Organized by the Abu Dhabi Combat Club (ADCC), the ADCC Submission Fighting World Championship is the most prestigious Brazilian jiu jitsu tournament in the world, considered by many to be the “Olympics of submission fighting.” Yet fighters aren’t paid to compete, and the prize money hasn’t increased in decades despite the sport’s boom in popularity. Now, famed jiu jitsu competitor and social media troll Craig Jones is putting on a rival tournament on the same day, in the same city — with a grand prize of $1 million — and paying every athlete one dollar more than the grand prize money at ADCC as a way to protest fighter pay.

The ADCC is largely considered to be the Olympic Games of grappling. Every two years, the best athletes from a variety of different martial arts including Judo, freestyle wrestling, Russian Sambo, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu compete for the title of best in the world. ADCC began in 1998 as the creation of Sheik Tahnoun Bin Zayed — the current national security adviser of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (incidentally, his father is Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, founder and first president of the UAE). Tahnoun was introduced to jiu jitsu during his time at college in the United States, and together with his instructor Nelson Monteiro, conceived of a tournament that would feature the best submission fighters from all over the world, competing against one another in an effort to help further grow and formalize the sport.

To date, ADCC has been a huge success in the world of grappling, going from putting on niche underground events confined to a basketball court, to now attracting well over ten thousand fans to college stadiums. But while the sport of grappling grows exponentially, only modest strides have been made in terms of athlete welfare. For example, at the time of the first ever ADCC, every athlete competed for free, with the eventual winner being rewarded with $10,000. Almost three decades later, the prize money hasn’t increased, or even kept up with inflation.