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Wednesday war room: WEC on Versus tonight
By Zach Arnold | December 12, 2007
Jeff Hamlin talks about Jens Pulver. Plus, everyone made weight for tonight’s WEC event. Check out this WEC event preview and make sure to get your fight predictions in at MMA Predictions.
Video of Kimbo Slice on ESPN’s E:60 show yesterday.
Two MMA HQ notes: 1) Go vote in the MMA HQ 2007 year-end MMA awards and 2) go to MMAHQ.net to vote in the latest round of Top 10 fighter poll voting.
MAX Entertainment Holdings Inc. is now Cyclon Capital Corporation.
Dragon Gate wrestler “Hollywood” Stoker Ichikawa lost his shoot fight against Yasuhito Namekawa at today’s DEEP Korakuen Hall event (R1 2′20 front choke hold). Check out the photo gallery for the fight.
Reportedly, nobody failed their drug tests at the Cage Rage 12/1 event.
An interview with Chris Horodecki.
FightMetric has a new upgrade.
An upcoming calendar of MMA events in Saipan.
Get to know Todd Duffee.
Topics: IFL, Japan, MMA, Media, Pro Elite, UK, WEC, Zach Arnold | | Permalink | Trackback | Share This
Those year-end awards are so f’n ghetto compared to what Triumph United launched last week. For a way more legit year-end voting process http://www.triumphunited.com/fotyhome.htm They posted the other day they already have like 10 thousand votes cast and it hasn’t even been a week yet.
Damn, that FightMetric kid is gonna burn himself out.
The biggest problem with his system — besides the subjectiveness of some of his new additional metrics — is that someone has to manually tally these things by watching the same fight over and over and over again.
It’s not scalable the same way a computerized system like Compubox is.
You’ve had two comments in three days on this site, in which you are promoting Triumph-related material in both. (Read the comments here and here).
Time for you to openly disclose your relationship to that company/project or else stop promoting it in future comments on the site.
No relationship. Just think it’s a cool site and want to show some love for them. Just found it weird you linked a site that is tallying votes via a comments section but no mention of what tu is doing. Sorry if it bothered you, thought this site linked to other people’s work.
Grape Knee High:
Once you get used to scoring a fight using the system (knowing what to look for, familiarizing with the scoring criteria, etc.) it takes no more than 8 minutes (most often less) to score a 5 minute round and get the level of detail you see in that report.
The key was in automating the process. I started with everything manual: Paper score sheets, manual data entry in Excel, manual formatting into PowerPoint. Now I’ve got a digital input device to score the fight, which links to an automated database, which automatically updates all the charts and tables you see in the new reporting format. At this point, the only thing that is manual is writing the text.
Also, regarding the subjectivity you mention, I think that has to do with a misunderstanding of the new HiPer Strike category. It’s my fault for not explaining well enough. I plan on addressing that soon, but email me if you’re interested in an explanation sooner.
-Rami
Excellent work with the fight metric Rami. I see you’re getting more efficient in tallying the data. Keep up the good work.
It only takes you 8 minutes per round to tally up stats? Impressive. If you can get your system to scale such that the results are available with little delay after an event, that would be even more impressive (and welcome).
Regarding subjectivity, I don’t think there’s any way where you can eliminate it from your HiPer and LoPer metrics. It simply cannot be done, and I don’t think adding extra explanation will really help.
Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re doing a great service for the fans and if you can figure out how to monetize what you’re doing, more power to you. I just think that it is misleading and irresponsible to deny that anything outside of simple event counting will always be subjective.
Who (or what) determines what a potential KO punch is? Who determines what a “catch” is? There is always a opinionated decision being made here and that is the definition of subjective.
Grape Knee High:
I hear where you’re coming from. Just to clarify, HiPer and LoPer are groupings of different strike variations, not classifications of individual strikes. So for instance, every power strike to the head is a HiPer Strike, whereas a power strike to the body is only HiPer on the feet but not on the ground. This is simple event counting, so it’s no more subjective than our usual method of separating power strikes from jabs.
I think that’s what your real issue lays and I can’t disagree. The scorer has to make the decision of how to classify a strike, a submission attempt, or the level of damage. We can minimize, but not eliminate, that level of subjectivity.
I don’t see this as a fatal flaw. In fact, such limitations exist in nearly every sport. When looking at a pitcher’s Ball-to-Strike ratio, what you’re seeing is the subjective evaluation of that particular game’s umpire. He has guidelines, but it’s within his power to call any pitch he wants either a ball or a strike. The game can completely based turn on those decisions, but that doesn’t make every other baseball stat a subjective one. I don’t think an unavoidable amount of subjectivity devalues the entire enterprise. The key is to develop a certain level of trust between fans and scorers. Fans trust that umpires know what they’re talking about (most of the time), so they’ll accept a certain level of subjectivity. I don’t expect that level of trust to be built overnight, but in time, I would hope fans could place that level of trust in FightMetric’s scores as well.
Poor Stoker Ichikawa
I was looking forward to the crowd reaction of him appearing at a UFC!
That is impressive work, Rami. It provides some very interesting data to look at and I’m glad there’s someone dedicated and patient enough to do it for all of our benefit.
It’s Stalker by the way not Stoker. Did he use the kancho in his match?
WEC live. Light Heavy belt on tap.
Is WEC using larger gloves?
Damn, this is annoying, Versus in the hotel has about a 7 to 8 second audio delay.
Since when does Cage Rage drug test, btw?
Interesting stoppage for Filho there.
Guess the ref wasn’t interested in seeing bone splintering in his cage.
Rami (FightMetric),
I can definitely see where you’re coming from and I agree; I only meant to point out that you will never escape the subjective nature of MMA scoring. I think you have a good thing going and I hope you keep it up and don’t burn yourself out.