MMAPredictions

Despite the multiple last minute changes to the fight card Strikeforce: Cung Le vs. Shamrock took places without any major hitches. Almost three-fourths of our predictors picked Frank Shamrock to win the fight against Cung Le. Many are even describing their encounter, which resulted in a broken arm for Shamrock, as being a contender for best fight of 2008.

Here is a snapshot of how our predictors performed here on MMAPredictions.com for the event overall, which you can see by going to the card’s detailed results page.

• 344 MMAPredictions users predicted on tonight’s card.
• Just one of those 344 predicted every fight correctly! That’s surprising considering that there were only 6 fights on the card. Congratulations to Supercrap!
• The average of all our users’ prediction accuracies for the card’s six fights on MMAPredictions was 42.3% making this card just a little bit harder to predict than most fight cards here on the site, which tend to be in the low fifties.

Most easily-predicted fight outcome: Drew Fickett’s first round victory by guillotine over Jae Suk Lim. Ninety-nine percent of users here on MMAPredictions knew that Fickett would beat the SpiritMC fighter.

Most surprising fight outcome: Tiki Ghosn’s defeat of Luke Stewart. Eighty-three percent of our users did not expect Ghosn to win the fight against the Ralph Gracie-trained Northern California native.

Next up on MMAPredictions.com is UFC Ultimate Fight Night 13 which takes place on Wednesday! No crazy shakeups to the fight roster for the card have taken place yet.

- Caleb

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Strikeforce MMA fighters at the press conference yesterday. Photo courtesy TOM CASINO/EliteXC.

On Saturday evening Strikeforce: Cung Le vs. Shamrock will take place in the combat-sports haven of San Jose, California. The fight card has been changing on a regular basis and now appears to finally have settled.

The headlining bout between Frank Shamrock and Cung Le has been marked by the normal smack talk found in the lead-up to a Frank Shamrock fight. Shamrock has been spreading the message that he expects to end Le via striking, in contrast to conventional wisdom that Shamrock would try to end things with a submission. Le has remarked that he is unconcerned about Shamrock’s mind games and is ready to win regardless of where the fight takes place.

Mike Kyle’s been brought on to the card to fight former IFL fighter Wayne Cole. Kyle was suspended by the California State Athletic Commission after his fight in 2006 when he delivered an illegal kick to Brian Olsen, and continued delivering strikes which required Olsen to have plates and screws inserted into the bones in his face.

Gabe Lemley was brought on to fight Cesar Gracie fighter Gilbert Melendez. Lemley is widely seen to not be on the same level as Melendez, who’s only lost once in his long career among high-level competition.

Drew Fickett will now face Jae Suk Lim , after both of their original opponents (Cesar Gracie fighters Jake Shields and Nick Diaz, respectively) have withdrawn from the card.

This event will be on premium cable channel SHOWTIME at 9 PM Eastern and Pacific. Good luck with the predictions you make here on MMAPredictions.com! I will be in Carson, California at the Brazilian jiu-jitsu Pan-Ams and will jump online tomorrow evening to update MMAPredictions with the fight results!

- Caleb

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Mixed martial arts fans were not disappointed with the mid-week action that went down in Las Vegas last night at WEC 33. Brian Stann took Doug Marshall’s WEC heavyweight title from him by force with a knockout that came just 95 seconds into the fight. This fight was correctly predicted by about two-thirds of our predictors on MMAPredictions.com.

Here is a snapshot of how our predictors performed here on MMAPredictions.com for the event overall, which you can see by going to the card’s detailed results page.

• 237 MMAPredictions users predicted on tonight’s card.
• No one correctly predicted all the fights. With so many fights on the card, it is no easy task.
• The average of all our users’ prediction accuracies for the card’s eleven fights on MMAPredictions was 45.6% making this card just a tad harder to predict than most fight cards here on the site, which tend to be in the low fifties.

Most easily-predicted fight outcome: Logan Clark’s victory over Scott Harper. Ninety-five percent of our predictors knew that Logan would continue his unbeaten streak in MMA last night. Logan Clark knocked out Harper shortly before the end of the first round.

Most surprising fight outcome: Alex Serdyukov’s defeat of Ryan Stonitsch. Eighty-six percent of our predictors were wrong on that one, as Serdyukov put a stop to Stanitsch’s unbeated streak by way of a first round triangle submission.

Next up on MMAPredictions.com is Strikeforce: Frank Shamrock vs. Cung Le from San Jose. This event has had changes to the fights regularly, especially in these last few days. Evangelista “Cyborg” Santos, Jake Shields, and Nick Diaz. Keep an eye out till the very last minute as things could change again at the rate we’re going now.

