Han Solo despised being told the odds. But that was a long time ago…. Today’s sports lovers are constantly bombarded with information and data, even in a simple and straightforward sport like MMA. As any game grows, the metrics which measure it and the numbers that report it all evolve and progress. But there is one set of numbers that are omnipresent in the inception of just about any game, in the rear alley to the big leagues: the gambling odds.
In MMA, the Tale of the Tape outlines the simple physique of each fighter, even while their records summarize their performance history within the game. But it’s the betting line that is the most immediate and direct hint to what’s about to occur when the cage door shuts on two fighters. So let’s take a closer look at what the odds can tell us about MMA, matchmaking, and upsets. Hey Han Solo, «earmuffs.»
Putting the Extreme into Extreme Sports In an educational sense, gambling lines are essentially the market price for a certain event or outcome. These costs can proceed based on gambling activity leading up to the event. When a UFC fight starts, that gambling line is the people closing figure at the likelihood of every fighter winning, with approximately half of bettors picking each side of this line. Many experts make daring and positive predictions about struggles, and they are all wrong a good part of the time. But what about the chances? How can we tell if they are correct? And what do we learn from looking at them ?
The fact is that just a small section of fights are truly evenly matched based on odds makers. So called»Pick’Em» struggles composed only 12% of all matchups from the UFC because 2007, with the rest of fights having a clear favorite and»underdog.» UFC President Dana White mentions these gambling lines to help build the story around matchups, often to point out why a particular fighter may be a»dog» White’s right to perform up that chance, since upsets occur in roughly 30 percent of fights where there’s a definite favorite and underdog. So the next time you look at a fight card expecting no surprises, then just remember that on average there’ll be three or two upsets on any particular night.
What Do Chances Makers Know?
In a macro sense, cage fighting is fundamentally hard to forecast for many different reasons. The young sport is competed by individuals, and there are no teammates in the cage to pick up slack or assist cover for mistakes. Individual opponents only fight only minutes per outing, and, if they’re lucky, only a few times each year. And let’s not overlook the raw and primal forces at work at the cage, where a single strike or mistake of position can end the fight in seconds.
The volatility of these factors means there’s absolutely nothing as a guaranteed win once you are allowing one trained competitor unmitigated accessibility to do violence on another. The sport is completely dynamic, often extreme, and with only a few round breaks to reset the action. These are the reasons we watch and love the sport: it is fast, furious, and anything could happen. It is the polar opposite of this real statistician’s game, baseball.
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