MMAPredictions

Okay. I am ready. After a long day at the first-ever Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu No-gi World Championship yesterday in Los Angeles and getting home late last night, I have a hot cup of joe next to me and we’re ready to talk about Mark Cuban’s newest endeavor, HDNet Fights.

HDNet Fights, Cuban’s Texas-based mixed martial arts promotion and broadcast platform held its second event last night. HDNet Fights: Reckless Abandon was comprised of ten fights, including the return of Jason “Mayhem” Miller, Frank Trigg, and Pete Spratt, all of whom were victorious in their respective fights.

A quick review of how we measure predictability of a fight card: we average how well all of our users predicted all the card’s fights as a way of seeing if it was easier or tougher to predict than other cards. So if I got, say, 25% of the fights on a card correct, my friend Luis got 75% of the fights on a card correct, and we’re the only two who predicted on the card, the overall prediction accuracy for this card would be 50% (the average of 25% and 75%).

That being said, here’s a little insight into how all our predictors did on the card tonight, which you can see by going to the card’s detailed results page.

• 211 MMAPredictions users predicted on tonight’s card.
• RagingBull831 predicted all ten of the fights correctly! Way to go RagingBull831!
• The average of all our users’ prediction accuracies for the card’s nine fights on MMAPredictions was 54.3%, which is dead even with the overall average predictability of all fight cards here on the site, which is 54.2%!

Most easily-predicted fight outcome: Yves Edwards vs. Alonzo Martinez. Ninety-four percent of our users knew that Edwards was going to win this fight. However the victories of Trigg and Miller were also very predictable, with around 90% of our predictors getting those correct as well.

Most surprising fight outcome: Jay White vs. Patrick Castillo. White, who trains with Randy Couture’s Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas, probably surprised even himself with an armbar victory that came in under one minute into the fight. Only eleven percent of our predictors had faith that White would win.

We have a brief MMA break at the moment for Christmas. But in between Christmas and January 1, there will be an orgy of MMA as all the promotions try to make their year-end statement with an impressive finale. We’ll see:

• Dec 29: IFL Grand Prix Finals
• Dec 29: UFC 79
• Dec 31: K-1 Hero’s Dynamite Fields Premium
• Dec 31: M-1 Global: Yarennoka!

Both the IFL event and Yarennoka will be televised on HDNet. UFC 79 and the IFL card are both currently up-to-date in the MMAPredictions system but Yarennoka and Hero’s need to have some fights added or modified. I will get that straightened out in plenty of time for you to get your picks in, don’t worry!

Okay - now it’s time for some breakfast! After which, I will begin working on this week’s episode of The FightWorks Podcast, a weekly internet radio show which covers the sport of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Our show this week will include an audio interview with Jeff Monson, who won the black belt no-gi absolute division at the No-gi World Championships yesterday. If you’re a BJJ fan, check it out!

- Caleb

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