UFC on ESPN+ 14 Betting Tips, Picks and Predictions

We kicked off August by banking a solid profit on both Prefight and Live Betting last weekend at UFC on ESPN 5. Now we have to try and keep it going by following it up with another win this weekend on UFC on ESPN+ 14.

Many of the fighters competing this weekend are making their UFC debuts so at this point I am not sure if there will be many solid betting opportunities. Hopefully I’ll be able to find something for us.

Polyana Viana vs Veronica Macedo Betting Tip and Prediction

I woke up this morning with just two fights left to research. Based on my hazy memories of the 4 fighters I still had left to study, I honestly didn’t expect to have any bets. Then I watched Polyana Viana’s last two fights and was shocked to see how bad she was. I’m not sure how I managed to forget that she was this bad, but trust me, she’s bad.

Veronica Macedo isn’t usually the kind of fighter that I’d bet at favorite odds, but if you go and watch Viana’s last two fights against Hannah Cifers and JJ Aldrich, you will see exactly why Macedo is a decent bet here.

Viana is primarily a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, but she lacks the offensive wrestling to take her opponents down. This means that she often pulls guard and ends up on the bottom. When on the bottom, she is highly ineffective and spends a lot of time in full guard, achieving nothing. She frequently puts herself on the bottom, and because she’s so inactive off her back, this is always a losing position for her. On average she pulls guard once a round.

Viana has to pull guard in fights because she quite often finds herself in a checkmate position. This is because she’s a grappler who doesn’t have the offensive wrestling to take her opponents down and her striking is at a very low level. Viana is quite tall for the lower weight classes, so she has flat-footed rigid movement and poor striking defense. She always fights with her hands very low and is slow to react to her opponent, which means that she tends to eat a lot of clean, hard shots. Her Boxing is very poor, but she does have powerful kicks.

Veronica Macedo is never going to be a safe bet because she’s absolute chaos, but from a technical perspective, there’s no doubt that she’s better than Viana almost everywhere. If the fight stays standing, I give her a big advantage because Viana is very slow and has poor striking defense.

On the ground, the fight is much more complicated to call because both girls frequently give up position chasing long shot submissions. What I would say is that Macedo is much more offensive. She’s got decent ground and pound and is constantly attacking submissions. In contrast, when Viana finds herself on her back, she tends to go to full guard and stall.

One of the things that I like about Macedo is that she’s small and flexible and does a great job of using this flexibility to create scrambles on the ground when caught in bad positions. This means that her opponents have to stay vigilant and work incredibly hard to maintain a dominant position on her.

The problem is, you can never feel confident in Macedo because she is constantly attacking with submissions on the ground, so she does frequently put herself on the bottom in a losing position. We also have to take into consideration the fact that Viana will have a relatively big size advantage in this fight, and physicality is a huge advantage in Women’s MMA. Having said that, Viana is taking this fight on just 2 weeks notice which gives us an extra reason to bet Macedo at these odds.

Reasons for betting on Veronica Macedo