MMA Scoring Hierarchies: Or how to avoid being ******** when Judging fights.

First up, don't get your Nerd rage boners in a twist;  a lot of judging does come down to the subjective interpretations of the viewers and I understand and accept this. There's many situations which arise when fans and Judges will be 50/50 on the outcome of a given contest and rightly so, because determining which fighter had an advantage over the other is sometimes virtually impossible. Sometimes, all things are seemingly equal.


In such a cases a 10-10 should be awarded, but judges don't like draws in MMA and they are simply not awarded enough. They definitely need to be issued more. Then we can all complain about it the way we do in Boxing.

Does this mean you can just whip your **** out and point it at who you think won the fight? **** no.
There be rules. And I'm going to explain to you how they work.



Firstly let's talk about the prime criterion by which MMA fighting is judged: Damage.

The philosophy behind Judging is based and built around damage, as is the system used to score rounds. Both the practical interpretation and logic of scoring MMA is centered around, quite simply, who hurt who more. 

Literally every other aspect of scoring fighting is tributary and commentary damage. If one fighter appears to have caused more damage to another fighter in any given round, they should, according to the rules, be given the round. That's not the end of the story however.

This is because there's two types of damage assessed by Judges: Immediate and cumulative.
Immediate damage is instant damage. Cumulative damage is damage caused over time; specifically the course of a round.


Not only is immediate damage the primary criterion, but if this is met within a round by one fighter, absolutely no other scoring considerations may enter the decision making processes of the Judging panel. This concept is fraught with problems and almost certainly needs revision....but it's what we've got.

Why is immediate damage rated over cumulative? Because the best evidence that a fighter caused damage to another fighter is...well, that they hurt them enough so that the other fighter reacted immediately. Getting wobbled and/or rocked/dropped is the strongest primary visible evidence judges can use to determine who hurt who more. That's the theory, anyway.

How do I know this? Because it's explicitly stated in the rules. Here it is Verbatim:

 “Legal blows that have immediate or cumulative impact with the potential to contribute towards the end of the match with the IMMEDIATE weighing in more heavily than the cumulative impact. Successful execution of takedowns, submission attempts, reversals and the achievement of advantageous positions that produce immediate or cumulative impact with the potential to contribute to the end of the match, with the IMMEDIATE weighing more heavily than the cumulative impact".

You know how you'll see someone score a round for some fighter who landed  massively more strikes that had no effect on the other fighter,  but ate like 4-5 massive bombs in the round that cut them/caused them to back up?

Yeah, that guy is a ****gibbon who doesn't understand how MMA is scored.  

You know that guy who scores the round for a fighter because they had three and a half minutes of top control time after getting wobbled bigly, nearly going out, then shooting on the other fighter and laying on him/her like a drunk sea lion trying to **** a surfboard and says 'herpa derpa but derpa derpa controls fite more of time so s/he win round'?

So's that guy.

The reason for this is because clauses in the criteria which denote observable phenomena into an hierarchical  system of tiered value judgments which have 'veto powers' over one another based on their position in said hierarchy.


Or more simply, some things trump other things to such an extent that those other things can't even be considered by the judges when handing out scores.

Listen up Timmy,  because this next part is going to undo your ******ation and make of you a scoring pro:

There are three types of observable phenomena judges look for when scoring a fight. They are:

Damage
Aggressiveness
Control

These three considerations act kind of like a kind of tiered judiciary in reverse order. Basically, the Damage criterion is the High court or the Supreme Court. Then you have Aggressiveness which is you local magistrate court. Then, you have control which like a tribunal.  Normally you start at the bottom first, and work up to the highest court (appelate constitutional). In MMA, you work from the top down.

Don't believe this either? Read this:

"Effective Striking/Grappling shall be considered the first priority of round assessments. Effective Aggressiveness is a ‘Plan B’ and should not be considered unless the judge does not see ANY advantage in the Effective Striking/Grappling realm. Cage/Ring Control (‘Plan C’) should only be needed when ALL other criteria are 100% even for both competitors. This will be an extremely rare occurrence."

Judges will attempt to decide a round based on, as stated earlier who hurt who more. If they can do this based on the ultimate criterion of damage, then they will not consult the other two 'slave' powers of aggressiveness and control.  This is because those two slave powers cannot overrule the judgement of the highest court in the land, which is Damage.The tail does not wag the Dog. A stream cannot rise above its source.


If the judges cannot determine that one fighter displayed an advantage over another according to damage, then they will look attempt to make a determination of who won the round by consulting the slave power of Aggression. This is because it is more likely that the person pushing the fight has been damaged less than the person doing the backing up.

If the judges cannot determine whether one fighter displayed an advantage over another according to criterion of Aggressiveness, they will consult the slave power of control. This is because at the end of all things, in a situation where no other value judgement can be used to determine a winner, who won a round simply comes down to had their way more often.

What Judges will never--I repeat never--do, is calculate all those decision-making factors and decide who did more of everything overall and determine the winner based on a total. A kilogram of feathers is a lot more stuff than a kilogram of gold visibly, but is worth a lot less in terms of value.


And that is how the system is designed, how it works, and how it is meant to used. That's it. Anyone who says this is not the case doesn't understand MMA judging; they are simply operating off their home-brewed wisdom, and should be disregarded out of hand.

Deuces. 










  

* Edited at 05.17.2020, 11:23 PM ET *

Bump.

@Pie I think the problem mainly is Judges scoring damage that happens in one round in other rounds. Say if a fighter gets cut in R1 off a legitimate damaging strike, then the corner patches it up, but in R2 the cut gets reopened again by a strike that really wasn't significant at all and the judges score it as thought it was significant. 

I agree with your point though. Some fighters just wear damage worse than others and it definitely seems to work against them. That and it gets harder to determine what did damage and what didn't the more you think about it.

I don't know what the solution is.

* Edited at 05.22.2020, 5:01 PM ET *

Heh. Blistering 36°. That's cute lol.

* Edited at 05.27.2020, 12:20 AM ET *

Weather is beautiful right now...if only it stayed like this all year. We don't get a true winter in QLD, just perfect moderate temperatures and balanced humidity. 

Light is different in Australia. Hard, clear, pure. I've never seen anything like it overseas.

* Edited at 05.27.2020, 5:37 AM ET *