July is the busiest month of the year for MMA and this weekend is no exception with three major MMA events taking place. On Friday night we have Bellator 202, then on Saturday night, we have Bellator 203 and UFC Fight Night 133. This weekend is also extra busy from a betting perspective because this is the first time in a long time where we can bet on Bellator Prelim fights as well as the main card.

Before jumping into the fights this weekend, I want to take some time to reflect on our results from last weekend. If you’ve been a member of the community for a long time, you will know that big PPVs tend to be our Kryptonite. I briefly spoke about it last week, but for some unknown reason, there tends to be much more variance on the big UFC events. I am looking forward to getting back to our bread and butter this weekend with a low profile Fight Night card.

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The Ultimate Fighter Season 27 Finale is just one of three major MMA events taking place this week. We have PFL 3 taking place on Thursday night, the TUF 27 Finale taking place on Friday night and then UFC 226 taking place on Saturday night.

Due to the number of fights taking place this week, I am prioritizing researching the fights over writing breakdowns. This will enable me to identify any betting opportunities before the odds change. Then once my research is complete I will return to the articles and add my breakdowns and reasoning for each bet.

Remember that we will be able to Live Bet the entire Prelim and Main card fights for the TUF 27 Finale and UFC 226, so be sure to join us in the Live Betting area of our website when the fights start to take advantage of this amazing opportunity. In the past, we have made huge profits on the July 7th series of UFC events and I am optimistic that we will bank another big profit this year.

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We are now entering the busiest time of the year for MMA. Over the next six weeks, we have 6 UFC events, as well as multiple events from smaller promotions such as Bellator, PFL, Invicta, BAMMA, XFN, and ACB. I am going to be extremely busy over the next few weeks with almost 100 different fights to research.

Right now we already have a lot of odds released for many of the upcoming fights, and it is a race against time to research these fights before the odds start to decline on the best opportunities. For this reason, I am going to prioritize researching fights over writing breakdowns for my bets.

Writing breakdowns is a time-consuming process that at times like this could be better spent studying fight footage. For this reason, I will give out Betting Tips now, and I’ll come back to these articles and add my breakdowns closer to the time of the events. I hope you understand. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me in the Chat Room if you’d like to discuss any of these bets in more detail.

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Being a Professional Gambler is based on the art of being able to silence your confirmation bias and try to see the truth for what it REALLY is. This is difficult because Cognitive Bias is hardwired into our brains. I guess this is the reason why so few people make money gambling.

A few years back Bet365 announced at a Gambling Conference that less than 5% of people who open accounts with them go on to make a profit. With multi-accounting being so popular amongst profitable players, I am guessing that the number of people who actually do make a profit gambling is much, much smaller than 5%. The majority of that 5% probably consists of people who multi-account when they get limited. Hell, our community probably makes up a good 2% of that 5%!

Before USADA I averaged 60 to 70 units of profit in prefight betting every year, and it wasn’t that hard to achieve. I work much harder now than I ever did back then. The sport was much more predictable before USADA, and I was much more rigid in my thinking. If you were a member of our community back then you would often hear me say in the Chat Room and Forums that “If you consistently bet on the more skilled fighter, you will always make money”. That statement was true for many years, but it’s not true anymore.

If UFC 225 took place before USADA, Charles Oliveira and Alistair Overeem would be insta bets, because they are better than their opponents in every single aspect of MMA. 9 times out of 10 both guys would show up and perform to their full potential and win easily. Can you remember before USADA when Oliveira was able to hang with Jeremy Stephens striking and toyed with him on the ground? Who can forget Overeem neutralizing the grappling threat of Brock Lesnar, Fabricio Werdum and Frank Mir like he was fighting children?

USADA changed the sport forever, but it also changed the way that we must think about MMA. For the longest time, I was rigid in my thinking, and this caused us to record a significant annual loss in prefight betting back in 2016. Since then I have learned that you must continuously evolve your thinking and you must always question everything. You must be radically open-minded and assume that anything is possible.