- Caleb

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Oy vei! What a week so far. For fans of this MMA site and mixed martial arts as a whole, things have gone from unpleasant to worse. And then from worse things have become downright comical. At this point if I don’t laugh I don’t know what I will do.

Things started off badly the day before yesterday for everyone when it was announced that Jake Shields would not be fighting Drew Fickett at the Strikeforce: Cung Le vs. Frank Shamrock fight card this weekend due to a back injury. That’s a bummer because everyone has been looking forward to seeing Cesar Gracie’s star 170 lb fighter in action again.

So yesterday I am updating the site with the winners of WEC 33 based on the live results of my favorite MMA news site, Sherdog. Yesterday for some time on that page they had listed Richard Crunkilton’s opponent as being a Japanese fighter that I did not recognize. “Crap,” I thought. “There must have been a last minute change to the fight card. Our predictors here on MMAPredictions.com have predicted against his original opponent, Sergio Gomez. I will have to delete that fight from the card”. (I think you can guess how this turns out.)

Here’s where the bad-to-worse comes in. Yesterday morning, the team that wrote the code which powers MMAPredictions.com were under the hood making some adjustments that were meant to improve the site’s cruching of prediction data so the site would run smoother at the conclusion of a fight card. Sounds good right? Well I am not sure but I suspect that those well-intentioned efforts may have been behind an outage on MMAPredictions.com in the very middle of WEC 33! The whole site became unavailable to everyone - including myself - yesterday. This almost-worst-case-scenario lasted until this morning at 5 AM on the west coast.

Next comes news that for unknown reasons another fighter from Cesar Gracie’s camp, fan favorite Nick Diaz, will also be unable to fight on the Strikeforce card this Saturday! Wow! Things have gone from bad to worse! If I were Gilbert Melendez, who is Cesar Gracie’s last remaining fighter on the card, I would watch out in case the old saying “bad news comes in threes” is true.

And to top things off, after I am done playing a little Halo3 on XBOX Live to distract myself from the fact that MMAPredictions is offline and I have no idea what happened to all the data from WEC 33 (my XBOX Live gamertag is MMAPredictions if you want to send a friend request), I do a real quick check of my email and find that an email blast I had prepared to go out prior to this weekend’s Strikeforce show was sent out to about 1,000 MMAPredictions users prior to me actually putting the finishing touches on it. Some of the information on there was not updated, and even if someone clicked on a link in there to visit the site, it would be down when they got there!

This morning I wake up to find the site online again. That’s good news but I then learn that Rich Crunkilton did fight Sergio Gomez after all. Doh! All of our predictors’ picks on that fight were deleted from the system, so we just have data on 9 of the 10 fights from last night.

Dios mio. I am going to hide under the covers until this week is over and pray that the streak of bad luck ends. I apologize to everyone who’s a member of MMAPredictions.com and has had to put up with the technical difficulties of this week. I promise everything possible is being done to hammer out this week’s issues.

Sigh. I will get cracking on the Breakdown for this event after my dentist appointment this morning. Hopefully no bad news is revealed there, lol!

In the fetal position underneath the kitchen table,

Caleb

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Brian Stann and Doug Marshall. Photo credit: WEC.

WEC 33 takes place this evening at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. For those of us who can not attend in person, it will be on live television on the VERSUS channel at 9pm ET / 6pm PT. According to the WEC, five of the fights should be televised.

In the main event, undefeated Brian Stann will take on Doug “Rhino” Marshall in a contest for the WEC Light Heavyweight Championship.

The card contains ten fights, one of which was originally supposed to include Paulo Filho against Chael Sonnen in a rematch of their December 2007 fight at WEC 31. However Filho was checked in to a hospital for depression and substance abuse a matter of weeks ago, and now Sonnen will face Bryan Baker, who is managed by Thomas Denny.

Remember, if you have registered at MMAPredictions.com you can get fight results sent to your cell phone for free just for being a member!

Good luck on your picks here on MMAPredictions.com,

- Caleb

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It doesn’t take very long to become spoiled does it? I know that on Friday evening Thomas Denny will take on Malaipet in EliteXC on SHOWTIME. I’ve got the DVR set to record it myself.

But I think most of the mixed martial arts community would agree that in the grand scheme of things, the EliteXC event, which has no true MMA star power on the card, is but a blip on the radar of what has become a very crowded marketplace in the MMA calendar. (Maybe it contains a star-in-training, but none presently are on the fight card). These days we have big cards like the UFC Ultimate Fight Night 13 on the way, and we are all eagerly awaiting what free mixed martial arts on a major network will look like when the CBS Elite XC Saturday Night Fights.

