1,181 Contests, 413 Draws, and Twenty Divisions With No Champion
At Western Australia's submission-only state championships a contest with no tap is a draw, and a division with no tap has no medal. The organiser recorded how every one of 1,181 contests ended. Twenty divisions closed with nobody on the podium.
Melbourne — The #SGTPERTH STATE SUBMISSION CHAMPIONSHIPS '26 ran on Sunday 1 November at the Perth Convention Centre: 253 brackets, gi and no-gi, children to masters. The organiser, Submission Grappling Tournaments, published the full match record on Smoothcomp, and every finished contest in it carries a result.
The rules are printed on the event page and they are not the usual ones. There are no points and no advantages. A bout that ends without a submission is a draw. Divisions are round robins, and the gold goes to the competitor with the most submissions, not to the one who beat the others; a tie goes to the fastest submission. And one line decides this story: if there are no submissions in a division, no medals are awarded.
Of 1,181 contests, 710 ended in a submission and 413 in a draw. 47 were walkovers, 7 disqualifications, 3 no-shows and 1 a referee decision. Adults drew more often than children, 38 per cent of adult contests against 32 per cent of junior ones, and children finished faster: the median submission came at 1:16 in junior bouts and 2:13 in adult bouts.
In twenty divisions every bout was a draw or a walkover, and the placement table lists every competitor at zero. Forty-four competitors went home that way. Seven of those divisions were children's. Most were small: two or three entrants meeting each other three times.
The rules also say a competitor must submit at least one opponent to be eligible for the podium. In four divisions the record lists a medallist with no submission in the division at all: in two, the gold followed walkovers; in one, a gold and a silver followed a walkover and two draws; and in one, a single entrant was placed first after two byes. We report what the record lists. Whether a walkover counts toward the rule is the organiser's to say.
Black belts entered free. Eleven black-belt brackets ran, all men's, with thirty registrations between them. The record gives the clock at each finish but not the submission itself, and a handful of times are short enough to check before they are repeated: the fastest adult submission in the file is recorded at two seconds. We print the times as the organiser recorded them and do not rank them.
Grappling Industries loses its Australian director; three dates leave the calendar
Ben Hodgkinson, director of Grappling Industries for Australia, announced on Facebook in the last week of October that he had "stepped down … effective immediately". He thanked the team for twelve years. He gave no reason.
Three Australian events have since left Grappling Industries' published calendar: Gold Coast (1 November), Melbourne (8 November) and Adelaide (15 November). The Gold Coast event page has required a log-in to view since at least 31 October. In a notice sent to competitors registered for Melbourne, which Matside has seen, Grappling Industries said the event was cancelled "as part of recent organisational changes within Grappling Industries Australia", and that everyone who paid has been refunded to their original payment method. The notice describes "a broader restructuring" and "a significant overhaul of our events and operations", and says the organisation will return "very soon with a new schedule of events". It does not name Hodgkinson or any other person, and it does not mention Sydney or Brisbane.
Two Australian dates remain listed as of 2 November: Sydney on 22 November at the Whitlam Leisure Centre, Liverpool, with 540 athletes registered and late registration open until 18 November, and Brisbane on 6 December.
Matside wrote to Grappling Industries on 2 November asking whether Sydney and Brisbane will go ahead. No reply had been received at publication. Any reply will be added here, dated.
Update, 10 November 2026. Grappling Industries' Smoothcomp page for Sydney (27077) now lists the event for 21 March 2027, at the same venue, with no notice of a postponement; it showed 325 registered athletes on 10 November. Brisbane remains listed for 6 December. Matside's question of 2 November has not been answered. — The Cornerman