Everything came to a head in July 2016 after I recorded a huge loss at UFC 200. Up until this event, I had put our losses down to bad luck as we watched killer after killer show up and perform NOWHERE NEAR the level that we knew they were capable of. We saw guys like Anthony Pettis go from running up the side of cages and roundhouse kicking dudes in the face to conceding bottom position against low-level wrestlers like Eddie Alvarez.

By UFC 200, 2016 had shown us a long list of fighters who had changed beyond recognition. By this point, it became clear that my losses were not down to bad luck. They were a direct result of the sport changing forever and me not being able to adapt quick enough.

One of our big losses at UFC 200 was Cat Zingano losing to Julianna Pena. Going into that fight, I could not have felt anymore confident in Zingano winning. It was an easy fight for her.

Even to this day when I am researching fights, I’ll often have to study some pre UFC 200 fights from Zingano and Pena and still to this day I understand why I went big on Zingano. Pena barely had a chance in this fight. She was second best by a considerable margin to Zingano everywhere. This was the exact type of fight where my mantra of “If you consistently bet on the more skilled fighter, you’ll always make money” helped me to pay the bills. Pena didn’t have a chance. She gave up takedowns and position too easily on the ground, and Zingano’s world-class ground game should have been enough to cause Pena all kinds of problems. If you go back and watch that fight, you’ll see that Zingano did dominate Pena… At least in the 1st round. Then for no reason she fell apart.

At UFC 200 I had to watch loss after loss rack up, but when it came to the Pena vs. Zingano fight, I was confident that Cat would get us back on track. I literally could not believe my eyes when I watched her completely fall apart in the 2nd round and repeatedly accept bottom position.

Still to this day I have found it difficult to accept this loss, because Zingano demonstrated in round 1 how much of an advantage she had everywhere. She was ragdolling Pena. If she had looked bad straight out of the gate, then you could perhaps blame the loss on an injury or illness, but Zingano looked great in round 1 and had never shown cardio issues in the past. One of the things that made her such a formidable opponent was that she was able to fight at a high pace and outwork everyone.

By now you are probably wondering where I am going with this because nothing I am saying has anything to do with UFC 225.

Well, I just wanted to let you know that Cat Zingano has made me change the way I look at MMA. She recently appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast and spoke at length about her career. I highly recommend that you take a listen because I believe it will help you view the sport differently. You should then be able to use that new perspective to make money:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUa8UOkL4Mo

During the podcast, she talks at length about the Julianna Pena fight. It turns out that between the Amanda Nunes fight and the Julianna Pena fight she had been diagnosed with PTSD, developed Hyperthyroidism, she had suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury, and she was also taking two different types of anti-depressants. Each of these pieces of information would have been a huge factor in my decision making when researching this fight, but when I bet £12,000 on Cat Zingano to beat Julianna Pena, I had no idea about any of this stuff. I was betting blind.

Would I have bet on Zingano had I known she was suffering from these issues? Not a chance…

So what to do we about losses like this? Because I guarantee you they happen very, very frequently in this sport. Do we just cry about them and put them down to bad luck? Or do we try to evolve and look at the sport differently? We should try to be like water. Move around the rock, not move the rock. These issues will always be present in MMA, so how do we profit from them or at the very least avoid losses?

Before USADA I firmly believe in my mantra “If you consistently bet on the more skilled fighter, you will always make money,” but now I think we need to look at fighters differently.

Fighters were Superheroes before USADA came into effect. They had Diuretics to help them cut weight. IVs to re-energize their body after cutting weight. They had Steroids to help them train harder. EPO to help them improve their cardio and Human Growth Hormone to help them recover from injuries.

Take all that away, and we are left with a sport where on any given day someone can show up tired, hurt and broken. This is unavoidable.

Would you want to bet thousands of dollars on a fighter who is tired, hurt or broken?

We are never going to be able to gain access to the type of sensitive medical information that would have enabled us to avoid that Cat Zingano bet, but we can look at the sport through a different lens which could help us avoid some of these losses in the future. It may also help us make money in situations where we can anticipate that a fighter may show up and underperform.

