Fight Stats · Submissions
The Undisputed King - The rear naked choke
Techniques rise, get solved, and vanish. The armbar had its era. The triangle had its highlight reels. One choke never needed a comeback, because it never left. This is what inevitability looks like in the data.
If you could only drill one submission defence, which one?
The rear naked choke, and it is not close. It accounts for 37.7% of every submission finish in UFC history — 9.2 times the next most common. Almost every defensive session in the sport is split more evenly than that, which means almost every defensive session is allocated wrongly.
The premise
Take someone's back, flatten them out, slide an arm under the chin. It is the first submission most people learn and the last one anyone solves. In thirty years of UFC fights, no finishing technique — not the guillotine, not the armbar, not any strike-adjacent fad — has come close to it.
The numbers are not merely lopsided. They are a category error. The rear naked choke has finished 644 UFC fights — 37.7% of every submission with a recorded technique. The second-most-common submission, the guillotine on the ground, has 70. That's not a rivalry. That's a nine-to-one landslide.
644 finishes
Six hundred and forty-four taps. Every dot below is a fight that ended with a forearm across a throat — from open-weight tournament nights in the mid-nineties to last spring's cards. 37.7% of all catalogued submissions, at an average of 6:52 into the fight.
One dot = one rear naked choke finish · 644 total
Nothing else is close
Here is every submission type in UFC history with at least 27 finishes. The scale is honest. Tap any bar for the receipts.
Finishes by method detail, all UFC fights through the data freeze. Percentages are of all submissions with a recorded technique.
Rear Naked Choke — 644 finishes, 37.7% of all catalogued submissions. Average fight time when it lands: 412.4 seconds. Average ending round: 1.78.
Guillotine Choke On Ground — 70 finishes, 4.1% of all subs. Average fight time 370.1s. The RNC has 9.2× as many.
Triangle Choke From Bottom Guard — 66 finishes, 3.9% of all subs. Median finish time 283.5s — a snatch submission, caught early.
Armbar From Bottom Guard — 64 finishes, 3.8%. Fastest average ending round of the top group: 1.42.
Guillotine Choke After Drop to Guard — 57 finishes, 3.3%. Average fight time 337.1s.
Arm Triangle From Side Control — 47 finishes, 2.8%. A grinder: average fight time 450.0s, later than the RNC itself.
Guillotine Choke Standing — 42 finishes, 2.5%. Median finish 227.5s — the fastest ambush in the top ten.
Armbar On Ground — 38 finishes, 2.2%. Median finish time 226.0s.
Arm Triangle From Mount — 36 finishes, 2.1%. The slowest burn in the data: average fight time 470.3s, average ending round 2.00.
Guillotine Choke From Bottom Guard — 36 finishes, 2.1%. Median finish 209.0s.
Armbar From Mount — 35 finishes, 2.1% of all submissions.
D'Arce Choke On Ground — 32 finishes, 1.9%. The scramble era's signature — still a rounding error next to the RNC.
Arm Triangle From Half Guard — 32 finishes, 1.9% of all submissions.
Anaconda Choke On Ground — 29 finishes, 1.7% of all submissions.
Kimura From Side Control — 27 finishes, 1.6% of all submissions.
The choke's share of all submissions, 1994 to 2026
Act I · 1994–2004 · The sparse years
Early UFC data is thin — some years saw fewer than ten submissions total, so the line whips around. The RNC's share swings from 28.6% (1999) to zero — no rear naked chokes at all in 1998 or 2001. It existed. It didn't rule.
Act II · 2005 · The breakout
The Ultimate Fighter era arrives and the RNC arrives with it: 10 finishes in 2005 — 47.6% of the year's submissions, after never exceeding 4 in any prior year. From here the choke never drops below double digits again.
Act III · 2012–2026 · The plateau of inevitability
Once the sport professionalised, the line stopped dipping. Since 2014, the RNC has taken between 31.7% and 50.6% of all submissions every single year — peaking in 2016, when more than half the taps in the UFC came from the back. 2026 is running at 45.3%.
Share is one thing. Volume is the tell.
Fads produce spikes. Fundamentals produce floors. The RNC's raw count climbed with the sport and stayed climbed: 45 finishes in 2016, 45 again in 2023, 40 in 2025. Meanwhile the triangle from guard — six finishes in 2006, a signature of the era — managed one in 2023 and none at all in 2026 so far.
2026 is a partial year (through the 6 August 2026 data freeze).
Everything else went out of style.
