MMAPredictions

Wow. What an evening. The fight that fans had looked forward to for years not only came to pass, but surpassed the expectations of those who had dreamt of it. UFC 79: Nemesis is one that will be remembered for some time.

Under the Looking Glass: Chuck Liddell and Wanderlei Silva, with assistance from CompuStrike.

With not one submission attempt in the encounter, the fight was a pure slugfest. Liddell’s third round decision victory over Silva was what we’d call an upset. Exactly two-thirds of MMAPredictions users thought that Silva would defeat Liddell, who although previously dominant, had lost two fights prior to this encounter. Liddell would connect with 48% of his 160 strikes, and Silva managed to land 35% of his 171 striking attempts. Liddell also took Silva down three times, yet Silva did not even land one takedown in the fight. The judges saw what the numbers from CompuStrike illustrate, and ruled Liddell the victor 29-28, 30-27, 30-27.

One thing to keep in mind before we discuss some of the details here on the site: Luis Cane was disqualified in his fight with James Irvin. As is mentioned in our FAQ page, if the outcome of a fight is not a win or loss, it isn’t counted here on MMAPredictions. We just track wins and losses, so that fight will not be counted among the numbers for this event.

Here is how our predictors performed here on MMAPredictions, which you can see by going to the card’s detailed results page.

• 518 MMAPredictions users predicted on tonight’s card.
• Just three users predicted all the fights correctly! Congratulations to DeeBash, Btown, and kanshoot!
• The average of all our users’ prediction accuracies for the card’s five fights on MMAPredictions was 52.0%, which is right in line with the overall average predictability of all fight cards here on the site, which in the lower fifties! When a fight card is not too predictable and not wildly unpredictable, that’s a sign of good matchmaking.

Most easily-predicted fight outcome: Manny Gamburyan vs. Nate Mohr. Ninety-two percent of MMAPredictions users knew that the Armenian fighter would come out on top in this encounter.

Most surprising fight outcome: Chuck Liddell vs. Wanderlei Silva. Only 34% of our users believed The Iceman could pull off this victory.

Congratulations to the UFC on a great event tonight. They will have a tough time living up to the bar they’ve set on this one, but that’s what a new year is for! Let’s see what happens in 2008!

- Caleb

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