Cat Zingano told Joe Rogan that her poor performance against Julianna Pena was a direct result of the Traumatic Brain Injury she suffered from all the damage she took in the Amanda Nunes fight. So maybe it’s time that we started to look at fighters as Batteries. A finite resource that will one day run out. Sure, it may sound like common sense now. But it wasn’t common sense back in 2015 when aging veterans like Vitor Belfort were still wheel kicking people’s faces off.

How then, does that affect the way we bet moving forward?

Well take a look at this:

Alistair Overeem suffered that devastating KO at the hands of Francis Ngannou just 6 months ago. He has also been KO’d over 15 times in his pro-MMA and Kickboxing career against some of the hardest hitting fighters that have ever lived.

If Cat Zingano suffered memory loss, vision problems and significant motor skills decline after enduring 5 minutes of ground and pound against a 135 pound female, what kind of damage do you think Overeem has suffered getting flatlined over 15 times against some of the hardest hitting fighters to ever live?

Based on my old mantra, Overeem is a solid bet tonight because he is better than Curtis Blaydes everywhere, but based on everything we’ve learned since USADA, he is most definitely not. If Overeem was a battery, his charge would be flat.

This is only one example, but I think we can make money and save money from this new perspective. Jose Aldo vs. Jeremy Stephens is an excellent potential opportunity coming up very soon. In recent years Aldo has been hurt badly by Chad Mendes, flatlined by Conor McGregor and suffered a horrific amount of damage in his two fights against Max Holloway. With all the head trauma he has sustained, is it possible that he could survive 15 minutes against a devastating power puncher like Stephens? Time will tell.

The stuff that Zingano said on the Joe Rogan podcast helped me to rationalize a lot of losses in the past that didn’t make sense, and it has also helped me to look at fighters differently.

Conor McGregor once said that a Gorilla is the King of the Jungle, until one day a younger Gorilla comes along, kills the King and takes everything he’s ever worked for. We’ve always known that the majority of fighters start to decline after the age of 33, but maybe we can use the information that Cat shared on that podcast to anticipate situations where fighters may begin to decline earlier or circumstances where fighters may not perform to their full potential because of damage sustained in previous fights. Robbie Lawler is a good example of this…

When Robbie Lawler fought Tyron Woodley back in 2016, he was just 34 years old and looked like a killer. I felt confident that he was going to run through Woodley, so I bet £6000 on him to win. I wasn’t the only one. If you were a member of the community back then, you’d remember that no one gave Woodley a chance after his lackluster performances against Kelvin Gastelum and Rory MacDonald. In hindsight, it seems ridiculous, but at the time it felt like Woodley was the sacrificial lamb.

How could a guy who gassed out in every fight stand a chance against a marauding, cardio king with a granite chin like Lawler? Lawler ended up getting flatlined within 3 minutes and added his name to the long list of Superheroes who had their careers derailed in 2016. He hasn’t been the same since.

Before Lawler’s loss to Woodley, I would have called you an idiot if you would have said you thought Woodley would win, but looking back with what we know now, was it really that hard to predict? Before the Woodley fight, Lawler had been in wars with Rory MacDonald, Carlos Condit and the prime Johny Hendricks who back then was knocking people 8 ft across the Octagon with his left hand. After each of those 25-minute wars, it seems obvious now that Lawler was heading into that Woodley fight with a flat battery.

Over the next few months, I’m going to be testing this hypothesis out by evaluating how certain fighters look after suffering a lot of head trauma in recent fights. Maybe we’ll learn something; maybe we won’t, but hopefully, in time we can use this insight to make more money and avoid some losses.

At this initial stage, I am not going to be placing any additional bets based on this new perspective because it’s just a hypothesis, but I will be paying close attention over the next few months to how fighters show up and perform after suffering significant head trauma in the 12 to 18 months prior to each fight.

Let me know in the comments how you feel about this stuff and if you disagree or agree with me. Take care guys. I luh you! Let’s make some money tonight.

