”
Veteran jiu-jitsu coach Fabio Prado, who grew up training under the likes of Carlson Gracie and Marcelo Clemente in Rio de Janeiro, has taught Morales and other experienced fighters at Team Alpha Male for many years now. He argues that experienced jiu-jitsu players have a harder time making the transition to MMA compared to the old days.
“I mean, there are guard players like Charles [Oliveira] and Morales, but there aren’t many,” Prado said. “For example, when I see guys who come from wrestling and it’s already too late for them to learn the basics of jiu-jitsu because they have old wrestling habits, I tell them, ‘You can’t sit your butt on the mat, you have to stand up.’ But with Morales, I can tell him to take it easy, because he’ll figure it out. His guard is absurd, very technical. He picked up a lot of details from [Urijah] Faber too. Faber taught him a lot.”
“There are very few true guard players in MMA today,” he continued. “People want takedowns, ground-and-pound and submissions from top position. Arm-triangles and guillotines are stronger positions that work a lot without the gi, and that’s really what we’ve been seeing in MMA. Morales knows how to play guard, because he’s been training since he was a kid. He came to my class at 14 and went through gray, yellow, and green belts, and he played De La Riva guard really well. He was very technical. Then he got his blue belt and started wrestling. That’s what I think is the time to take off the gi. A guy should train in the gi up to blue belt as a kid and then train wrestling and focus on takedowns. If he ever has to end up on bottom, he already has that base he learned daily as a kid.”
Morales jokes that Prado “yells at me in practice when I’m on my back for too long,” saying that the low number of triangle choke finishes is the result of “the evolution of MMA.”
“The judges, they see people on their back, and they don’t see it as an advantageous position,” Morales said. “I think even fighters don’t see it as advantageous. You could get hit, you could get punched. It’s not my goal to be on my back as well. If it happens, it happens. But my main purpose when I’m on my back is to stand up. I just think the sport kind of evolved to be mostly striking and to be mostly on top in terms of jiu-jitsu, so the game kind of changed a little bit.”
One of the most successful fighters to transition from jiu-jitsu to MMA in recent years was Roberto Satoshi, who moved full-time to the ring to become RIZIN lightweight champion. Five of his 20 MMA wins came via triangle chokes, including his December 2024 title defense against Vugar Karamov.
“I think the triangle choke is the most difficult submission to get because there’s no position to go for it that doesn’t put you in disadvantage,” said Satoshi, who ended up losing his belt to Ilhom Nazimov on the final RIZIN card of the year on Dec. 31. “You can go for an armbar from the mount, you can go for other chokes from the back, a position where you have control and advantage.
“I was able to get triangles from back control but 90 percent of the time you’re from the bottom, and everybody knows jiu-jitsu at the highest level [of MMA]. It’s not like the old days when people had no idea of jiu-jitsu. You’re in a position where you’re getting punched and elbowed, the opponent on top of you knows this position, so it’s hard to get their head and arm in.”
Morales echoes Satoshi, saying “you gotta be a little bit more creative and gotta hit them from different places” if you want to end a fight with a triangle choke. He calls it his favorite submission and joked he might go for a flying triangle in his next bout in 2026.
“What’s funny is that two weeks before the fight had happened, where I got the submission,” Morales said, “I was teaching my kids class and for two weeks we were just working triangle chokes with the kids so one of my students brought it up after the fight like, ‘You got him with the move that we were practicing.’ And I was like, yeah, we practice it for a long time. It’s not something that I’m doing all the time in practice, but it’s something I’m always teaching and to be able to hit it at the high level in front of my students and for my kids to see, it was pretty cool.”
Triangle choke numbers remain low and fighters agree there’s no reason to expect it to change in the near future. Prado considers it “strictly an emergency” when you find yourself on the bottom, and even he advises his young students to divert from it when they indicate at young age that MMA is their main goal.
“Being a guard player doesn’t work in MMA today,” Prado said. “There are very few. It’s Plan B or C. Carlson [Gracie] used to say that when heavy punches start coming in the guard starts to loosen and it no longer works [laughs]. These jiu-jitsu black belts who want to transition to MMA, very few of them will do well. Here at my gym, I recommend that at 15 years old, once you’re a blue belt, you go straight to wrestling. And when you come back, don’t even put the gi on.”
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