Juan Francisco Estrada Romero vs. Román Alberto González Luna II/Hiroto Kyōguchi vs. Axel Aragón RBR

I don't think anybody can reasonably have a problem with it going Estrada's way, so the word 'robbery' shouldn't even be creeping its way into the discourse (I had it decided by a mere point myself, and felt compelled in one instance to score an even round for the first time in a blue moon, and there were several more rounds nearly as close as that one) - but at the same time people with scores as wide as 117-111 have to at least give a nod to what an overwhelming majority felt it was actually go-either-way close (a majority that eclipses the number of diehard Chocolatito fans, so you can't just dismiss it as only a handful of fringe crackpots saying that scorecard is too generous to El Gallo), and that some of their closer Estrada rounds could merit further review, and that some might swing Romagon's way on a re-score, unless you're bending over backwards to not give him any credit.

 

Interesting proposal. Reminds me of how the old system of scoring amateur boxing had the 'countback' failsafe.

 

Right. The thing with weeding out robberies from unpopular decisions in close fights is, you first need to pare down to essential rounds. As in, cases where you have to give round X to fighter A or B. Generally speaking, these are the rounds where, an outlier here and there aside, absolutely everyone - going RBR on forums, live-tweeting on Twitter, publicly offered up on press row, and in YT comments sections years later - score it unanimously. You set aside those aside, call it Tier 1 at the base of your pyramid - that's your foundational 'we all can agree on this much' starting point. Then, it gets tricky - you have to sift out the "close but clear" from the "Jesus, who the hell did win that one?? " frames. The former is your middle layer and the latter your apex of the pyramid (assuming standard distribution, although sometimes there will in fact be more razor-thin impossible-to-split ones than competitive but with a clear victor).

Round 1 is a Tier 1 round for Estrada. Hardly anybody gave it to Chocolatito.

Round 2 is second tier for González - there was a notable amount of dissent, and you saw a trickle of 10-9's for Estrada, but most had it for the Nicaraguan.

Round 3 is where we find our first real head-scratcher up at the pyramid's tippy-top - and that's where you see major divergences begin.

All it takes a few rounds like the third (and fourth, which I had for Estrada by a filament) and you can have two people adamantly swearing that a fight went two completely different ways - because in their minds, those second- and third-tier rounds are indistinguishable; they all just get lumped together as 'close but clear' for the guy they saw it for. When it really is more nuanced than all that. Quite often a good, experienced scorer will have a fight like this differently on future viewings. Different, to an extent, that is within reason. They won't budge on any but the uppermost layer of the pyramid, and that includes rounds they may in real time not have realized they were so infirm on their convictions about the first time around.

I fully acknowledge that watching this again in 5 years I might have it 115-114, 115-113 (assuming I eschew doing another 10-10 and find a justified rationale to pick somebody's way to lean), or even possibly 116-112 for Estrada - but 117-111 just feels like it sits beyond the scope of what nudging some Tier-3's might accomplish. On the bubble, on my card, of the rounds I scored for González, the closest are the 5th, 8th, and 11th. Swing them all Estrada's way, along with my 10-10 in round 3, and I'd reach that 117-111 score for him (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11 for him and 2, 10, 12 for González) - but the question then becomes, how close did I mean by 'close' in the moment? How married am I to González as the winner of that round? Was it a case of 51%-49%, or more like 60%-40%. I certainly don't feel like all four of those rounds on the chopping block were taken by Chocolatito, in my view, by a narrow enough margin that you could reverse them. None of the four are more suspeptible to reversal than my round 4 for Estrada. (if you 'trade' round 4 for rounds 3, 5, 8, and 11 you get a 116-112 win for Estrada on my card, but that is an unequitable 4-1 trade in the closest rounds where the 4 on one side are less close than the one opposite in the bargain).

So even with a disciplined approach like this you still run into the problem of subjectivity in scoring, and people who may normally exhibit the same taste in fighters and have equally experienced eyes and be applying the same criteria, can find themselves in wildly different locales and each unable to understand how the other got so far off-track, just on the basis of that narrowing of perspective the further up the pyramid you go, and people having a hard time separating rounds they allocated one fighter's way in the heat of the moment (possibly for a very valid reason) but that might be subject to change later from the ones that are in fact in that challenging-to-pinpoint 'close but (unshakably) clear' territory.

tl;dr - Bottom line, if there's more than a couple of Tier 3's, and when you subtract those from your equation you find the rest of the rounds are fairly evenly distributed between the fighters ...then you can't really use the word robbery.

 

At the risk of starting a serious political firestorm with a tongue-in-cheek aside, because of course this is ESB..

They could both have reassignment surgery and have two-minute rounds in the rubber match.

 

Rescores are often (but not always) more reliable than first-times.