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UFC Fight Night 131 starts in around 1 hour, giving us a rare Friday night card to enjoy and hopefully make some money on. Although I don’t think it’s possible to enjoy a card that we lose money on…

We’ve been destroyed in the last couple of months losing bets in every way possible. We’ve lost three consecutive split decisions and don’t get me started on how frustrating it was to watch Nordine Taleb stop defending the Rear Naked Choke last weekend when the referee told him to stop holding the glove. It’s painful to watch. Check it out:

Claudio Silva vs Nordine Taleb fight

Taleb was doing a good job of fighting the hands and wasn’t in that much danger until the referee interfered. There’s a good chance that he would have survived the remaining 50 seconds in the round and gone on to win the fight if he had continued defending the choke. I get that he should have “protected himself at all times,” but this is just one more loss in a long list of recent losses where I feel like we’ve been hit hard with bad luck.

Live Betting hasn’t been any better as we’ve had to endure painful losses like Mads Burnell being submitted in round 3 last weekend against all the odds and before that, we lost a decent sized bet under bizarre circumstances on Merab Dvalishvili.

I don’t want it to sound like I’m making excuses, but I’ve had plenty of bad runs over the years and this recent bad run has featured much more bad luck than usual. Many of our recent bets have lost under weird circumstances, and it has got to the point where it feels like any bet we place will lose. I can only hope that our luck will turn around soon, but I wanted to talk about this because in my experience things can often get worse before they get better.

I was horrified to discover that tonight’s event is taking place in Utica, New York. When you’re trying to catch a break, New York cards aren’t generally the place where you catch them. The NY State Athletic Commission is well known for having terrible judges and terrible referees, so I expect more craziness to occur tonight. I just hope that we can avoid the madness or maybe even be the benefactors for once.

I just wanted to let you know that tonight might also be rocky because the NY State Athletic Commission and their crazy antics do not fill me with much confidence. But it is important not to be discouraged by our recent run of bad luck. Spring always follows Winter, and we’ll get back to winning ways soon. I don’t know when that day will come, but if we keep grinding and consistently betting on fighters who hold significant advantages over their opponents, in the end, we’ll make money. Like we always do.

Good luck – I don’t usually wish people good luck, but based on how things have been going lately I think we need it!

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UFC Liverpool gives us an excellent opportunity to get back in the win column after we’ve made a disappointing loss on the last two events. Zak Cummings to beat Michel Prazeres was one of my most confident prefight bets in a long time, but the early headbutt that caused a cut over his eye seemed to throw him off, and from there he never found his rhythm.

Michel Prazeres was able to secure a takedown in round 1 and after that Cummings seemed to be hypnotized by the threat of the takedown and struggled to let his hands go for the rest of the fight, for fear of being taken down. Prazeres was able to land his overhand right repeatedly despite Cummings having a massive 8-inch reach advantage.

Zak’s performance was exceptionally disappointing after he was able to cause guys like Santiago Ponzinibbio and Alexander Yakovlev problems. Michel Prazeres once again proved that he is a complicated puzzle to solve even when facing massive physical disadvantages.

As we head into UFC Liverpool, we have to take a moment to shake our heads at Darren Till and Molly McCann for missing weight. In the build-up, to their fights, both scousers have been very vocal, so it is ironic that things have played out this way. Here is a video of Molly McCann making fun of her last opponent for missing weight at Cage Warriors 88:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4xFUcQjPv0&feature=youtu.be&t=15m5s

The Live Betting landscape for UFC Liverpool is uncertain because, like all European and Asian UFC events, we won’t know what will be available for Live Betting until the event starts. Historically we’ve only been able to Live Bet the Main Card of European Fight Night events, but for the first time in a long time, BT Sport is broadcasting the Prelims too. This does give us some hope that this time we’ll be able to Live Bet the Prelim and Main Card Fights.

My advice would be to join us in the Live Bet Feed at 4 pm British Time on Sunday, and we’ll try to figure out between us which betting websites are offering Live Betting on the Prelim Fights. Please be prepared for disappointment, because it is possible that we will only be able to Live Bet the Main Card.

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We suffered a disappointing loss at UFC 224 last weekend and broke even on Live Bets. In the last few days, I have received some criticism from members who were not happy with my bets or performance on that night. This is disappointing because we have recorded a solid profit on prefight bets this year and we’ve been CRUSHING it in Live Betting for the past 4 years.

I don’t ever try to justify losses in these articles because people often interpret this as me making excuses, but with so many people unhappy with what happened I feel like on this occasion I need to explain things from my perspective.

