The field was a genuine cross-section of the masters elite. Sixteen athletes, including Rafael Lovato Jr., fresh off his upset of Giancarlo Bodoni in ONE and five weeks out from his Pawel Jaworski booking, alongside Rafael “Formiga” Barbosa, Jaime Canuto, Rodrigo Caporal, former BJJ Stars masters champion Luis Marques, Anderson “Cyborg” and a dozen more names that any competitor of the last two decades would recognise. Gracie’s run through it went through Filipe Carmona, Wellington Alemão, and finally Horlando Monteiro, who had earned his place in the final by beating Leandro Maia and Anderson Cyborg on his own side of the bracket.
What made the run stand out was not a single highlight so much as the through-line. Gracie’s grip fighting stayed disciplined round after round, his hips stayed heavy from the top, and his transitions kept arriving on the far side of his opponents’ reactions rather than into them. The GP format is designed to punish anyone who can only bring one game plan for one match. Multiple performances in a single night against fresh opposition is a different examination entirely, and it tends to reward the competitor whose fundamentals hold their shape deepest into the evening. Gracie’s answer, across the bracket, was to keep the same plan and sharpen it as the night went on. Monteiro, who had done real work to reach the final, met a version of Gracie that seemed to have solved the tournament before it started.
The superfight slate gave the card its second centre of gravity, and its most widely travelled result. Renato Moicano, the UFC lightweight who has never let anyone forget he was a grappler first, submitted former Bellator lightweight champion Patricky “Pitbull” Freire with an arm-triangle choke in under four minutes. The sequence, per Sherdog’s account, was clean and entirely on brand. Moicano countered a Freire takedown attempt, advanced to mount, and walked the choke in from there. Shoulder pressure into the neck, hips squared, the frame cinching by inches until there was no space left to bridge into. Arm-triangles from the top rarely look dramatic on replay. They tighten quietly. Moicano’s version was textbook, the kind of finish that rewards the person who kept drilling the small adjustments long after the room emptied.
The win moves Moicano’s submission grappling record to 3-1, alongside earlier victories over Chase Hooper in 2021 and Cristian Guzman in 2024 and a decision loss to Russia’s Yusuf Raisov. For Freire, the tap slots into an uncomfortable pattern. It is his second grappling submission loss to a UFC athlete, after tapping to Arman Tsarukyan last year, and it lands on top of a five-fight losing streak in MMA. At 40, the crossover conversation around the Pitbull brothers’ generation returning to pure grappling keeps producing the same lesson. Cage instincts, particularly the urge to create space and stand, work against a grappler who needs to accept a position and hunt from inside it. Moicano, on the night, was simply the man who had spent more recent hours thinking in gi logic.
The timing of the performance matters for Moicano’s other career. He returns to the octagon at UFC 331 on September 18 in Los Angeles, where he is reportedly slated to face former featherweight title challenger Brian Ortega. A sub-four-minute submission of a decorated MMA veteran, five weeks before a fight against one of the division’s most dangerous grapplers, is about as useful a tune-up as the calendar could have offered him.
The rest of the card leaned into the format BJJ Stars has built its identity around: veterans, name-value matchups, and superfights spanning generations, with Roberto Godoi against Diogo Almeida among the featured attractions. Replays of the full card are available on FloGrappling.
The question sitting over the main result is what Gracie does with it. Another absolute booking before the year closes, or a targeted superfight landing on his desk first. Either way, the R$200,000 answer to the masters division’s open question is now on record. The bracket was deep, the field was decorated, and the man with the most famous surname in the sport went through it without leaving the outcome to anyone else.
