Adam “Megatron” Wardzinski

Adam Wardzinski won the 2025 Worlds final, took the black belt off his waist and left it in the middle of the mat. He walked off without a word. The gesture closed a 12-month stretch in which the Polish black belt from CheckMat won two Worlds, Europeans, Pans and the Brazilian Nationals, all at heavyweight.

The IBJJF calls it a Grand Slam when an athlete wins the four biggest tournaments in the same season. Wardzinski’s started at the 2024 Worlds and ended at the 2025 Brazilian Nationals, with 13 wins and eight submissions by the federation’s count. The 2024 title had already gone into the books for another reason: the IBJJF named him the first Polish world champion.

Wardzinski was born in Poland on April 22, 1991. At 14 he was doing aikido, a choice his parents made. Jiu-Jitsu came at 18, at Combat Zone in Poznań, where Karol Matuszczak coached him from white belt to brown. While still a blue belt, he was already teaching a small group in the city.

As a brown belt he met Brazilian Alan “Finfou” do Nascimento, who was teaching in Sweden at the time. He invited him to teach a seminar in Poland and ended up joining his team. It was Finfou who gave him his black belt, in October 2016, at a ceremony attended by Marcus “Buchecha” Almeida. The nickname Megatron came from a team bus trip he spent “shooting” his teammates with a toy of the character.

His game starts from butterfly guard. More than half of his wins ended in a submission, almost always a choke: from the back, the Ezekiel or the head and arm choke. A head and arm choke is how he closed the 2024 Worlds final, at a tournament where he submitted every opponent.

In 2025, the road to his second world title went through Nicholas Maglicic (11-2), Lucas Norat (13-0) and Rider Zuchi (13-0). In the final, against Leo Ferreira, a 2-0 score was enough.

The farewell lasted five months. In November 2025 he came back for The Crown, beat Igor Tanabe and Paulo Merlin and lost the final to Nolan Stuart by omoplata. In September 2026 he competed at ADCC at home, in Kraków, Poland, as an invited athlete in the under 99 kg (218 lb) division, and lost his first match to Eoghan O’Flanagan.