I often say this in the Chat Room and during my Live Betting Commentary, but I’ll repeat it here for anyone that has never seen me say this before…

You cannot predict the outcome of a fight.

No amount of research will help you determine what will happen when the cage door is locked. Two athletes are going into an extreme environment to fight to the death and the only thing protecting them is a referee and some rules. All we can do is try to make the best decisions possible based on all the information we have available to us. It doesn’t matter how much you know about the sport, or how much experience you have, you will always lose bets. You will never make money betting on MMA or investing in anything until you get comfortable with this.

You need to become comfortable losing. You need to learn from losses too, but you also need to understand that how you cope with losing is a big part of making money. To learn more about how you can develop this mindset and use it to make much more money, I highly recommend reading Ray Dalio: Principles of Life and Work. It might be a game changer for you. It certainly was for me.

I also recommend that you watch the podcast below where Phil Hellmuth openly talks about the struggles involved in making a living from Gambling. Phil went on a 2-year losing streak, but he stuck to his gameplan, kept working and bounced back to win more money in Tournament Poker than anyone else in history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqCwQQMkW54&t=

If you study the lives of successful investors, you will find a common trend. None of them complain or dwell on losses. They try and rationalize them, learn from them, and they move on. You will also often find that they are only able to make money because they are comfortable losing. They accept it will happen, and they don’t allow losses to affect their judgment.

Ask yourself if you would have been as frustrated on Saturday night that I didn’t place a single Live Bet if it was in the middle of a busy run of UFC events. I could sense after the long break in UFC schedule that some people were itching to pull the trigger and place some bets. This kind of mindset will result in you losing money long term. You need to shake off that impulsive instinct. Also, ask yourself if you would have been as frustrated if we weren’t going into that event on the back of two consecutive losses. We’ve been crushing Live Betting all year. We have only made a loss on 3 out of the last 18 events in Live Betting! 3 events!!! Going 15-3 in Live Betting this year is an unbelievably good win rate.

UFC 224 was just a bad night for Live Betting because 6 out of the 8 fights that we could Live Bet ended very quickly, and the other two fights were Lineker vs. Keller and Nunes vs. Pennington. Lineker and Nunes established dominance very early on in those matchups, and their odds significantly declined early.

The only opportunity I saw all night was Junior Albini to beat Oleksiy Oleinik. Oleinik was starting to take deep breaths, shoot for panic takedowns and eat big shots off Albini. He was showing all the signs of a fighter who was about to be put into a checkmate situation. He was losing the fight everywhere. He was getting picked apart in the stand-up exchanges, and he wasn’t even coming close to taking Albini down. In a last-ditch attempt to win the fight, Oleinik PULLED MOUNT on an Ezekiel choke attempt. 99 times out of 100 this would be suicide in the UFC. Albini would usually end up mounting him and ground and pounding his way to a TKO win. There is a reason why you never see people pull mount in MMA… It is an incredibly dumb idea with only a very low probability of working. You don’t even see high-level Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioners like Demian Maia, Gilbert Burns or Fabricio Werdum pull mount. It’s a high risk, low reward maneuver. Oleinik somehow was able to pull off another Ezekiel choke submission after pulling mount and against all the odds he won the fight. This was one of those freak occurrences in MMA. Luckily we didn’t have time to lock in the bet on Albini. This is one of those occasions where we dodged a bullet and got lucky. Albini was looking like a great Live Bet.

Now I want to talk a bit about the prefight bets. We ended up making a loss of around 3.7 units. The first loss was the over 2.5 rounds bet on Thales Leites vs Jack Hermansson. This bet was doomed very early on when Jack Hermansson broke his rib in round 1. Shortly after that, he blew his knee out when trying to defend a takedown. Under these circumstances, it would have been a miracle if this fight went the distance. In the end, Hermansson put on an incredibly brave performance, and he killed our bet just 20 seconds before it would have cashed. Against all the odds this bet was only 20 seconds away from winning.

