GGG vs Canelo: A Rant About Judging In Combat Sports

Last night's fight between Canelo Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin was an exciting, back and forth fight between two of the top pound for pound fighters in the sport. The fight ended in a draw, and the most surprising thing was that judge Adelaide Byrd scored it 118-110 for Canelo: this was past just a wide scorecard and into corrupt area.

the other judges scored it more reasonably, although Don Trella giving Canelo the 7th is inexcusable.

As I watched last night, I personally scored it 114-114, but on a rewatch I think I'd score it 115-113 for GGG. Regardless, the judges were all over the place on every round: they only reached consensus 6 out of 12 times.

Impediments to Judging Accuracy

Other than crying corruption, there are a bunch of hurdles to judges accurately scoring a fight:

• No access to statistics
• Sitting ringside and swayed by crowd
• Poor view from below the ring without access to monitors

How is a judge supposed to score a fight correctly when he or she is in that atmosphere?

GGG both threw, and landed more punches in many rounds

Not all punches are created equal, but GGG clearly won the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 11th rounds based on volume and power punches landed. I think the fight would have been scored differently had the judges seen this.

Round by Round Issues

Boxing fights are judged round by round. Normally, the fighter who wins a round gets 10 points, the fighter who loses a round gets 9 points, and if there are knockdowns, the fighter floored is deducted one point for each knockdown. In a 12 round fight with no knockdowns, there will usually be twelve 10-9 rounds dished out between the fighters. It's hard to quantify rounds with points, but this is an obvious issue because close rounds are counted the same as lopsided rounds: if one fighter wins a round by a small margin and loses the next by a wide margin, the result is likely the same: one round a piece.

The goal of scoring a fight should be to pick the same fighter that would have won the fight had the fight been judged on the whole. Of course, judging the fight on the whole would slightly change their strategies, since guys like to close out a round strong, and coast when they are already losing a round. So instead of changing it entirely, there needs to be a better way to implement the ten point must system. If a round is lopsided, score it 10-8, even without a knockdown. If a round is too close to call, give it a 10-10. These slight corrections would smooth out the discrete nature of scoring and award the rightful winner the bout more often than it currently does.

Conclusion

I'm not sure if I want to say Byrd is corrupt or not. It was an extremely wide scorecard, but at least she got the 7th round correct. I would be naive to think that every title fight this year has gone on without corruption involved, but I think the bigger issue at play is the difficulties in the way of judges scoring a fight correctly. It's hard enough to pick a round winner with the stats and a great view on tv: let's not make it harder on the three most important people choosing the victor.

---

My name is Ryan Daut and I'd love to have you as a follower. Click here to go to my page, then click in the upper right corner if you would like to see my blogs and articles regularly.

I am a professional gambler, and my interests include poker, fantasy sports, football, basketball, MMA, health and fitness, rock climbing, mathematics, astrophysics, cryptocurrency, and computer gaming.