Han Solo despised being told the odds. But that was quite a while ago…. Today’s sports fans are constantly bombarded with data and information, even at a very simple and simple sport like MMA. As any game develops, the metrics that measure it and the statistics that report it evolve and advance. But there is one set of numbers that are omnipresent from the beginning of almost any game, in the back alley to the big leagues: the gambling odds.
In MMA, the Tale of the Tape summarizes the basic physique of each fighter, while their records summarize their performance history within the sport. But it’s the betting line that’s the most direct and immediate hint to what’s about to happen when the cage door shuts on two fighters. So let’s take a better look at exactly what the odds could tell us about MMA, matchmaking, and upsets. Hey Han Solo, “earmuffs.”
Putting into Extreme Sports In an academic sense, gambling lines are essentially the market price for a certain event or outcome. These prices can move according to betting activity leading up to the function. And when a UFC battle starts, that betting line is the public’s final guess at the probability of each fighter winning, with roughly half of bettors picking each side of the line. Many specialists make daring and confident predictions about struggles, and they’re all wrong a fantastic part of the time. But what about the chances? How do we tell if they’re correct? And what do we learn from looking at them in aggregate?
The simple fact is that only a small portion of fights are equally matched based on odds makers. So called”Pick’Em” fights composed just 12 percent of all matchups in the UFC because 2007, with the rest of conflicts having a clear favorite and”underdog.” UFC President Dana White cites these gambling lines to help build the story around matchups, often to point out why a particular fighter may be a”live dog” White’s right to perform up that possibility, since upsets occur in approximately 30% of fights where there is a clear favorite and underdog. So the next time you look at a fight card anticipating no surprises, just remember that on average there’ll be two or three upsets on any given night.
What Do Odds Makers Know?
At a macro sense, cage fighting is fundamentally difficult to predict for a variety of reasons. The young game is competed by people, and there are no teammates in the cage to pick up slack or assist cover mistakes. Individual competitors only fight only minutes per excursion, and, if they are lucky, only a couple times each year. And let’s not forget the raw and primal forces at work at the cage, where one strike or mistake of position can end the fight in seconds.
The volatility of the factors means there’s absolutely nothing as a guaranteed win when you’re allowing one trained competitor unmitigated accessibility to do violence on another. The sport is totally dynamic, often intense, and with only a few round breaks to reset the action. These are also the reasons we observe and love the game: it is fast, furious, and anything can happen. It’s the polar opposite of this true statistician’s game, baseball.

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