The ADCC 2022 World Championships are, to our rampant excitement, just one month away. All 97 athletes have been named to the six divisions and the singular historic superfight. But the brackets have not yet been revealed.

Throughout the next few weeks, we’ll be analyzing the roster of each division to try to make sense of some likely seeding permutations, and to make our best guess how each of these hypothetical brackets will play out.

NOTE: the brackets below are pure speculation of the FloGrappling staff, and have not been corroborated by ADCC officials.

Update (Aug, 20): Carina Santi has dropped out of ADCC. She is replaced by Elisabeth Clay. That should make Rafaela Guedes the obvious 2-seed, making Reusing or Clay the likely no.3. 

Gabi Garcia is as clear of a no.1 seed as any athlete competing at ADCC 2022. She’s a five-time ADCC finalist and a four-time champion, making her the most decorated woman in the history of the Combat Club.

Eleven years after Garcia’s ADCC debut, she’s set to make her sixth appearance at ADCC.

She has more ADCC experience than the rest of her 60+ kg division combined; and that margin is massive.

Only one other competitor named to the 60+ kg division at the 2022 World Championships has been on the big stage before. That’s Carina Santi, who took silver in 2019, losing to Garcia via submission in the final after back to back impressive victories over Nathieley de Jesus and Tayane Porfirio.

Santi’s experience makes her a likely no.2 seed. But after that, the seeding charts get substantially more opaque.

It’s fair to expect that the Europe Trials winner, Eleftheria Christodolou, and the Oceania & Asia Trials winner, Nikki Lloyd-Griffiths, will be toward the bottom of the chart, as they’ll be sharing this division with world champion grapplers. But that leaves seeds three through six at dispute, as they will be filled with the following athletes:

• Rafaela Guedes
• Kendall Reusing
• Amy Campo
• Giovanna Jara

At first look, this is the appropriate order for these athletes to fill in the remaining spots. Guedes has a submission win over Reusing at WNO. Reusing has a high score victory over Campo at the East Coast Trials finals. Campo won the 60 kg division in the 2022 West Coast Trials which broke attendance records. Giovana Jara is an impressive grappler; but the newly-strapped brown belt is less decorated than her counterparts.

But this seeding falls outside of an ADCC norm. It pits Reusing against Campo in a rematch from trials in the first round of the division, which is unlikely for ADCC organizers to favor.

If that’s the case, bracket makers could opt to swap Campo and Jara, spreading out the probable mismatches throughout the bracket, but also guaranteeing a barnburner match between Amy Campo and Rafaela Guedes in the first round.

In either of these two cases, Kendall Reusing would be pitted against Gabi Garcia in the second round, while Rafaela Guedes and Carina Santi would be the favorites to move ahead on the opposite side. Amy Campo and Giovanna Jara are deserving wild cards, and each has the potential punch ahead to the final after a few upsets.

But at the end of the weekend, one factor will decide this division: whether any athlete has the will, the skill, to defeat Gabi Garcia in the ruleset where she’s been dominant for a decade