Standing BJJ Guard Pass with Rolles Gracie
When we sat down with Rolles Gracie in 2014 to film a short BJJ tutorial on opening the guard from your feet, we used a line from his cousin Roger to frame it: "If you face someone of a good…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
When we sat down with Rolles Gracie in 2014 to film a short BJJ tutorial on opening the guard from your feet, we used a line from his cousin Roger to frame it: "If you face someone of a good level, you are going to have to stand up to open their guard." A decade on, after watching the closed guard get squeezed off competition mats and then quietly come back, the line still does most of the work. Anyone who has done a serious round of Jiu Jitsu against a clever bottom player knows it. Sooner or later, you have to stand.
Rolles is a 3rd-degree black belt out of the original Rio house, an ADCC veteran and a long-time New York coach, and the details he walked us through that day weren't fancy. They were the family standards — the posture, the grips, the hip line, the small bend of the back that keeps the chest above the hips and the hips above the knees. The whole pass turned on principles you could write on the back of a gi patch. Hands inside, not crossed. Spine stacked, head up. Step in, not out. Push the knees down before you try to break the cross. It's the same checklist Helio used to drill, the same one Carlos Jr. teaches under the Gracie Barra umbrella, and the same one every honest Brazilian Jiu Jitsu coach will still walk a white belt through tonight.
What's changed since 2014 isn't the technique — it's the bottom game it has to solve. Closed guard players in 2026 don't sit and wait the way they used to. They're more active, more upright, more willing to climb to a high pinch and threaten armbars and back takes the second you give them a wrist. The likes of Mikey Musumeci, Cole Abate and the new wave of IBJJF lightweights have made the closed guard a living attacking position again, not just a stalling zone you have to grind through. Which means Rolles's standing details have actually got more important, not less. The instant you posture up, you've taken the bottom's leverage away — their hips can't follow you to the ceiling — and you've reset the exchange somewhere they can't pull you back into a control position.
The same principles also underwrite every modern variant of the pass you'll see this year at Worlds, ADCC and CJI. When Tainan Dalpra stands in a closed guard, he's checking the same boxes Rolles ticked off in our magazine pages. When Felipe Pena does it in no-gi, the grips change but the geometry doesn't. When the Ruotolos bully someone up off the floor in a Polaris superfight, it's still Rolles's hip line doing the talking. You don't need to subscribe to a Gracie seminar tour to see this — a one-tap YouTube search or a few minutes on a BJJ Fanatics or Submeta clip will put a hundred standing-pass variants in your gym bag. The advantage is having a teacher who can tell you which details are decorative and which are load-bearing. Rolles, in 2014, kept us safely on the load-bearing side.
If you take one thing into training this week from this clip, make it the boring one: build the posture before you build the pass. Hands in, elbows tight, hips under, eyes up. Stand with intent, not reluctance. The opening, the knee-cut or the torreando or the long step that follows — those will only ever be as good as the structure underneath them. Twelve years on, that's still how the Gracies pass the guard, and it's still how the best of this generation are doing it too.
See you on the mats.
Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 25 September 2014. Refreshed for 2026.