DE LA RIVA GUARD

De La Riva guard is the open-guard variant in which the bottom player wraps one leg around the outside of the opponent's same-side leg, hooking the foot behind the opponent's far thigh while keeping the other foot pressed into the opponent's bicep, hip, or opposite leg for control. Named for Ricardo de la Riva Goded, the Brazilian competitor who developed and popularized the position in the 1980s, the De La Riva guard has been the most influential open-guard innovation in the history of competitive jiu jitsu — every modern lightweight competition system is built on it or against it.

The defining feature of the De La Riva hook is that it pre-empts the standing opponent's passing options before they begin. The hook controls the opponent's near leg from rotating away (preventing torreando passes), the foot on the hip or bicep blocks forward pressure (preventing knee cut), and the upper-body grips (typically same-side sleeve and same-side collar, or pant grip on the captured leg) prevent posture-breaking-down and weight settlement. The opponent who tries to disengage to reset distance has to remove the hook first, and the hook is structurally awkward to remove from standing without giving up a sweep angle.

From De La Riva the bottom player has access to a vast network of sweeps and back-takes: the basic De La Riva sweep (push the captured leg out while pulling the sleeve), the kiss-of-the-dragon sweep (invert and capture the back from the De La Riva hook), the berimbolo (invert under the hook to take the back via a rolling motion), and the single-leg-X transition (drop the De La Riva hook and switch to single-leg-X for a different sweep angle). The Mendes brothers' competition record at the IBJJF World Championship across the 2010s was built largely on De La Riva entries chained with these follow-up techniques.

Defensively the De La Riva is passed by stepping the captured leg outside the hook before any sweep is set up, by torreando-style hop steps that prevent the hook from establishing, by knee cut passes once the hook has been stripped, and by the leg drag when the captured leg can be pulled across the centerline. In no-gi the De La Riva is less dominant than in gi because the lack of sleeve and collar grips reduces the upper-body control that makes the position threatening.