Bellator 238 Betting Tips, Picks and Predictions

Last month’s Bellator cards were awful for betting because they stacked each event full of one-sided squash matches. Bellator 238 looks much better because it features a couple of very competitive fights between highly skilled athletes.

We also get to watch the next leg in the Featherweight tournament, and we also see Cris Cyborg and Sergio Pettis making their Bellator 238 debut.

Alfred Khashakyan vs Sergio Pettis Betting Tip and Prediction

It has been a rough week for Roufus Sport. Last weekend two of their fighters lost in Maycee Barber and Anthony Pettis, and now this week, Sergio Pettis has a difficult fight against Alfred Khashakyan.

Bellator likes to sign big name fighters and then match them up with cans for a while to help them build their hype. When I saw the odds on this fight, I assumed that’s what they were trying to do with Pettis. As a result, I began researching this fight to see if he was a suitable parlay partner for Cyborg. Very quickly, we discovered that Khashakyan is no joke. Pettis must have upset the Bellator brass during contract negotiations because this is a tough fight for him. Win or lose, Khashakyan is no picnic.

Before we break this fight down, I have to make it clear that this is a very high-risk bet because we don’t know anything about Khashakyan’s takedown defense, ground game, or cardio. As a result, there’s a good chance that this bet will lose.

At this stage, it is important to note that his takedown defense, ground game, and cardio are a complete unknown, so there’s an equal chance that he has good or bad cardio, good or bad wrestling, and a good or bad ground game. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. We absolutely know based on his past fights that he has the striking to cause Pettis problems. Average cardio and average grappling might be enough to cap this fight at 50/50. Excellent cardio and strong wrestling might be good enough to cap this fight at 60/40 in favor of Alfred. Poor cardio and poor grappling makes it possible to cap this fight at 65/35 in favor of Pettis.

If we conservatively cap this fight at 65/35 in favor of Pettis, we’re still getting a decent margin over the bookies because Alfred’s current odds of around 3.95 | +295 | 59/20 carry an implied probability of just 25%. These odds make absolutely no sense based on the past fights that we watched.

Alfred Khashakyan trains alongside Edmen Shahbazyan at Glendale fighting club alongside Ronda Rousey’s former coach, Edmund Tarverdyan.

 

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@edmenshahbazyan You made it bro!! The golden boy fights tonight on Fox Sports Live @ufc main card!!! Tune in live to watch it guys #fearless #goldenboy #gfc #ufc #mma

A post shared by Alfred Khashakyan (@thefearless_alfred) on Nov 30, 2018 at 2:32pm PST

Glendale Fighting Club has a long history of churning out tough, well-rounded Armenians like Karo Parisyan, Manny Gamburyan, and, more recently, Edmen Shahbazyan. The one thing that those 3 guys all have in common is that they’re all strong grapplers, so even though we haven’t seen much of Khashakyan’s ground game, I am optimistic that he’ll be decent on the ground.

This is an interesting aspect of this fight because Pettis is decent on the ground, but he doesn’t have the best takedown defense and he’s quite weak off his back. It’s possible that Khashakyan takes Pettis down and dominates him on the ground. There’s no footage available that tells us this can happen, but there’s also no footage available that tells us that it can’t happen.

Size matters in MMA, and in this matchup, it’s clear that Khashakyan will be the more physically imposing fighter. Khashakyan is a Featherweight cutting down to Bantamweight, whereas Pettis is a Flyweight moving up to Bantamweight. In Pettis’ recent fight against Rob Font, Pettis lacked the physicality to gain any respect from Font. His punches didn’t seem to have any power on them, and Font pretty much walked through everything that Pettis threw at him. It’s possible that Pettis might be too small to compete against these bigger, more physically imposing Bantamweights. Khashakyan even referenced this fight in one of his recent interviews by saying Pettis didn’t look dangerous:

As you can see by the way he talks, Khashakyan isn’t your regular Bellator jobber that’s coming in to take a loss. He is already talking about winning the title at 145 pounds and said that he was struggling to get an established Bellator fighter to take a fight against him.

Khashakyan also references the fact that he finishes his opponents and wants to knock Pettis out in round 1. This is the first significant weakness with him that we must discuss. This guy loves to scrap. He’s wild and loves to bait opponents into reckless exchanges.

In Pettis’ past fights, he hasn’t looked that dangerous. He only has 3 wins by KO or TKO in his 23 fight career and hasn’t knocked anyone out for almost 7 years. He never picked up a KO win throughout his time in the UFC. Having said that, when you try to finish your opponent, you also put yourself in a position to be finished, and Khashakyan is super aggressive. It’s possible that Pettis catches him with something.

If the fight stays standing, I see Khashakyan pushing forward aggressively, trying to take Pettis’ head off, and Pettis backing up trying to catch him as he comes in. As I’m writing this, I’m actually getting more and more confident in Khashakyan because I don’t see Pettis being able to take his shots, and Khashakyan’s got a decent chin on him.

This is a high-risk bet because there is so much that we don’t know about Khashakyan, but that’s ok because, at the current odds, we can afford to take a gamble. We’re getting a great risk to reward ratio here on a fighter who might actually be better than their opponent everywhere. We know for sure that Khashakyan can cause Pettis big problems standing, and he might even be able to dominate the fight on the ground.

At the current odds, this is a risky one, but it’s also a no brainer bet for me.

Reasons for betting on Alfred Khashakyan