In recent weeks we have made a lot of money from these kinds of bets. We hit Iaquinta vs Khabib to go over 2.5 rounds. We also hit Fedor vs Mir to end under 1.5 rounds, and even at UFC 224 we hit Nunes vs. Pennington to last longer than 2.5 rounds. We are 3-1 on these kinds of bets in recent months for a very nice profit overall.

Styles make fights and trust me when I tell you that Leites and Hermansson would have fought to a decision the majority of the time. The injuries to Hermansson early in that fight added an extra level of chaos into the matchup that gave both fighters a sense of urgency. It happens. Nobody could have predicted the fight would have played out like that based on prefight information and we were only 20 seconds away from the bet winning. This is one of those losses that you have to take on the chin and move on. We will continue to make money from these kinds of bets. Please don’t get upset when they lose occasionally.

The second losing bet I would like to talk about is the Amanda Nunes vs. Raquel Pennington bet. Out of all the bets, this is perhaps the one that people were most unhappy about. Which to be honest baffles me.

If you read my breakdown for the fight between Pennington and Nunes, you would have known that I said that this would not have been a picnic for Pennington. It was a tough fight. This bet hinged on whether or not Nunes would be able to fight at a high pace for 25 minutes. Historically she has started to slow down significantly in rounds 2 and 3 when a fight has been contested at a high pace, but against Pennington, her cardio looked outstanding.

In the past, it was rare that fighters would be able to improve their cardio, but in recent weeks we’ve seen Rose Namajunas, Kevin Lee and now Amanda Nunes all make giant leaps forward in their conditioning. This is not something that can be predicted based on the prefight information we had available.

To some degree, the fight pretty much played out like I thought it would. I knew that Rocky would be in trouble early, but I also knew that she was tough enough to hang in there, which is why I recommended betting on the over 2.5 rounds. At odds of 7.50 | +650 | 13/2 I was betting on Nunes coming into the fight with the same cardio that she has shown throughout her career, and this would have given Pennington an opportunity to take over in rounds 3, 4 and 5. It never happened. Nunes dominated and looked terrific, but I still believe Pennington was a great bet as a considerable underdog. The bet lost, but you have to roll the dice sometimes when the risk is worth the reward. We lost 1 unit on Pennington, but if Nunes had not have made such a massive improvement to her cardio, we would have had a genuine chance of hitting a 6.5 unit profit. This is an excellent return based on the information that we had going into the fight. You have to get comfortable with losing bets like this because you only need to hit 1 in 6 of them to make a profit. They will lose more often than not, but over the long term, they are profitable.

The final loss was by far the most frustrating. Jacare started the first round against Kelvin Gastelum strong, but then faded hard in rounds 2 and 3. Before I talk about this fight, I would like you to take some time to read the official scoring criteria for the new unified rules of MMA, which the Brazilian Athletic Commission used to score this fight. The official document from the ABC MMA Rules Committee can be downloaded by clicking here.

I am not going to dissect this fight in line with the scoring criteria, or else this article is going to get very, very long, but under the new scoring I believe it’s pretty damn clear that the only way to score round 1 of the fight was 10-8 Jacare. Gastelum didn’t land a punch in round 1 and got completely dominated on the ground. Under the new scoring criteria, that round should have been scored 10-8 for Jacare.

Round 2 was obviously Gastelum’s round. He had Jacare hurt bad, knocked him down, and Jacare was starting to look very tired. Up until the final 60 seconds of the round, I believe this was a 10-8 round for Gastelum, but if you go back and watch this fight, you will see that Jacare caught a second wind and finished the round very strong. He landed 3-4 hard shots on Gastelum in the final minute, which backed Gastelum up and appeared to hurt him pretty bad. You would not have noticed this if watching the fight on a low-quality stream, but in HD Gastelum was hurt by these big shots. I believe that this brought the scoring down from a 10-8 Gastelum round to a 10-9, but I could also see why you would score the round 10-8 for Gastelum under the new scoring.

Either way, heading into the third round this fight was dead even. Or Jacare would have been slightly up if you scored round 2 10-9 for Gastelum. In the third round, Jacare landed the much more meaningful shots. Gastelum applied a ton of pressure and came forward the whole round, but for the most part, he was walking onto Jacare’s power counters. Jacare also got a brief takedown at the end of round 3.

