MMAPredictions

Damn if I didn’t manage to catch a cold to ring in the new year. I blame it on air travel and being stuck in a plane with a hundred strangers for several hours on the way back to San Diego from Washington DC. But no cold will stop me from breaking down the predictability of K-1 Hero’s Dynamite Fields Premium!

I guess the first thing I notice about this fight card is that it bears strong similarities to M-1 Global’s Yarennoka, which took place the same day. You’ll remember that that event was noteworthy for having several fights which a vast majority of predictors felt the same way about the fight outcome.

Of the seven fights on the K-1 New Years Hero’s card (I’m not counting the under-eighteen year old fights in the event), our predictors here were evenly divided about who would win on just one of the fights. For every other fight on the card, MMAPredictions users felt very strongly about who would win.

In three of the fights, one of the fighters received more than ninety percent of our predictors’ favor: 97% of our users felt Melvin Manhoef would beat Yosuke Nishijima, and 96% percent of users knew Joachim Hansen would beat Kazuyuki Miyata and that Bob Sapp would beat up Bobby Ologun. Those are some pretty convinced predictors!

They were right on all three counts. From this perspective, K-1’s New Years MMA fights were very predictable.

Let’s check out some of the details from the K-1 Hero’s detailed results page.

• 215 MMAPredictions users predicted on tonight’s card.
• No one predicted all seven fights correctly! Several people came close and predicted six of the seven correctly.
• The average of all our users’ prediction accuracies for the card’s seven fights on MMAPredictions was 56.7%, which is right in line with the average fight card’s predictability here of 53.1%. So despite having three very easily predicted fights, the others were tricky enough that it brought that overall card’s predictability into line.

Most easily-predicted fight outcome: As mentioned before, 97% of MMAPredictions users who made picks on this card thought Melvin Manhoef would defeat Yosuke Nishijima. Heck, Nishijima was 0-4 coming in to the fight, making this a very easy to predict fight.

Most surprising fight outcome: Zuluzinho’s defeat of Minowaman. Just 12% had faith that the giant-sized Brazilian could beat Minowa but reports suggest that Minowa was simply overwhelmed by Zulu’s size and girth.

Again, like Yarennoka, the apparent lopsided matchmaking found in this K-1 Hero’s card must be the result of matchmaking logic that is distinct from what is used when putting together fight cards in North America. And I don’t claim to understand it. But despite the individual matchups not making sense to most of us, the events as a whole are about as predictable as your average MMA card everywhere else.

Okay! I am off to get some hot tea and blow my nose! Keep in touch!

- Caleb

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