UFC 247 Betting Tips, Picks and Predictions

At the beginning of every year, I always go back over the previous 12 months to see if there are any areas that I can tighten up and improve.

The best part about doing this kind of analysis when you’re on a losing streak is that you are much more open-minded towards doing things differently. This kind of analysis doesn’t seem as valuable when you’re winning because everything is great.

Personally, I don’t care about losing bets. They are just apart of the game. They are unavoidable. I’ve been gambling for so long that I just don’t feel anything anymore, but the negativity that I receive online does bother me. I’m getting used to it slowly, but it’s not easy to wake up after having a losing weekend and face a ton of abuse.

People were particularly harsh this past weekend, so I went into my analysis session for this year’s results, feeling pretty down. This soon changed when I began to take a look at our performance in 2019. Looking back, I think we did great. We banked a solid profit across that 12 month period. Sure the end to the year was disappointing, but it’s hard for me to put into words how much bad luck we’ve had over the last few months.

I don’t want it to sound like I am making excuses, but when you spend as much time studying these fights as I do, you start to develop a very deep understanding of all the possible ways that a fight can play out. This means that when a fighter you bet loses, you’ve already seen them lose that way in your head. This means that it’s no surprise when it actually happens.

This kind of thinking also enables you to quantify how lucky or unlucky you were that this particular scenario played out. This ability to visualize the different ways that a fight could play out is one of the reasons why I’ve had so much success Live Betting over the years. I can often see how a fight is going to play out before it actually does play out, based on small clues we get early on into the matchup.

It’s very important to remember that every bet that you’ll ever place will have risk factors. Recently I’ve found that we’ve been placing solid bets with minimal risk, only to see those minimal risk factors end up being the deciding factor in the fight. It’s frustrating, but it’s also improbable that it keeps happening.

A really good example of this from this past weekend was the Brett Johns and RDA fights. There were so many risk factors with betting Brett Johns compared to betting RDA, and yet Brett won, and RDA lost.

After analyzing my results for 2019, I feel super positive about 2020 because I feel like we had a disproportionately high amount of bad luck. Not just towards the end of the year, but also dotted throughout our strong run from January 2019 to September 2019.

The only area where I feel I need to tighten up is when betting on older fighters. We didn’t actually make a loss last year betting on old fighters, but I think that these kinds of bets may become a problem moving forward.

When looking back at my results, I found that I lost a lot of bets last year on older guys. The reason we never made a loss on older fighters overall was because of a few select winners who really came through for us. Like when we bet on a 45-year-old Cheick Kongo to beat Vitaly Minakov at huge underdog odds, when we bet Diego Sanchez at dog odds to beat Mickey Gall, when we bet Glover Teixeira as an underdog to beat Nikita Krylov and Ion Cutelaba or when we bet on Demian Maia to beat Ben Askren and Anthony Rocco Martin.

These bets were huge winners for us and contributed to our overall profit in 2019, but I am worried that they may become problematic in the future because pretty much all those fights were hyper-competitive and could have gone the other way.

I’ve found that when we bet on older fighters, they either get dominated, or they win by a close margin. They never go out and totally dominate their opponent. This means that even though we made money on these kinds of bets last year, if things would have played out slightly differently, we could have lost overall on them.

There is, of course, evidence in FightNomics that supports the theory of old fighters being a bad bet. Generally speaking, the bigger the age gap between fighters, the less likely it is that the older fighter will win.

This discovery doesn’t mean that I am going to stop betting on older fighters, I think any fighter is worth a bet at the right odds. I will, however, be much more cautious when pulling the trigger on older fighters and make sure that we’re getting a really good risk to reward ratio in the odds.

When you’ve just lost some bets, your first instinct is to “try and get it back”. This is a dangerous mindset because that impulsive behavior can lead you to make bad betting decisions.

I know that many of you might be itching to get back on the horse and are feeling frustrated with my recent performance, but it’s very important that you understand that this is a long term game. There are brutal swings with all types of gambling. The reason why most people don’t make money gambling is because they behave impulsively and they can’t deal with the swings.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve had several big swings in Prefight betting, so this is not my first rodeo. I always bounce back, and long term, I will continue to be profitable. In order to be profitable long term, you must remain disciplined, and you must remain consistent when you know that your strategy works.

I will always be straight and honest with you. So please understand that UFC 247 is one of the worst PPV cards I’ve ever seen and also one of the worst events for prefight and Live Betting that I’ve ever seen. Take a look and see for yourself:

When I begin to research an event, I usually have 4 or 5 names jump out at me as potential bets. I then whittle that number down to 1 or 2 bets after research.

This is the first UFC event that I can remember in a long time where not a single name is jumping out at me right now. This is a bad sign. Maybe we’ll find some decent bets after doing research, but it’s not looking good.

This fight card also looks terrible for Live Betting because there are only 10 fights on this card instead of the usual 12. On top of that, we also have 5 of those 10 fights featuring heavy favorites.

We can only work with the fights that we are given, and the fights the UFC are serving up for UFC 247 look about as bad as you can get for betting.

