BTG 163 - Rigged Fights

Hello and welcome to another episode of Breaking the Guard. Today's episode, uh, well, talk a little bit about the UFC and not so much about the fights, which actually seemed pretty decent. I I didn't get to tune in. I was busy. Uh, but a lot of finishes. I saw a lot of people saying it was a sleeper of a card. But there is one thing that well a couple things that caught my attention. First, another eye poke. [laughter] And uh I talked about it on Friday, but there seems to be uh rumors that on Monday there's supposed to be a meeting about changing the I poke rule and hopefully the all all the fouls rule and they're saying it's going to be taken away the decision from the referee. So, I'm imagining there's going to be some type of ruling happening that it's not going to be at his discretion. So, it's not going to be a subjective call. That sounds promising as long as it's just point deduction. Like I said, the punishment has to be harsh to deincentivize this because it's pretty crazy. Uh, and what's funny is that the guy who did the eye gouge was a teammate of Tom Aspenol who was saying, "I've never eye gouged anybody before." And well, he did now, but at least this time the eye gouger didn't win the fight. He ended up losing. Uh but his opponent looked like he was in pretty bad shape even after he managed to score a knockout win the TKO but he just grabbed his eye immediately after he won the fight. So he kind of toughed it out there but wasn't feeling too great obviously. Uh hopefully we get to see that action as far as heavier punishments on stalling call. I mean on f fouls so we can not have every fighter out there just reaching like this trying to get an eye gouge and then go whoops right. Um the metric to me should be intentionality and damage. I've already talked about it so we'll move on. The other thing that's a little interesting that we haven't heard much about this is that one of the fights had a major swing of the odds just an hour before the fight started. And [sighs] there were two guy honestly I don't really know either of these guys so I I couldn't even remember their names. But one of them was the favorite a pretty decent favorite. I think he was like minus 150. The other person was like plus 240. Uh so not huge but good, right? And it swung pretty hard in the hour before the fight which is unusual especially for like a no-name fight. Then the fight, the favorite fought like an amateur and I only saw the finishing portion of it, which is he has his back taken. The guy's locking on a rear naked choke and he's not even addressing like he has one hand like kind of like this and the other hand's out like this and he's never really pulling on the arms to try to fight the choke. He's just staying in there for a little bit and then he eventually taps. The commentators were all trashing on him. Everybody has been. And it turns out he's from James Krauss's camp, who has also been uh in trouble for gambling on fights that he's involved with. Not to mention, apparently on a podcast the week before, he talked about how you would be dumb if you weren't gambling on fights as a fighter. So, it it seems like crazy work to come from a camp where the the head coach was found to be and admitted to gambling on fights he's involved with the week before your fight to talk about doing it and then to throw a fight allegedly. Then again, you don't get into fighting because you have a very high IQ or you're smart, right? >> [laughter] >> This is not a genius sport, but holy moly, what a way to bungle that uh rig of a fight if it is one, which like I said seems to be. There's a lot of evidence pointing in that direction. And uh it comes to the question like how often does this actually happen? I think it happens more than people would want to admit, but I think most people are better at rigging it. If you're going to do a fixed fight, you don't make it easy for yourself. Like, oh, I'm just going to quickly give up my back and just open up my chin, you know, just throw lots of punches instead of actually trying to get out of the position. and then when I get caught look like I'm being tough for like five seconds and then tap out. Like that's a horrible acting job, right? Like you're actually supposed to get hurt, take punishment, you know, try to win this fight and make it a little more convincing rather than just getting ragdollled, especially when you're the one that's considered the favorite. So, uh, yeah, I I think it does happen more not I don't think it happens too often, but I think it does happen, you know, and I think most fighters are better at doing this as far as rigging the fight. Does it happen all the time? No. Does it happen? I I would say it probably happens a few times a year at least in a big show like the UFC if I had to guess and probably in a situation like this because he was on the last fight of his contract and it wasn't going well. So it would presume well this is my my last fight in the contract and maybe I'm done