Xande Ribeiro's Jiu Jitsu Berimbolo Counter
When we first shared Xande Ribeiro's Jiu Jitsu berimbolo counter back in 2014, the move it was answering was barely four years old in the public eye. The Mendes brothers and the Miyaos had only…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
When we first shared Xande Ribeiro's Jiu Jitsu berimbolo counter back in 2014, the move it was answering was barely four years old in the public eye. The Mendes brothers and the Miyaos had only recently put the position on a podium at black belt and the rest of the lightweight world was still catching up. Coaches argued about whether it was a fad. Purple belts started inverting in every roll. And somewhere in the middle of it all sat the question we asked on the page back then: ok, so you can berimbolo — but can you re-berimbolo a berimbolo? Xande's quiet, methodical answer remains as useful in 2026 as it was the day we filmed it.
The berimbolo, for anyone who's spent the last decade asleep, is the De La Riva entry that sends your training partner cartwheeling under your hooks toward the back. It rewrote the IBJJF lightweight divisions, then the kids' divisions, then the way half the planet teaches bottom game in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. A whole generation of competitors grew up assuming it was just part of the grammar of jiu-jitsu — Mikey Musumeci built a career out of refusing to let anyone else have the position, the Ruotolo brothers fold their own no-gi versions into superfight cards every other weekend, and the entry shows up in lapel guard, K-guard and leg-drag sequences that didn't exist when the original move did. Saying you don't need to deal with the berimbolo in 2026 is a bit like saying you don't need to deal with the closed guard.
What Xande shows in this clip is the part most of the early counters missed. He doesn't try to out-scramble the entry — at black belt, against someone who lives in the position, you almost never win that race. Instead, he gets ahead of the rotation. He reads the De La Riva hook early, kills the cross-grip before the inversion starts, and quietly takes the angle that turns the berimbolo's own momentum into a back exposure for the passer rather than the bottom player. It's the kind of detail that only comes from twenty-plus years on the mat: the answer to a fast move isn't a faster move, it's a piece of timing one step further upstream.
What's quietly brilliant about it is that the answer hasn't aged. Modern berimbolo systems have got cleaner — the entries are shorter, the lapel variations are nastier, and the kids coming through today learn the position with the same fluency that older grapplers learned closed guard. But the leverage point Xande is hunting in this video — beating the cross-grip, breaking the De La Riva connection before the inversion commits — is the same leverage point Lucas Lepri, Tainan Dalpra and Roberto Jimenez are hunting on the IBJJF stage now. The dressings change. The structural mistake the berimbolo player has to make to enter is the same one it always was. Find it early enough and the whole sequence stalls.
For the rest of us, the lesson here goes further than one counter to one position. It's a small reminder that every flashy attack in BJJ has a moment, two or three beats before it looks dangerous, where it can be quietly switched off by someone who has seen it enough times to recognise the shape. That's what Xande was showing in front of a magazine camera a decade ago, and it's what black belts are still doing on World final mats in 2026. Drill the entries to the position you fear, and you stop fearing it.
See you on the mats.
Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 25 September 2014. Refreshed for 2026.