Bellator 189 Betting Picks, Tips and Predictions

While the whole world turns their attention to the big fights taking place at UFC 218, I have been digging for Gold on Bellator 189, the Ultimate Fighter 26 Finale and the Prelim matchups taking place this weekend. My reasons for doing this is simple…

There are 28 fights taking place this weekend that we can place bets on. It takes me on average 30 – 40 hours to fully research 1 UFC card. For this reason, it is impossible for the bookies to accurately cap this many fights in such a short space of time. There simply are not enough people in the world with a deep enough knowledge of how to cap MMA to be able to set accurate odds on all of these fights. This means that there will almost definitely be additional value in some of the odds this weekend. We just have to find the spots with the best opportunities.

With so many MMA events taking place every week, we now frequently see betting websites set opening odds that have a good amount of value in them. Unfortunately, they safeguard themselves from making big losses by setting very low betting limits on their opening odds. This prevents high stakes bettors from being able to bet significant amounts of money on the opening odds, and it also enables the betting websites to get their lines corrected for a low price by the casual betting public.

This system works great when there is only one UFC event per week, but with 2 UFC events and 1 Bellator event in the same week there are bound to be fights which slip through the net. There will be matchups where the bookies haven’t got the time to accurately cap a fight and where the casual betting public does not have enough knowledge of the fighters to correct the odds.

Eventually, the betting limits on all fights have to open up, and this is when we start to see excellent opportunities to make money. In this perfect storm, we can identify situations where we find tremendous value in the odds, with large enough betting limits for us all to make money off them.

This used to happen all the time in MMA, it’s how I managed to make so much money over the years, but as the sport has grown and as betting websites have become sharper it has become increasingly difficult to identify these golden opportunities. Thankfully for us, I have identified one of these golden opportunities to make money on Bellator 189.

I don’t care whether or not this bet wins or loses. I promise you, irrespective of the outcome. This is an AMAZING bet.

Good luck, I have a very strong feeling that this is going to be a huge weekend for us…

Chidi Njokuani vs Hisaki Kato Betting Tip and Prediction

This is one of those rare occasions where the odds on a fight are totally wrong. The bookies have made a huge mistake capping this fight. There is absolutely no way on earth that Hisaki Kato should be an underdog to Chidi Njokuani.

Kato to beat Njokuani at the current odds of 2.60 | +160 | 8/5 is, in my opinion, the best bet of the year so far. If you take the time to accurately cap this fight, you will have no doubt in your mind that Kato should be much closer to a 1.40 | -250 | 2/5 favorite. The current odds make absolutely no sense. For this reason, I recommend that you lock in your bet on Kato as soon as possible because I predict that the odds on him to win will start to significantly decline as we get closer to the time of the fight.

Chidi Njokuani has excellent technical striking, but he’s also a glass cannon who quits and can be broken easily. Hisaki Kato might not look as flashy as Njokuani, but he’s still pretty damn technical, and he is incredibly tough to go with it.

If you go back and watch any of Njokuani’s fights, you’ll see that his striking is all centered around his powerful body and head kicks. Njokuani’s kicks are nasty, there’s no doubt about it, but if you go back and watch any of Kato’s fights you’ll see that he has nasty kicks too. What Kato also has to go with his nasty kicks are dangerous hands with KO power in every strike…

Chidi Njokuani’s kicks are impressive, but just like so many guys with an excellent kicking game, he doesn’t have the Boxing to back it up. Kato, on the other hand, has excellent Boxing and carries knockout power in every punch. Kato is also tough enough to fight his way into a phone booth and use his Boxing to devastating effect.

The huge difference in this matchup is the heart and toughness of both guys. We saw Kato eat bombs against Joe Schilling in the two times he fought him, and he ate them without a problem and still kept coming forward. Schilling landed earth shattering body and head kicks on Kato and Kato still kept coming forward. Njokuani’s kicks are no more scary than Joe Schilling’s, and Kato ate everything that Schilling threw at him.

In contrast, we’ve seen Njokuani quit in fights and accept bad positions many times throughout his career. Njokuani is a guy who will break if you put him in bad situations. Kato is incredibly good at testing the will of his opponent’s, and he never gets tired. Kato is the kind of guy that you have to flatline in order to beat and based on his past performances it is incredibly difficult to flatline Kato.

This is an important factor to take into consideration because, despite Njokuani’s vicious striking, he is not really a finisher. This is backed up by the fact that he recently went the distance with Melvin Guillard, a fighter whose chin has been shot for many years now. It’s also worth noting that Guillard is a natural Lightweight, while Njokuani has competed at Welterweight for his entire career. Njokuani had a huge size advantage over Guillard and still couldn’t put him away. We’ve also seen Njokuani struggle to use his striking to significantly hurt Journeymen opponents such as Thiago Gonçalves, Rickey Rainey, and Gilbert Smith. Kato on the other hand is a straight up murderer who knocks people out dead. He KO’d Joe Schilling twice and has only ever fought to a decision one time, having picked up 7 wins by KO in his 8 career victories.

We also have to take into consideration the fact that Chidi Njokuani has very poor takedown defense and a low-level ground game. Hisaki Kato is primarily known as a striker, but he’s a smart fighter who does what he needs to do to win. He demonstrated this high fight IQ in his first matchup against Joe Schilling where he took Schilling down and controlled him on the ground for large periods.

I do not understand why Kato is the underdog in this fight. Please leave a comment below to let me know how you feel about this matchup.

Reasons for betting on Hisaki Kato