How quickly things change. It was a few short years ago when the UFC would put together an event several times a year, and that was really all there was to watch domestically. But now?

We have shows all the time now. Using a combination of MMA talent developed in-house and in the UFC, Strikeforce and EliteXC are putting on events that demand attention.

But, are so many MMA events a good thing? There is the question of quantity versus quality right? Sometimes you get the impression that an MMA promotion will put together a show just for the sake of having something going on. Better to have a less-than-ideal card for folks to talk about than not being included in the conversation at all, right?

From an optimist’s point of view, I’m prepared to overlook the occasional underwhelming MMA event. For one thing, not every event can be mind-blowing, even if you had all the best fighters in one spot. Some events will naturally be better than others.

And with so many organizations out there all vying to put out an MMA product, the talent pool of MMA fighters becomes stretched so thin that by necessity there will be MMA events from a decent MMA promoter that is comprised of fighters you probably don’t know.

Right now we find ourselves in a developmental stage of the sport of MMA where there are more promotions attempting to be number one than there is room for. What do I mean? I am saying that at most, when all is said and done, there is space in the average person’s consciousness for two big MMA promotions. (Note that I said average person. Not the hard core MMA fan, but the average joe-blow you see commuting to work next to you on the morning.)

Coke has Pepsi. McDonalds has Burger King. Who will the UFC have? Or will MMA evolve into a sport like the baseball, where just one league commands everyone’s attention?

Regardless of the outcome, we have entered an age of MMA affluence and choice. Grab the popcorn and enjoy, folks, as the MMA promotions compete for your attention. The weaker offerings will perish, and we will be left with even better MMA to watch.

In the near term, our respite from the mega-events is not going to last long. In short order we’ll have:

• WEC 33, March 26
• Strikeforce: Cung Le vs. Frank Shamrock, March 29
• UFC Fight Night 31, April 2

Get your predictions in here on MMAPredictions.com and as always, good luck everybody.

- Caleb

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This time on MMAPredictions Radio you will hear from Mike Whitehead, who is currently on an eleven-fight winning streak in mixed martial arts fights. Whitehead was unbeaten in the International Fight League and was expected to take on Vladimir Matyushenko late last year in the IFL Grand Prix light heavyweight contest but was not included in the organization’s plans.

Our interviewer Toby Glenn discusses Whitehead’s upcoming muay-thai debut on March 22 in Las Vegas as part of the XFA. Also on the schedule for Whitehead is a fight with Renato “Babalu” Sobral on May 2nd, which is also discussed. Here’s a snippet of the conversation where Mike Whitehead discusses the souring of the relationship with the IFL.

Since I’ve started MMA there’s always been something that’s set me back. I don’t know why it would change now that I’d start to get breaks. Everything I am going to get in this sport seems like it will come from good old hard work, and I don’t mind that at all.

Click here to listen to the 16 minute mp3!

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- Caleb

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Today Strikeforce held a conference call to help get the word out about Strikeforce: Cung Le vs Frank Shamrock, which takes place in San Jose on March 29th and will be shown on SHOWTIME. Here are a few snippets:

• Frank Shamrock on Cung Le: “Like most people he’s afraid to go to the ground with me. I don’t think it’s going to be a long fight.”
• Cung Le on Frank Shamrock: “If Frank chooses to stand I think we’re going to have a great fight. If Frank believes he’s going to chase me down while I’m striking that’s great I will be happy to greet him with strikes.”
• Frank Shamrock on his brother Ken Shamrock’s fight against Buzz Berry at Cage Rage 25: “I was pretty disappointed. I don’t know if he’s still got the heart of a lion in him… I hope he’s got plenty left in him because I’d like to take it out of him.”
• Gary Shaw on arranging the fight between Randy Couture and Fedor Emelianenko upon their availability: “I would sign it in less than a heartbeat.”
• Jake Shields on his promotion to black belt under Cesar Gracie: “It was mostly symbolic. I’ve been competing at that level for a while. It’s still significant though as it’s not often that Cesar Gracie gives a black belt.”
• Gary Shaw on Frank Shamrock, responding to the claim that Anderson Silva is the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world: “The best fighter in the world, hands down, bar none, is Frank Shamrock.”

Gary Shaw also said that a CBS press release will go out tomorrow listing the date, the announcing team, and some fight matchups of the previously reported network television deal EliteXC has reached with CBS. Someone asked when we might see Gina Carano in action again and though Shaw did his best to not reveal any details about tomorrow’s press release, he did hint that she may appear in tomorrow’s press release.

- Caleb

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Baret Yoshida.

