Yes, how very unfortunate that in the US you are not arbitrarily allowed to steal money from fighters.
The yellow card doesn't have to result in a 10% purse deduction, it could be a warning before a point deduction, since the ref's are hesitant to take away points.
I'd say your first point highlights why whole fight scoring is the superior method in terms of giving better results if not in accountability. MMA being such a diverse sport is hard to pin down to exact criteria and without those criteria judging naturally tends to be based on opinion of who has the advanatge as much as the action itself. As I said Shogun/Machida 1 highlights that for me, Peoples admited he gave Machida the opening rounds because he believed he was in control of the fight. He wasnt scoring based just on the action but rather trying to read the outcome. You do that while judging by the round and your in effect trying to read the future which is obviously prone to error. While judging the entire fight though your in a far superior position to see whether a fighter was indeed controling the match to his advanatge. Looking at Shogun/Machida 1 as a whole its clear that Rua is the one controling the action to his advanatge wearing Lyoto down with low kicks, looking at it round by round the judges incorrectly believed Machida was in control and likely to land a big counter.
I meant "points" as in action A = X points and action B = Z points; using numbers to keep track of the rounds one. Even if you just use the whole fight as a whole rather than the round as a whole you are basically doing the same thing but once rather than 3 or 5 times. I think you get a more accurate score if you do it round by round, because a judge isn't going to be able to keep 15 minutes, let alone 25 in a championship fight, memorized in his head properly. I see that there could be problems if one fighter wins two close rounds vs one fairly dominant round and only get a draw and even lose, but that con vs the con of the judge only having to make one decision, hence a poor decision having a much greater impact on the outcome. In round by round, one judge making one mistake accounts for 1/9 or 1/15th of the score, as opposed to 1//3 using the fight as a whole.
That is Peoples judging improperly, there is no instruction to use the future rounds, plus you are adding that in yourself, he never said he was trying to predict what would happen or "read the outcome", just that he thought Lyoto won the round. In scoring round by round you can say "Peoples made a mistake with rounds X, Y, and Z" and be specific with each mistake, because he has to make 5 decisions publicly. If you have him just make one decision, it is much harder to argue against him because he only has to make one choice and has the whole 25 minutes to chose from. How are you trying to read the future by scoring one round? The criteria are all laid out, and if the judge deviates from that by trying to read the future he is a bad judge; Since there are more decisions in round by round, the judge making that mistake once has less effect on the outcome, and by having a larger sample size a judge can be better evaluated as good or bad. The judges were not basing it on what they thought Lyoto would do, they were simply valuing what he did do more than what Shogun did. Lyoto did land good hard punches to the head; I thought Shogun won the fight, but Lyoto hardly got blown out or anything. Letting the judges score the fight as a whole would have simply let them justify their decision even more, because they could pick out all the punches he landed and not have to score them in the context of each round. Basically, by making the judges publicly declare 3 or 5 decisions vs 1 gives them less power to hide, and shows the bad ones for what they are. By scoring round by round, you are making each bad decision less powerful and have less of an outcome on the fight as a whole.
What is the difference between that and what is already used, the ref giving you a warning? What does the ref waving a yellow card add to the warning?
Yellow Cards were used in Pride to penalise fighters for being boring/not pushing the action enough. The fighter would be docked part of their purse. Its completely different to referees warning fighters to stop breaking the rules.
Yes, we discussed the money part already, I know how they were used in Pride. My point is that Pride was stealing money from the fighters, which would obviously and correctly be illegal in the US. Then the response was that the US should use yellow cards without taking money, so I asked what the difference would be between using a yellow card as a warning as opposed to the verbal warning system that is used now. Taking money away from an MMA fighter is ****ing stupid, unethical, and hurts the sport. Anybody who wants to see fighters have their money taken away, especially arbitrarily, does not deserve to enjoy the fights they put on.