fighting. I know my time's up. let me try to cash out where I can. And I can imagine people in similar circumstances making the same decision, which isn't the craziest thing in the world to do, but um you normally wouldn't tell people you're going to do that the week before your fight, you know, like it's just really low IQ moment there, right? Uh not a good fight IQ or strategic IQ in that regard. Uh but needless to say, he's probably done anyways. So if he did throw this fight, hopefully he made some money out of doing it. But it seems like this is how for me like, well, okay, something bad happened. Almost immediately, all the online casinos cancelled the bets and even had instructions about getting your ticket back as far as like what you put in. When casinos and bookies and online reig on a bet like that, they probably have very good reason to do so, right? That's a very heavy indicator of foul play. They're not normally going to just, you know, let money slip that way. So, yeah, I think it's more likely that he threw the fight than he didn't based off of that. And like I said, all the other circumstantial evidence, there's no red flag that I know of that we can definitively hang this as, oh yeah, like it's but it's a lot of smoke coming from that area, but uh kind of hard to stop it when you're being a little more intelligent about throwing the fight. And like I said, if it's done well, I think most people wouldn't know what happened. They think maybe the guy had an off night or maybe he just lost because the guy was better. But I would imagine this is not typically happening to fights that you really care about, right? The fights that are high stakes, title fights and um you know, top contenders moving up the ladder. I don't think that's what's going on there. I don't think those fights are being thrown because one, egos, and two, you know, you got into a fight game because you're passionate about it. So, it's not likely you're going to throw a fight when you're at the peak of your career or you're on the way up. This is something more I would see someone who's on the way out. So, I don't think this is a particularly big problem, more of a nuisance. Right? Like obviously you don't want to tarnish the name of your sport because you have the lowhanging fruit. Uh well not the low hanging fruit but that are there's a better analogy for that that I I'm lost for words at the moment. Um but the runs of the litter there we go are you know making you look bad but that's not describing the sport. Right. Just like if you watched a local MMA amateur promotion, which would probably not look that great technically and you might have some weird things that go on there and you think, well, this is how all MMA is like. Clearly, no, it's not, right? I would think it's kind of the same thing. Although these are UFC fighters, right? These are not highlevel, you know, and clearly one guy was on his way out. So, he was just trying to execute an exit plan to cash out a little bit more. I think it'll be interesting to see what happens with that as far as is he going to get into any legal trouble there, which I imagine he might because there was money on the line here. He's kind of defrauding people. Um, but probably never fighting for the UFC again, especially with the contract running out. Uh, so weird way to want to go out in my opinion. Yeah, that's not the way I would want to go out for sure. But uh other than that, we also had a Polaris 34 Europe versus Asia and some notable names like Joseph Chen. And we had some guys that we've seen in CGI like uh Tyler Pierman and um Australian fellow that was also good with leg locks that had the big upset against Hugo, Victor Hugo at CGI1. name slipping me Oliver Taza and a few other guys. One of the common things there was ankle locks, leg locks, no surprise. Um, couple Zlock entries that we saw. Uh, I think uh, Egan Flanigan scored one. Well, he didn't score the actual Z-lock, but from threatening the Zlock, he was able to get a straight ankle lock and quite a few straight ankle locks and not from the conventional positions, you know, not like your regular Ashi, but like I said, a Z-Lock style entry. So, like in my lingo, he was going for the Zlock, but his opponent was defending it by not letting him fold the Z, if you will. Uh he was holding his foot up, but he then I'm not sure if it was a straight ankle or he turned it into an Aoki lock. It's hard to to see from the camera angle, but he definitely scored it on the controlling leg. And we I saw one from Joseph Chen as well, which was like lowin one. So outside uh like what I called 50, he just dropped it. uh the 50 double feet over rather than going on the hip dropped it just below his knee and it seemed like a pretty sharp choke uh crank because his opponent tapped right away and there were a few other straight ankle locks and leg lock entries. So, not a surprising result considering the the grapplers there. There was very heavy leg lockers but and They were also short rounds