Guess the fighter by their overall combined opponents' W-L-D records.

Lightning Round #15

23) 1291-186-38

...good for a roughly ~85% winning percentage, in aggregate - or a ~88% non-defeat percentage (including draws).

24) 700-243-47

...good for a roughly ~71% winning percentage, in aggregate - or a ~75% non-defeat percentage (including draws).

Clue: 23 & 24 share the exact same ring name. Both have also fought at Madison Square Garden, exactly once, and both suffered knockdowns on the night they did.

 

Keep firing off guesses, you guys now have plenty of catching up to do! (bought myself a little breathing room )

...and don't be afraid to ask for hints. I'm happy to hand them out, just no dead giveaways. Examples: you can ask how many degrees of separation two mystery boxers are, whether they fought within a division or two of each other, whom amongst them is older, which has challenged for a world title, etc.

 

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Hmm...thanks for the feedback. I had been erring on the side of making the clues sufficiently challenging, with the bare minimum necessary to potentially make a correct guess (assuming individual more-than-passing familiarity with the boxers in question) - striking that delicate balance of maximum "playability" that has long been the objective for makers of games, from the kind with pieces on a board through modern day console & handheld electronic varieties: an equilibrium between "doable enough to not frustrate and induce rage-quit" and yet "not too easy so as to induce boredom".

In terms of setting that bar, I was kind of flying blind here in the early testing phases, so to my view all the entries were of about equal difficulty, but of course that comes from the bias of my own perspective. That's where an outside look (in the form of user input) comes in handy.

I guess if the current overall scoreboard leader (2 for 2 guesses correct, 100% clip) is deeming the incomplete remainder too difficult with the clues provided, then it behooves me to make the adjustment of sprinkling in a few more.

 

Full table of mystery boxers:

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Lightning Round #16

25) 78-26-5

...good for a roughly ~71% winning percentage, in aggregate - or a ~76% non-defeat percentage (including draws).

26) 852-180-122

...good for a roughly ~74% winning percentage, in aggregate - or a better than ~84% non-defeat percentage (including draws).

Clue: 25 & 26 share the exact same ring name. They also were both recognized, at their respective peaks, as world champions in the same weight class - although not both in boxing, which served as one's "secondary" combat sport to which they attempted crossing over mid-career - and each was enshrined in their respective Hall of Fame in 1994. 25 was born almost exactly fourteen years (less three weeks) after the date on which 26 last fought.

 

I'm pretty sufficiently happy with the amount of clues available now. Any more than what has been provided as the median here and I think it would risk either making the answers too obvious to really flex anyone's brain muscles, or else would make the solutions too entirely reliant on the clue set without even having to glance at the W-L-D totals (which is kind of the point of the game).

I recognized from the outset that simply guessing the identity of a boxer on the sole basis of their opponents' combined records (as of when they fought them) was going to be nigh impossible save for the very rare savant boxing nerd with the coincidental and statistically unlikely combination of both an encyclopedic mind for record data plus a capacity to perform column tallies automatically.

The idea was always to have guesses based on a syncretic approach, using both the hard numbers and the more qualitative data supplied in the hints to help triangulate a "hit" (much as one makes educated guesses based on a preset array of data plus trial & error in a game like Battleship). Some of the early ones needed only common sense to narrow down to an initial, manageable pool of suspects - a relatively short list is going to have their combined opponents boast a win total numbering as high as nearly 1400, like Mayweather's. Then, as the patterns of the game emerge, you can start to intuit your way around using common sense and further applying what you've observed through playing. If you already know the first is Mayweather and then look at 2 (Shumenov), for instance, you can extrapolate that whoever it was clearly fought decent competition to be in the same ballpark of combined opponents' W-L-D ratio as someone like Mayweather, and yet one can logically deduce he fought a much smaller # of fighters, since the values in each column are half Mayweather's or less. So then you start asking yourself intelligent questions, like "Who fought pretty good competition, but had less than half the experience of Mayweather?" - and from there, you start to realize that it doesn't work on a 1:1 basis, and "better" records won't be distributed evenly in every fighter's early career. Having in the vicinity of twenty fights but still having the win to loss ratio be the same as Mayweather's? That means somebody who started out with a tougher schedule than normal and never eased up, and maybe fought a couple of big-ticket names (like Hopkins, for instance) with high values in the W column and relatively low ones in the L and D to stretch out that ratio.

Navigating the clues while keeping in the forefront of your mind "whose raw data (of the people the clues may have suggested) might resemble this set of W-L-D values? Who, for instance, faced an unusually high number of boxers with draws on their records? What circumstances might bring that about?" - etc.

At this point, the pieces are on the board and the die are cast. The next move is yours, dear players.

 

Guuuuuuuuuuuuys! Some of these are lay-ups at this point. (way easier now with the supplemental hints than some of the ones already guessed, IMO)

 

BAM!!!

 

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Full table of mystery boxers:

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