MMAPredictions

Sacramento’s ARCO Arena played host to WEC Faber vs. Pulver (aka WEC 34) last night, with about half of the card being televised live on the Versus cable channel.

The evening’s highlight was undeniably the encounter between Chicago-based Miguel Torres and Yoshiro Maeda. This clash of 135-pound titans saw each deliver and take serious damage, and even included a standoff on footlocks that had me on the edge of the seat. Torres opted not to use his free foot to help pry his attacked foot away, and instead used it to continue to deliver heel kicks to Maeda. Eventually while standing Maeda’s right eye took so much punishment due to Torres’ regular jabbing that the medical team deemed that the fight must be stopped, and Torres retained his featherweight title.

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.

• 407 MMAPredictions users predicted on the card.
• The average of all our users’ prediction accuracies for the card’s 11 fights on MMAPredictions was 43.6% making this card less predictable than most MMA events. On average we can expect about half of a fight card to be correctly predicted by our users on this site.
• No one predicted all of the eleven fights correctly, but MMAPredictions user mfd420 deserves special mention for being the only person to miss just one fight!

Average percent of card correctly predicted: 44%

Most easily-predicted fight outcome: Ninety-nine percent of MMAPredictions users knew that Rob McCullough would defeat Kenneth Alexander. I can only presume our predictors were not aware that Alexander actually had beaten McCullough in the past, but that’s pretty arcane trivia. In any case the fight itself was one of the least entertaining we have seen in a while. The other fights easily made up for this however.

Most surprising fight outcome: We have a tie! Just thirteen percent of our predictors had faith in both Will Ribeiro and Michael T. Brown. However both were able to come away with respective decision victories over Chase Beebe and Jeff Curran, two very respected fighters.

You know what I am about to say next: This weekend on MMAPredictions we have UFC 85: Bedlam on the way, so make sure you get your predictions in the system here. Also, we will have an audio interview posted here on the site tomorrow with Kevin Burns, a last minute replacement for Ryo Chonan and will make his UFC debut against Roan Carneiro this weekend!

- Caleb

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Just a few hours before WEC Faber vs. Pulver gets going in Sacramento, California this afternoon! Remember that the fight between Jens Pulver and Urijah Faber is for the WEC featherweight title!

You can catch the action this evening on the cable channel Versus at 6pm Pacific and 9pm Eastern LIVE.

- Caleb

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WEC Faber vs. Pulver takes place this Sunday and will be televised at 9pm ET / 6pm PT LIVE on Versus! Of course the headlining fight will be the contest for the WEC Featherweight Championship and pits current WEC champ Urijah Faber against Jens Pulver.

This busy event has a total of eleven fights and includes WEC standouts Chase Beebe and Miguel Torres in separate fights. Make sure you enter your predictions here on MMAPredictions.com!

If you’re looking for more background to help you decide which fighters will come out on top, Versus has set up a great site full of content on the Faber vs. Pulver fight, which you can check out here!

- 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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Last night the Versus cable network broadcast WEC 32 from New Mexico in an event which held three title fights among the ten on the card.

• Carlo Prater’s efforts were not enough to take away Carlos Condit’s belt for the 170 lb division.
• Jamie Varner upset Rob McCullough to win the lightweight 155 lb title.
• Chase Beebe lost to Miguel Torres by guillotine in the first round, passing on the 135 lb. belt to Torres.

As is our habit here on MMAPredictions we presented the fights for our uses to pick the winners. Here is how our predictors performed here on MMAPredictions, which you can see by going to the card’s detailed results page.

• 306 MMAPredictions users predicted on tonight’s card.
• Just one person predicted all of the fights correctly! Congratulations, karateguy!
• The average of all our users’ prediction accuracies for the card’s ten fights on MMAPredictions was 51.5%, which is right in line with our overall accuracy of 53.1% since the site’s inception.

Most easily-predicted fight outcome: Leonard Garcia’s win over Hiroyuki Takaya. 83% of users knew Takaya would lose to the American fighter. A very close second in this category was Carlos Condit’s win over Carlo Prater: 82% of our predictors knew that Condit would retain his title.

Most surprising fight outcome: Mark Hominick’s loss to Josh Grispi. Only 23% of predictors thought Grispi would win. This was another very close category as only 24% thought Jamie Varner would beat Rob McCullough to become the WEC lightweight champ, Varner did indeed win.

