Wake me up after you gogo: Check out this rare gogoplata submission at IMMAF World Championships

If we were listing the rarest things you’ll see in MMA, you might include Demian Maia’s trash talk, or a Brazilian crowd that doesn’t tell an overseas fighter they’re going to die when they walk out to face a local star.

But also up there in that list is a submission technique that always elicits an excited response from Joe Rogan when someone attempts it inside the octagon, the gogoplata.

This year has actually proved to be something of a prolific year for the gogoplata, as we’ve already seen two examples of the technique as a fight finisher already in 2019. Brent Primus submitted Tim Wilde via gogoplata at Bellator Europe 2, and Andrew Tenneson claimed victory via the same technique at LFA 66.

Remarkably, the two rarely-seen finishes came in the same month as they both challenged for MMA Junkie’s “Submission of the Month” honors in May, with Primus getting the nod from our panel.

And now we’ve seen another gogoplata finish, courtesy of Kazakhstan’s Yernaz Mussabek, who secured the sub in impressive fashion on Wednesday to defeat Bahrain’s Mansur Magomedov and punch his ticket to the flyweight semifinals of the IMMAF World Championships in Bahrain.

Mussabek executed the technique superbly to secure the first-round technical submission finish as he locked up his shin into Magomedov’s throat and pulled down his head with such force that he was able to render his opponent unconscious.

Submissions don’t get much better than that and just shows the level of talent coming up through the amateur ranks as the next generation of MMA stars go for gold in the amateur world championships in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, this week.

And, while we’re on the topic of rare submissions, let’s also salute Wales’ Stephanie Page Evans, who finished Sweden’s Janina Danes with a similarly-rare Von Flue choke (well, rare if your name ins’t Ovince Saint Preux) in the second round of her featherweight bout on Tuesday.