Under the new scoring, aggressiveness and octagon control is only supposed to be scored in a round, when striking and grappling is equal. Therefore under the new scoring, Gastelum’s forward pressure and Octagon control in round 3 should not have counted for anything because Jacare scored a takedown and landed the more significant, meaningful strikes.

Was Jacare tired? Yes. Would he have lost if this was a 5 round fight? Absolutely. But this is a sport, and by the rules, I feel it’s pretty clear that Jacare won.

If Manchester United were beating Real Madrid 2-1 in the Champions League, it wouldn’t matter if many of their players looked tired or if Real Madrid was dominating the whole game, Manchester United would still win the game if the score ended 2-1 after 90 minutes.

MMA is a sport, with clearly defined rules and yes, Jacare was struggling, but it doesn’t change the fact that he won that fight under the new scoring criteria that was used to judge this fight.

MMABoxingJunkie26 shared this really cool breakdown of the fight from the UFC website:

As you can see in that image, Jacare won the fight everywhere.

This was a particularly frustrating loss to digest because Jacare having home advantage was one of the reasons why I decided to bet him. If the fight were taking place anywhere else in the world, I probably would have passed. I knew that Gastelum had the skills to make the fight close in the 2nd half, but I banked on Jacare’s home advantage being enough if the fight went the distance.

Earlier this year we were on the receiving end of Brazilian home judging when we bet 5 units on Tim Means to beat Sergio Moraes. Means won the fight clearly, but the Brazilian judges ended up scoring the fight for Moraes. The judging decision was so bad that the UFC decided to pay Tim Means his win bonus, even though on paper he “lost.”

Our big loss on Tim Means made the loss on Jacare particularly difficult to digest. I felt that Tim Means and Jacare both won their fights, but we were on the wrong side of the judging in both of them. In these situations, people often say that long-term these things balance out, but in my 8-year betting career, I can assure you that for me, they haven’t. Not even close. These two losing bets amount to a -11 unit loss. This is huge. These two losses have cost me thousands of pounds, and they have probably prevented Jacare from ever getting a title shot in the UFC.

I’m sorry that I have had a whinge and a moan here, but I received some pretty hurtful emails earlier this week which told me that “I sucked” and that I am an idiot. This is difficult to digest when I feel like we made good bets, but got unlucky.

We have made a decent profit in prefight betting this year and a huge profit in Live Betting. We will continue to make money, but there will also be weeks where we will get destroyed and make losses. Sometimes those losses will be close and contentious like I feel they were for UFC 224 and on other weeks we will straight up get wrecked, and I’ll look like a clueless idiot. That’s why they call this gambling. No one can predict what will happen in these fights. All we can do is put our money in strong positions and hope for the best. I promise you, that win or lose; we always put our money in strong positions based on the information we have available to us. Sometimes it’s not enough, and we will lose, but if you hang in there, I promise that we’ll make money long term. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’m not a Hobo yet…

As we get closer to the start of UFC Fight Night 129 we are all itching to get back in the win column and bank a profit, but again we need to be patient and go into this event with the same, calm and calculated mindset that has helped us earn so much money over the last few years. If it turns out to be another crappy event and we make a loss, then so be it, it happens. This is how bookies end up making so much money. They rely on people losing their minds and their composure and acting impulsively and losing all their cash. That is not the game we play. We will continue to crush them long term, but we need to be smart, and we need to be patient.

I am ready to lay the smackdown on the betting website’s candy asses this weekend. But at the same time, I won’t try to force opportunities. We will continue to make big money this year, but in the meantime, we need to relax, trust the process, trust the strategy and wait for the opportunities to come to us.

Please leave a comment below and let me know how you feel about what I’ve said. Good luck, I love you guys!!!

https://youtu.be/I0rfmjnT7kw

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UFC 224 looks incredible for prefight betting. It has been a long time since I have felt this confident about our chances of making a big profit on an event.

I believe that the betting websites have been lazy with their capping of these fights because many of the odds seem to be way off. There is a ton of value on many of these fights.

Hopefully, we can make them pay for their complacency by making a lot of money from our bets for UFC 224.

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