UFC on ESPN+ 26 Betting Tips, Picks and Predictions

I’ve been posting my Fun Bets to the website for exactly 1 year now, and I’ve been really surprised by how much people like them.

Due to the growing popularity of these bets, I’m now going to be updating the Fun Bets article throughout the week. It’ll now become a working document where I update my Picks and recommended Prop Bets as soon as I am done researching each fight. This means that you won’t have to wait until 1-2 hours before an event to see my Props, they’ll now be updated throughout the week.

Just remember that the full range of Prop Bets often don’t get posted to betting sites until the Thursday / Friday before an event, so check the Fun Bet articles from Thursdays on Fight week to start seeing my Prop Bet recommendations.

I also want to remind everybody that Prop Bets are subject to violent swings, so please be careful with them. We are profitable after tracking them for 1 year, but this isn’t a long enough period of time for me to feel totally confident that they will be profitable long term.

On any given night, every single Prop Bet can lose, so please don’t go too big on them. Keep your stake sizes small relative to how much you’re Live Betting and how much you’re betting on the regular prefight bets.

The regular prefight bets have 6 years of profitable results behind them, so I’m confident that if you tail them, you’ll make money long term. Of course, these bets are also subject to swings like any form of gambling, we’re in the middle of one right now, but the swings won’t be anywhere near as violent as what you will get with Props.

Now let’s talk a bit about last week’s event.

These are strange times in the UFC. I’ve been watching MMA for 15 years, and I’ve never seen two disqualifications in the same night. I also never thought I’d see the day where Diego Sanchez did what he did.

I won’t criticize Diego over what happened because I believe the current ruleset and judges scoring criteria is badly broken. I am massively in favor of Black and White rules and scoring in the UFC.

If a fighter commits a foul, I believe a point should be taken. Irrespective of the severity or whether it was accidental or not. If you foul someone in Basketball, the opposing team gets a free-throw. Bring someone down in the 18 yard Box in Football; the other team gets a penalty. This is the only system that works in sports to make it fair for everyone.

Diego should never have been put in that position. If a Footballer gets brought down in the 18-yard box when he’s about to take a shot, the referee doesn’t ask him whether he thinks he was going to score before deciding whether or not to award a penalty. The rules are dumb in MMA. Pereira inflicted significant damage with an illegal strike; so I’m all for automatic disqualification. Yes, it sucks, but rigid, Black and White structure is the only way you’re going to fix a dysfunctional sport.

These are also strange times in the UFC because I can’t ever remember a time where we saw this many flash KOs within a short period. I’ve been paying close attention to this because of a lack of Live Betting opportunities in December and January due to so many fights ending early due to Flash KOs. Fights feel weird at the moment, almost like fighters appear to be much more fragile than usual. I’m looking forward to this chaotic period passing so that we can get back to the way things usually are.

With losses on guys like Tim Means, it’s easy to play Captain Hindsight after the fact, but you have to ask yourself if it’s rationale to worry about a guy like Means getting KO’d when he’s only been KO’d one time in his entire 40 fight career. What is an appropriate level of caution in a business filled with risk?

If Means was fighting a Heavy-handed KO artist, I’d understand the apprehension, but he wasn’t. We saw Rodriguez go the distance with some very low-level guys recently, and he didn’t look that dangerous in his past fights.

You have to draw a line in the sand somewhere and try to work out what an appropriate level of risk to take on for the payoff in the odds. Getting a 40% return on your money betting a guy significantly better than his opponent everywhere, with only one way to lose, is usually a pretty good deal. It just sucks that these deals haven’t been bringing us a return lately.

At least Tim Means was able to show us his advantages. He was cruising in the fight and a 1.16 | -625 | 4/25 favorite in Live Betting before the flash knockdown.

At the moment, we’re seeing a disproportionately high number of bets lose after a small number of risk factors end up being the deciding factor in a bet. I’d compare this current run to how it feels when you’re playing Poker, and no matter what you do, you can’t win. It doesn’t matter how many times you get your money into those 70/30, 80/20, or even 90/10 positions; you just know that you’re going to get rivered before the card is even drawn. If you’ve ever played Poker, you’ll know exactly what this feels like. In 10 years of betting on MMA, I’ve only ever had this feeling once before, back in 2016 just after USADA came into effect.

I’m really glad that you’ve decided to come with me on this journey because you’ll get to see first hand how to grind your way out of a tough run of results.

It doesn’t matter how good of a gambler you are; variance, unfortunately, hits everyone because, ultimately, you are betting on things that are outside of your control. You can’t work harder or faster to improve results; all you can do is make changes to your strategy, stay disciplined, and continue to put your money in strong positions.

Thankfully Saturday night wasn’t all doom and gloom. Merab Dvalishvili ended up coming through for us in a big way. No flash KOs or bad judging here. Just the guy we bet showing up and doing exactly what we expected him to do. A strong reminder that we’re making the right decisions, but the randomness of MMA and gambling is punishing us in this small window of ugly variance.

It turned out to be a great night for < a href="https://mmabettingtips.com/live-betting/">Live Betting. We were able to hit 3 solid winners that all had decent max bet limits and liquidity. Going 3-0 on < a href="https://mmabettingtips.com/live-betting/">Live Betting felt great after a strange couple of months filled with low-quality PPVs that lacked opportunities to make money due to one-sided fights or fights ending early in round 1.

Last weekend was a reminder that the lowkey Fight Night cards are our bread and butter and that there is so much money to be made Live Betting MMA. I literally cannot wait for this weekend because it’s another Fight Night card full of competitive matchups and plenty of opportunities for us to bank another profit.

This weekend is another huge weekend for us with 2 Bellator events and 1 UFC event. This means that I will be online a lot this weekLivestreaming my research for these fights. It would be great if you could stop by sometime to join me. I really love having you guys research the fights with me. It makes the whole process a lot more enjoyable.

Due to the sheer number of fights that we have to get through this week, I will probably be working right up until the final hour before the UFC Auckland card takes place in order to get through them all. You can keep track of what fights I still have to research on this page. I’ll post all the Livestream videos to the Livestream archive.

If you are are one of my Elite Members, please don’t forget that I will be offering Live Betting for every single fight this weekend. We’ll be doing both Bellator cards and the UFC.

If you’re still reading this, thank you so much for all your support. I’ll see you in the Livestreams!