I don't understand that at all, if your looking back on the whole fight your obviously not going to be predicting what might unfold as it progresses. Your looking back from the position of knowing whether the wrestler who pushed his opponant up agenst the cage actually did wear him down or of knowing whether thecounter fighter was actually sucessful in landing his big shots. As I said many of the very worst decisions seem to be the product of judges making those predictions and it IMHO amplifys any bias that maybe present. Even if a judge was bias towards Rampage I'd say its much less likely he'd give him the fight agenst Machida having watched the entire thing having witnessed Lyoto being the one to come out ontop of the slow counter game both men were playing. I see a fighter who would have been given two very close rounds under round by round scoring and then loses a dominant round as being the inferior fighter and deserving to lose the decision. Round by round scoring combined with very few 10-8's has clearly resulted in a move towards boring decision fighting for me, its just common sense from the fighters point of view. Its exactly the same problem as you highlighted with "point scoring", yes it provides a more accountable framework but at the expense of one that can be exploited by fighters. As with K1 I think its a mistake to veiw Pride's format as merely a gimmick or a system created to give bias results, it was a system that was created in an enviroment where the promoter was freer to make changes for the benefit of the sport. I don't think it was just that freedom that led to those changes being made either but rather the fact that the buck stopped with the promoter, in the US I think the AC's do not just provide a barrier to change but also a convenient scapegoat to deflect fan criticism when a prompoter is happy with a system(that ampliy's bias towards his favorued fighters and rewards decision fighting american wrestlers he's often looking to promote).
I never said you would be predicting the future if you judge the fight as a whole, I just said that you also don't predict the future by judging the round. You just view each round as it's own fight, and don't try to predict anything. You were the one saying that judging round by round involves looking into the future somehow. There is absolutely no trying to predict the future involved in judging, you look at what happened, you base your score on that. You seem to have a hard on about two close fights that many different people see many different ways, and want to scrap the scoring system in favor of one that allows for even more bias to be present. The smaller amount of decisions each judge has to make, the more influence each decision has, and the more damage one bad decision can have on the outcome of a fight. Also, the longer amount of time you are giving judges to make a decision on, the less they are going to remember and the more likely they are to forget or remember incorrectly the events that took place.
What did Peoples say? as I recall it he claimed that Shogun's leg kicks were worth less than Machida repeatly countering him with punchs. That seems to show two clear ways in which he was using prediction to judge the fight to me. Firstly he was predicting that Machida landing pucnhes on Shogun was more likely to turn the fight in his favour than Rua' landing leg kicks on him. As it turns out though he was clearly incorrect, Shoguns leg kicks obviously turned the fight in his favour as it progressed. Secondly I'd say he was judging based more on the previous rep of fighters than the actual action. The stats actually show you that Machida was not landing nearly as often as Peoples claimed he was. I'd say that Peoples belief that Machida was the superior kickboxer more likely to win by counter clearly coloured his preception of the action. Again I think theres alot of hypocrasy in your arguement, on one hand your rubbishing a complex stats based scoring system because while more accountable it would be prone to exploitation while supporting round by round scoring thats resulted in exactly the same thing. Whats more the latter is always more likely to lead to the former, if your scoring round by round then to make up for the fact you can't view the fight as a whole and know for sure whether action was benefiting one fighter or the other you need to resort to scoring criteria(even if they arent stats) that weigh certain elements agenst each other. In the US right now we seem to have the worst possible system in that reguard since while judges justify decisions by scoring criteria those criteria seem to shift wildly as there so ill defined. Leg kicks for example were enough for Forrest to win the 1st round from 2 judges vs Rampage dispite actually being knocked down yet they werent enough for Shogun to beat Machida, the same with Randy's fence clinching vs Vera compaired to Shoguns vs Machida. Besides possible bias(and perhaps linked to it) those shifting criteria seem greatly effected by the rep of the fighters involved to me, Randy's fence clinching worked vs Gonzaga so its weighed more highly vs Vera. Heck even if you do have set criteria there still making predictions about who benefits from certain actions in a sport when thats very often unpredictable due to the differing skill sets/styles of the fighters involved, much moreso than any other fightsport. Whole fight scoring obviously has the advanatge that you can keep the same loose criteria that are less prone to exploitation BUT you can base those criteria on way in which the actual fight infront of you progressed. Say for example Aoki fought Sherk and the former spent the first two rounds in the latters guard with taking limated GnP then imagin the 3rd goes two different ways. In one situation Aoki locks up a triangle and very nearly submitts Sherk and in the other Sherk rocks Aoki with GnP then very nearly finishes him. Scoring the fight as a whole the judge can both avoid making predictions himself AND using criteria that make predictions(say that Sherk in top position has an advanatge) and instead form his opinions based on how the fight progressed, Aoki turned out to be in the advantagious position in the early stages in the first situation but not in the second.
Clear round = 10-8. Close round = 10-9. Cannot pick a winner = 10-10. Domination with multiple KD's = 10-7. Problem solved.
The problem is that your dealing with a 3 round format, if anything other than 10-9 is given the risk of a draw is high. Some kind of tie breaker would be needed, either an extension round or a must deside from the judges looking back at the entire fight.