The Quintet ruleset: teams, and the winner stays on

Quintet is a team format, and its one rule changes everything: the winner stays on the mat. Teams field five athletes and fight them one at a time, and a team is only beaten when every one of its five has been eliminated. Which means one athlete, on a run, can beat an entire squad — and that is precisely the thing the format exists to make possible.

How a single bout is decided

This is the version WITH points, and a bout is settled by walking DOWN a ladder. The first rung that separates the two athletes ends the bout, and nothing below it is ever looked at:

• 1. Submission — a tap ends it instantly.
• 2. Points — then advantages, then fewer penalties.
• 3. Golden point — sudden death, two short periods, first score wins.
• 4. The chosen ending — the referee’s call, or both athletes eliminated, decided per tournament.

The order is the whole point. "Both eliminated" is the BOTTOM of the ladder — it can never fire on a bout somebody won six points to nil. Applying an ending a rung too early would take a winner off the mat, and that is the one mistake the format cannot afford.

Winning the tie

When one team runs out of athletes, the other team wins. In the rare case where everyone on both sides is eliminated and the teams are still level, it goes to total team points, then to a referee’s decision — a result reached by fighting for as long as fighting can possibly decide it, and only then handed to a human.

The rules for every bout — the ladder, the ending — are printed on the referee’s tablet and on the public tournament page, from one shared source. The athletes and the referee are never working from two different sets of rules.