FanHouse Toby Imada

It was the YouTube highlight that put the upstart Bellator Fighting Championships on the map, and it was an easy choice for our MMA Submission of the Half Year: Toby Imada choking out Jorge Masvidal with an inverted triangle.

Eddie Alvarez beat Toby Imada to win the lightweight title and Hector Lombard beat Jared Hess to win the middleweight title Friday night as the Bellator Fighting Championships brought its inaugural season to a close.

Last week Bellator brought us one of the sickest submissions in recent years when Toby Imada finished Jorge Masvidal with an inverted triangle choke. This time around, the upstart promotion brings us a crazy KO.

Toby Imada has competed in 34 mixed martial arts fights over the last 11 years. Fourteen of his 22 victories have come via submission.

However, he will be hard-pressed to top the inverted triangle choke he used to defeat Jorge Masvidal in the semifinals of Bellator FC's lightweight tournament last Friday.

FanHouse spoke to Imada about how he pulled off the submission and how he's dealing with his new-found fame. The interview is after the jump.

The upstart Bellator Fighting Championships mixed martial arts promotion held its inaugural show on April 3. However, when historians look back on their growth as an MMA organization, they will probably point to Friday, May 1, 2009, as their official launch into the MMA space.

On that night, in the Hara Arena in Dayton, Ohio, Toby Imada pulled off one of the most shocking submissions in MMA history when when he choked out Jorge Masvidal with an inverted triangle.

Bjorn Rebney, Bellator FC's founder and CEO, believes the buzz created by that submission is proof that his organization has arrived.