because this was a team format. So, five minute rounds and one guy stays in. So, in five minutes, not a lot of time to work. And if you're trying to score a finish, which all these guys are cuz in the Polaris format, from my understanding, if you win a decision is one point. If you win by submissions, two points. So, clearly getting submissions is a big factor in winning the team format. So leg locks are going to be the easiest thing to do, especially with the the people they had there were all solid grapplers. Probably difficult to pass guard with, but leg locks is the easy way to avoid playing that game. At least in these though, a little bit more proactive. Not so much of the waiting around for a leg lock to happen. the guys who were going for the leg locks were very proactive in attacking. And uh in a couple matches, it was actually the guy that uh the the the top guys, the passers were being a little bit more passive rather than the bottom player who was more active in the leg lock game. So, I don't mind. I I know in a few of these uh podcast and breakdowns, I kind of harp on the guys who are pulling guard and just playing leglocks the whole time. Like, I'm not as opposed to it when you're very aggressive and effective at doing it. I I don't like it when you're very reactionary with it and your whole game relies on somebody playing the game with you, right? because then it's boring. But if you can impose your game on somebody and not require them to even want to play along that they're maybe they're trying to avoid it, but you're still able to get them, that's to me valid and obviously effective because you're taking them away from any offense, putting them purely on defensive and still able to get good looks at your game. So, from what I saw, it was a solid leg lock game that most of these guys were playing and interesting and more things you got to look out for, man. That's why someone asked me the other day like, "How do you, you know, work the leg lock game?" It's like, I just don't let it start, [laughter] you know? I'm decent at leg locks, right? like was one of the OG guys in the early 2000s that were doing heel hooks, straight ankle locks, knee bars, you know, cap slicers, all the different leg locks. But the game now is just very uh high level, a lot more complex, and more of a shootout than I would like. When I was going for leg locks back in the day, it was one-sided because most people didn't play it. So, I was getting in and if I didn't get the leg lock, then I was still in control. I wasn't getting counter leg locked or putting myself in a situation that I couldn't extract myself from. Whereas now, if you throw into a leg lock, you've now put yourself in a shootout because the other guy is going to have a bite at you, too. And it's not as easy as to break out as you would want, right? Because now, even though you might have started with a 50/50 attack and it didn't work out, now you're in his 50/50 and now it's his turn to play and now you just can't get out when you want to, right? Versus when you're going with somebody who doesn't want to do leg locks, you put them in the 50/50. The moment you let go of it, they're running away from it. They're happy that you disengaged. So, it's not uh to me I don't like those shootouts. I don't want to play chicken, especially at this age and with the way my legs are. I'm actually decently flexible. Uh I had just the other day people are trying to put me in some weird like catch wrestling style leg locks. you know, I know how to relax my feet and whatnot and not get overextended, but it's not something that I want to do willingly, right? I don't want to go into shootouts. I do go for certain leg locks like I I shown on the website, like the kneeling leg lock. I like that one because the kneeling straight ankle lock, it's one-sided. I'm not getting into a shootout and I could disengage and still remain on top. So, I will go for them from time to time or like counter leg locks. Like if someone's, you know, trying to work a heel hook or straight ankle lock while I'm standing over them, I'm going to counter tool hold them. Uh, and that one's a really strong finish for me. And if not, they're usually going to disengage right there and I get out of that situation. But I'm not gonna like jump into like a ashi heel hook or something like that or go into a 50/50 for sure. Like I don't like playing around with 50/50 too much. As the name implies, it's pretty even trade. So I don't want to go in a shootout, right? If I'm going to get into a leg and dangle, it should be a very dominant one. Like a saddle or something like that, I will throw in if I see it there. But usually I rather just pass and work my kimora game. But like I said, I'm not opposed to it as long as you can you can impose that and make it exciting and not make it boring or rely on your opponent to want to play the game with you. But that's my take on that. And uh yeah, that's all I have for you guys for this week. I'll catch you all next week.