Baret Yoshida, the Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt under Egan Inoue and frequent competitor at the Abu Dhabi submission grappling tournament, will make his return to mixed martial arts on March 28 in a Shooto fight against Hatsu Hioki. MMAPredictions.com caught up with Yoshida and got his thoughts on jumping in to MMA again after not fighting since November 2003.

MMAPredictions.com: We’re a couple of weeks away from your return to MMA in your fight with Hatsu Hioki in Shooto. Tell us about that. You’ve competed in MMA before, but that was a while ago.

Yoshida: I just wanted to fight Shooto again. I miss fighting in Korakuen Hall, so I figured I would try it one more time.

MMAPredictions.com: Has it been difficult to get into shape for fighting MMA again?

Yoshida: I trained a little bit less this time so I wouldn’t overtrain.

MMAPredictions.com: When did you sign the deal to fight again? How long have you been actively preparing for this fight?

Yoshida: About a month and a half ago. I was going to do another fight against another opponent, but my opponent got hurt and they asked if I would fight Hatsu instead.

MMAPredictions.com: Do you like the Japanese fighting scene a little better? I am sure that you could find a fight if you were looking for one around here. Is there a reason you decided to fight over there?

Yoshida: I like the rules better. When the guy opens his guard, there will be a lot of that leg kicking game, when the guy who is standing will kick the guy’s leg. They don’t really stand you up. I’m not too fond of the elbows (found in MMA in the USA). I don’t like the cage so much.

MMAPredictions.com: So that’s what makes you prefer fighting in Japan.

Yoshida: I’m just more familiar with those rules.

MMAPredictions.com: I imagine this isn’t going to be a one-and-done endeavor for you and you intend on fighting more than just this once. What are your plans?

Yoshida: We’ll see what happens. I just wanted to try again.

MMAPredictions.com: Is this part of a multiple fight deal?

Yoshida: They said they’ll use me at least three times, so it depends on me.

MMAPredictions.com: What do you know about your opponent Hatsu?

Yoshida: Good jiu-jitsu, good standing. Tall guy, really tall. For my weight class, that is. Goes southpaw to regular. Pretty tricky guy.

Undisputed Training Center in San Diego

MMAPredictions.com: How about your training partners? Who’s been helping you get ready for Hatsu Hioki here at Undisputed?

Yoshida: I’ve had a handful of training partners, like Jon “Warmachine” Koppenhaver, Ray “Kong” Seraille, a few other guys.

MMAPredictions.com: Is there one thing about returning to MMA that has you most excited? Is it the fans, the competition, the money?

Yoshida: It’s not really for the money this time. I have been paid more. I’m not getting paid that much. It was like one of those things I wanted to do, you know. When I first started fighting in the Shooto league, I had a few chances, you know every year they make guys fight often to see who can become champion. A couple times I got close, being one fight away from a title fight but I ended up losing. So I just thought I wanted to try one more run.

MMAPredictions.com: I know that you have a lot of fans out there. People have been watching you in grappling and in Shooto for a long time. Do you have anything that you would want to say to them?

Yoshida: Just that I will do my best!

MMAPredictions.com: Thank you Baret.

Yoshida: Thank you.

- Caleb

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DREAM Lightweight Grand Prix Round 1 took place in Japan today. Perhaps the most important news of the card was the result of the fight between JZ Calvancanti and Shinya Aoki. At 3:46 into the first round, Calvancanti delivered an elbow to the back of Aoki’s neck, a rule infraction that caused the fight to be ruled a no-contest.

Calvancanti punches from inside Aoki’s guard prior to the illegal elbow. Photo courtesy DREAM.

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

• 224 MMAPredictions users predicted on tonight’s card.
• Just two people were able to correctly predict every fight on the card. Congratulations, THEUFCKID and JimMancini!
• The average of all our users’ prediction accuracies for the card’s nine fights on MMAPredictions was 70.1%, making this card more way predictable than most fight cards here on the site, which tend to be in the low fifties.

Most easily-predicted fight outcome: Crocop vs Tatsuya Mizuno. Every single one of the predictors on this event predicted that Crocop would win. That’s right: it was unanimous. I don’t recall ever seeing that on MMAPredictions. No fight that is so predictable should ever be made. Let’s not forget too that three other fights on the card were correctly predicted by 95% of predictors. I think I see a trend here.

Most surprising fight outcome: Katsuhiko Nagata vs. Artur Oumakhanov. Nagata proved 90% of the predictors wrong on this card.

Next up on MMAPredictions.com: WEC 33. Lots of fights on that card although we won’t get to see the Paulo Filho vs Chael Sonnen fight we were hoping for now that Filho’s checked himself into a substance abuse treatment center. Good luck!

- Caleb

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