Kit Dale's BJJ Great White Grip to Triangle
When this clip first ran in December 2016, the grip Kit Dale was showing off didn't have a name in any BJJ manual — he was calling it the Great White because once he'd sunk it into a sleeve or a…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
When this clip first ran in December 2016, the grip Kit Dale was showing off didn't have a name in any BJJ manual, he was calling it the Great White because once he'd sunk it into a sleeve or a collar, it clamped down and didn't let go until the triangle was locked underneath it. It was a short video buried in a busy month of Jiu Jitsu Style output, tucked in between subscription pitches and cover shoots the way most of Kit's clips were back then. A decade on, the name has mostly been forgotten. The grip fight it describes hasn't.
Watch it: Kit Dale's Great White grip to triangle.
How the Great White grip sets up the triangle
The idea itself is simple enough to survive ten years of trends. Before a triangle choke ever closes, somebody has to lose the fight for a limb, usually a wrist, a sleeve or a collar, and Kit's Great White grip was his answer to winning that fight early, off his back, before the opponent had any idea a submission was coming. Clamp the far grip, break the opponent's posture over the top of it, and the angle needed to swing a hip through and lock the triangle turns up almost by itself. No wrestle for the leg, no scramble at the last second, just a slow, patient strangulation of the space the opponent needs to stay upright, the same principle every Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner eventually learns to respect.
Kit Dale's concept-first approach to BJJ
That patience was very on-brand for the man showing it. By December 2016 Kit Dale had spent a couple of years telling anyone who'd listen that jiu jitsu didn't need to be learned in fixed sequences, that a grip like the Great White wasn't a move to be drilled a thousand times so much as a principle to be understood once and then applied wherever the position called for it. Grip first, break posture second, finish whatever the reaction gives you third. Swap the triangle for an armbar or an omoplata and the same three steps still hold up. That was always the point he was making, technique clips included.
Grip fighting from the bottom in 2026
Grip fighting from the bottom has only got more sophisticated in BJJ since. Ffion Davies builds entire guard games around exactly this kind of early grip theft, closing off an opponent's posture long before a leg ever leaves the mat. Nicholas Meregali finishes triangles from spaces that look impossible until you notice the grip fight that set them up three exchanges earlier. Mikey Musumeci's guard retention, for all its flash, still runs on the same unglamorous principle Kit was demonstrating here, win the connection point first, and the finish takes care of itself. None of today's black belts call it the Great White. Most of them are doing some version of it anyway.
Watch enough Jiu Jitsu at any level and the pattern holds: the triangle chokes that actually land in competition are rarely won at the moment the legs lock. They're won two or three exchanges earlier, in a grip fight most of the crowd isn't watching closely enough to notice. Kit was pointing at exactly that in under a minute of footage back in 2016. Still worth a rewatch.
See you on the mats.
Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 14 December 2016. Refreshed for 2026.