My main objective for 2020 is to grind out a bigger profit this year than we did last year, and the only way we’re going to achieve that is by only putting our money in strong positions. If I can’t find strong positions, I pass and wait for better opportunities to come along.

I just wanted to let you know what the landscape is like for UFC 247 just in case we have to pass on this event completely. I know it’s disappointing, but making money from gambling is really hard, and it’s important to keep things tight and to stay disciplined.

Alex Morono vs Kalinn Williams Betting Tip and Prediction

I have been vocal in the Chat Room and in my Livestreams this week about how bad UFC 247 looked for betting.

When I started to research the fight between Alex Morono and Kalinn Williams, I didn’t expect to find a bet. To my surprise, this turned out to be a really good stylistic matchup for Morono, and I think there’s a good amount of value here, even if he is currently a big favorite.

Like with any bet, it’s important to emphasize that there are risk factors here. I recommend going and watching some of Morono’s past fights and then watching my Livestream on this matchup to decide if you want to tail this bet:

When it comes to Alex Morono, I can only see two potential risk factors, and if I am completely honest, I think there’s a good chance I’m overly cautious with both of them.

The first and most obvious risk factor is that Kalinn Williams is a big, strong, athletic guy. In round 1 he commits hard to his punches. It’s possible he could land a bomb on Morono and knock him out. I don’t personally consider this as too much of a risk factor because Williams has sloppy technique, and Morono has a great chin. He’s only been knocked out 2 times in his 22 fight career, and he’s only been KO’d once in his 9 fights in the UFC at the hands of Niko Price.

It would be particularly unlucky if we bet Morono and he was to get knocked out because in the last 2 years Williams has gone the distance with several extremely low-level fighters who have losing records.

The 2nd and more significant risk factor is that Morono has really bad takedown defense, and he’s weak off his back. Morono has only defended 31% of takedowns in his 9 fights in the UFC, and you can pretty much guarantee that if you shoot a takedown, you will probably get him to the ground.

One of the reasons why Morono is so easy to takedown is because he’s a Black Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and falls in love with hunting for longshot submissions. He is more focused on submitting his opponent as opposed to working his way back to his feet or keeping the fight standing in the 1st place.

Kalinn Williams is a low-level grappler and a low-level wrestler, but he does frequently try to take his opponents down. Based on past performances, he doesn’t appear to have a heavy top game or a high-level ground game, but I can’t rule out the possibility of him winning this fight via lay and pray if Morono chooses to stay on his back.

After watching the Jordan Mein fight it’s tough to feel totally confident in Morono against anyone who will try to take him down, but he has since moved to Fortis MMA and in his last fight against Max Griffin looked to quickly pop back up to his feet every time he got taken down.

Morono will likely have a giant advantage on the ground, and it would be an epic flake job on his part if he chose to allow Williams to control him from top position. Unfortunately fighters often implode, but it would be exceptionally disappointing if Morono were to demonstrate fight IQ that was that bad.

Now that we’ve talked about the risk factors, let’s talk about the reasons why Morono is a solid bet.

To put it bluntly, Morono is significantly better than Williams everywhere. He’s lightyears ahead of him standing up and on the ground. Morono can only lose this fight if he gets flash KO’d, disqualified, injured, or demonstrates terrible fight IQ.

If the fight stays standing, I expect Morono to pick him apart with his superior striking. Williams is quite slow past the 1st round and stands very flat-footed and rigid. He’s also very easy to hit. There’s a good chance that Morono wins this fight by knockout.

On the ground, Morono should also have a huge advantage. Everything that Williams does is with athleticism and explosiveness as opposed to the correct technique. Morono is a BJJ Black Belt with tricky submissions, sweeps, and reversals. He should be able to cause Williams big problems on the ground as long as he doesn’t except being on the bottom for too long chasing long shot submissions.

I also really like Morono in this fight because he has great cardio. He can fight at a high pace for 15 minutes. He’s always working. Williams tends to slow down after the 1st round, and he becomes sloppier. His hand speed is much slower, and he’s much easier to hit. I like how Morono is constantly working; Williams will struggle to keep up with the pace he sets.

There are also a few X-Factors in Morono’s favor. The first is that he’s from Houston. UFC 247 takes place in Houston, which means he’ll have home advantage for this fight. Texan judges are historically very biased, which will make it difficult for Williams to win a decision in a close fight.

The hometown crowd could also have an impact on the referees. If Williams does take Morono down, the crowd might get restless and put pressure on the referee to stand them up.

Morono also started to train at Fortis MMA after the Jordan Mein loss, which is slowly becoming one of the better MMA gyms out there. This has shown in Morono’s recent performances. He appears to be getting significantly better from fight to fight.

Another major X-Factor is that Kalinn Williams is stepping up to take this fight on just over 1 week’s notice. His cardio didn’t look great in his past fights, so it will probably look even worse since he is taking this fight on such short notice.

Like with any bet, there are risk factors, but it really would be an epic flake job by Morono if he were to lose to Williams. It’s not often that I see a ton of value in such a big favorite, but Morono should be much closer to a 1.20 | -500 | 1/5 here.

Reasons for betting on Alex Morono