REVERSE DE LA RIVA

Reverse de la riva is the open-guard variant in which the bottom player wraps their leg around the inside of the opponent's same-side leg, with the hook foot behind the opponent's calf. The configuration is the mirror of the conventional DLR — where DLR hooks outside the opponent's leg, RDLR hooks inside — and the position is used primarily as a counter to torreando-style passing because the inside hook prevents the opponent from rotating the captured leg outward.

The position emerges naturally as a defensive response when the opponent has stripped a conventional DLR hook by stepping the leg out. The bottom player, rather than abandoning the position entirely, re-inserts the hook on the inside line, creating the RDLR. From this configuration the bottom player has access to sweeps that exploit the opponent's locked rotation — most notably the spinning back-take that uses the captured leg as the pivot point for the rotation.

The RDLR was refined in the modern era by Lucas Lepri and Rafael Lovato Jr., both of whom used it as part of their IBJJF competition games. In the 2010s the Mendes brothers and the broader Atos team integrated RDLR into their open-guard system as the natural answer to opponents who had developed strong DLR defenses. Defensively the RDLR is passed by stepping the captured leg sharply inward and downward to break the hook, by stuffing the bottom player's far leg with body weight, or by switching to a leg drag pass on the captured leg.