It doesn't ambush you. It arrives.
The RNC is not a snatch submission. When it lands, the average fight has run 6:52 — later than the armbar from guard (5:20), the standing guillotine (5:00), or the ground armbar (5:10). Its average ending round is 1.78. You don't get caught in a rear naked choke. You get worn down, taken down, broken down — and then it closes.
Still, 44% of them end round one. And it's the choke that survives deep water: eleven have landed in round four, three in round five — an average of 23:29 into the fight.
Every division taps
Lightweight leads on raw volume — 136 RNC finishes, 44.9% of the division's submissions. But the share story belongs to the small fighters: at flyweight, more than half of all submissions are rear naked chokes. The only place the choke underperforms is heavyweight, where arms are thick, necks are thicker, and fights rarely last long enough to take a back: just 24.0% of the division's subs.
Bar length = RNC finishes; label shows count and the RNC's share of that division's submissions. Non-title bouts shown.
The men who own it
Demian Maia sits alone at the top with nine rear naked choke wins, the first in October 2007 and the last a dozen years later in 2019 — a whole career of taking backs against men who knew exactly what was coming and could not stop it. Michael Chiesa is one behind at eight, and his run is somehow longer: first RNC in May 2012, most recent in March 2026. Fourteen years, same finish.
Then comes the seven club. Charles Oliveira — the most prolific submission artist of his generation — has choked seven opponents from the back between September 2010 and October 2025, fifteen years of the same ending across two divisions and a title reign. Renato Moicano has seven of his own, still adding to the tally as of April 2026. Kenny Florian got his seven done in a five-year sprint from 2005 to 2010, right through the choke's breakout era. Brendan Allen rounds out the list with six, all packed between 2019 and 2023.
Notice what these six don't have in common: era, weight class, or style. A jiu-jitsu purist, a TUF winner, a Brazilian volume machine, a lightweight contender, a 2000s pioneer, a modern middleweight. The choke doesn't belong to a generation. It gets re-inherited by every one.
Thirty years. One answer.
Why it never dies
Every other submission in the top fifteen requires your opponent to make a mistake in front of you. The rear naked choke only requires the fight to keep going. Positions degrade. Fighters get tired, get hurt, get desperate — and desperate fighters give up their backs. That's why the choke's line never dips while the others rise and fall: it isn't a technique that gets solved. It's what happens after everything else is.
Since 2014, four out of every ten submissions in the UFC have ended this way. In 2026, so far, it's 45.3%. Check back in ten years. It'll still be there.
Men and women
The choke rules both games
If the rear naked choke’s dominance were an artefact of male strength or male weight classes, the women’s divisions would be the place it showed.
Of all submission finishes
1,530 submissions on record, and the choke takes more than a third of them.
If anything, more
177 submissions. Nominally higher than the men, though the difference is −5.8 points with a range of −13.5 to 1.9 — consistent, and certainly not lower.
Against men of comparable weight the two are level to a decimal — 42.7% at men’s flyweight and bantamweight against the women’s 42.9%, a difference of −0.2 points. This is worth stating because submissions are the one category where the two games already agree: women submit opponents in 19.3% of fights and men in 19.8%, near-identical, even as the knockout rate differs by a factor of two. The choke’s primacy is not a men’s-division fact that happens also to be true elsewhere. It is a fact about the position, and it holds wherever backs get taken.
What this changes
Stop splitting your submission defence evenly
The usual way to run a defensive session is to give each major submission roughly equal time. Against this distribution, that is close to the worst allocation available.
Back defence, out of all proportion
Split a session evenly across the eight most common submissions and each receives 12.5% of the time. The rear naked choke alone accounts for 37.7% of every submission finish on record — three times the share an even split hands it. Matching the effort to the threat means roughly tripling it.
It arrives early
44.0% of rear naked choke finishes land in round one and another 36.1% in round two. Four in five are done before the third round begins. The thing to survive is your back being taken by a fresh opponent, not a late one.
The exotic catalogue
The next most common finish after the rear naked choke is the guillotine from the ground, at 4.1%. Everything past it is smaller still. Hours spent on the tail of this distribution are hours not spent on the one technique that ends more fights than the next eight combined.
The necessary caveat: these are finishes, not attempts. This data records what ended fights, not what was tried, so the rear naked choke’s dominance is a statement about how reliably it converts rather than how often it is reached for. It is also professional, no-gi, UFC-level data — a grappling-only or gi context distributes differently, and nothing here should be read across to one.