RIZIN heavyweight tournament brackets revealed

Bloody Elbow 2.0 | Anton Tabuena

Early Monday morning, upstart Japanese promotion Rizin Fighting Federation held a press conference and announced the completed brackets for the heavyweight tournament that begins on Dec. 29.

1. King Mo vs. BAMMA Fighter (TBA)
2. Teodoras Aukstolos vs. Bruno Cappelozza
3. Satoshi Ishii vs. Jiri Prochazka
4. Goran Reljic vs. Vadim Nemkov
5. Valentin Moldavsky vs. Yuta Uchida (Reserve fight)

Bellator and Strikforce veteran King Mo Lawal was originally scheduled to face BAMMA champ Mark Godbeer before an injury scratched that bout.

The Dec. 29 show will consist of the five fights in the first round of the tournament, including the reserve fight.Seperate match-ups between Kazushi Sakuraba vs Shinya Aoki, Yuki Motoya vs Nam Jin Jo, AJ Matthews vs Anatoly Tokov, and Tsuyoshi Kosaka vs James Thompson, will also take place on that show.

The Dec. 31 show will consist of the semi-finals and finals of the tournament, Fedor Emelianenko long awaited return, Kaido Hooverson, Gabi Garcia vs Lei’D Tapa, RENA vs Jleana Valentino.

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About the author

Karim Zidan

Karim Zidan is a investigative reporter and feature writer focusing on the intersection of sports and politics. He has written for BloodyElbow since 2014 and has served as an associate editor since 2016. He also writes for The New York Times and The Guardian. Karim has been invited to speak about his work at numerous universities, including Princeton, and was a panelist at the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival and the Oslo Freedom Forum. He also participated in the United Nations counter-terrorism conference in 2021. His reporting on Ramzan Kadyrov’s involvement in MMA, much of which was done for Bloody Elbow, has led to numerous award nominations, and was the basis of an award-winning HBO Real Sports documentary.