Next up on MMAPredictions is EliteXC: Kimbo vs. Tank, which will take place Miami and on Saturday. In addition to Kimbo Slice taking on Tank Abbott in MMA action, the other four fights will include Ricco Rodriguez facing American Top Team’s Antonio Silva. Get your predictions in now!

- Caleb

We’re not hurting for friends, but we could always use more! Befriend us on the MMAPredictions MySpace page!

WEC 32

When: Wednesday night, starts at 9pm EST
How to watch: Versus cable television
Why you should care: WEC has been called one of the best MMA products in the industry at the moment, and this event will be on free television, assuming you have cable service. In short, Sherdog’s very discriminating Jordan Breen called this fight card “ridiculously good”. Enough said.

You did know that there will be three WEC title fights on the line on this card, right?

• 170 lb division: Carlo Prater vs. Carlos Condit
• 155 lb division: Jamie Varner vs. Rob McCullough
• 135 lb division: Chase Beebe vs. Miguel Torres

You can be taken to the MMAPredictions page to make your picks on this card’s ten fights by clicking on the image above. If you made your picks last week, you may want to take another look at yours because there was a last minute change officially announced on February 11 saying that Damacio Page has stepped in to fight Scott Jorgenson, as Jesse Moreng broke his second metatarsal in his left foot and is unable to fight.

- Caleb

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Today the WEC confirmed that Scott Jorgenson will now face Damacio Page at WEC 32. Page is a New Mexico-based fighter that was featured on the reality television show Tapout, which follows the training of up and coming fighters.

Jorgenson’s original opponent Jesse Moreng has suffered a leg injury.

We at MMAPredictions did hear the rumors last week of Moreng’s injury, but we wait for official announcements from promoters before making changes to fight cards. If, in cases like this one, the change happens very soon before a fight is supposed to happen, we will do our best to post the news of the change here on the site’s main page after we’ve updated the fight card.

The best way to always be in the know of all the fight card changes and updates here on MMAPredictions.com is to subscribe to the RSS feed of our forum thread of all such changes.

- Caleb

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The Vs. network had another solid night of mixed martial arts courtesy of the Zuffa-owned promotion WEC yesterday. WEC 31 included three title fights:

• Urijah Faber retained his featherweight title in his fight against Pedro Sauer BJJ blackbelt Jeff Curran after a win by guillotine choke.
• Paulo Filho defeated Chael Sonnen and retained his middleweight belt.
• Doug Marshall armbarred Ariel Gandulla to hang on to his heavyweight title.

Here on MMAPredictions, the fight card turned out to be a little tougher than average to predict. As you know, 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.

• 280 MMAPredictions users predicted on tonight’s card.
• No one predicted all nine of the fights correctly! Three people only missed one fight however.
• The average of all our users’ prediction accuracies for the card’s nine fights on MMAPredictions was 45.1%, which is a little less than the overall average predictability of all fight cards here on the site, which is 54.4%.

Most easily-predicted fight outcome: Paulo Filho vs. Chael Sonnen. Ninety-six percent of our users knew that the Brazilian was going to win this fight.

Most surprising fight outcome: Marcos Galvao vs. Brian Bowles. Galvao was dropped by a right hand in the second round by Bowles. Only 22% of our users thought Bowles would win.

If we step back for a moment the way the Curran vs. Faber fight ended is no surprise, but I know for a moment in the first round that I thought Curran might have had a shot at sinking the rear naked choke. It’s kind of like when you’re at the movies and “suspend disbelief”, and go along with the space robots and dinosaurs. Like the Curran choke, you know they can’t really happen but for a moment you buy into it. Nothing against Curran, but it seems that at that level it is no easy task to sink a RNC even when you have taken the back.

And how about Jens Pulver’s modified anaconda choke over Cub Swanson? Three-fourths of our users knew the Pat Miletich-trained Pulver was going to win, but what is up with the uncommon chokes creeping into MMA this year? If it’s not the gogoplata it’s a Brabo choke nowadays.

Am I wrong? Perhaps just being used enough that most guys don’t spend too much time on learning the defense for these submissions.

Next up on MMAPredictions’ schedule is HDNetFights: Reckless Abandon! Another fight, the one between Marcus Lanier and Lee King was added to the card late last night, so make sure you have all of your picks in!

- Caleb

We’re not hurting for friends, but we could always use more! Befriend us on the MMAPredictions MySpace page!