American odds into percentages

I spend way too much time in Excel every time I want to convert odds into percentages, so I'm just going to leave it here for reference. Maybe it will help someone else as lame-brained as me.

=IF(A1=100,0.5,(IF(A1<100,A1/(A1-100),100/(A1+100))))

Skill disparity and entertainment value in combat sports

Tomorrow night at UFC 153, Anderson Silva, the greatest mixed martial artist of all time, will fight Stephan Bonnar, a popular and tough fighter but one who has never been in any sort of UFC title contention. Silva is a massive favourite (-1200 to -1000 on most books) and barring a total miracle, is expected to wipe the floor with Bonnar.

Similarly, a few weeks ago in the UFC's last pay-per-view offering, the main event featured light heavyweight phenom Jon Jones defending his title against Vitor Belfort. Jones was about a -800 favourite and after surviving an early submission scare from Belfort, dominated the vast majority of the fight.

People seemed quite excited about both fights, despite how one-sided they were.  Yet this doesn't seem to happen in more mainstream, stick-and-ball type sports. To draw an example from college football, no one would be excited to see Alabama play against Idaho and beat them by six touchdowns. People want to see Federer against Nadal or Djokovic, not against some random unseeded pro. When Canada plays Kazakhstan in hockey, it's pretty hard to find anyone outside of those two countries who cares. And while many Americans tune in to watch the USA's "Dream Team" of NBA superstars dunk all over some overmatched nation in the Olympics, the rest of the world is usually hoping the other country pulls out the upset, if they care at all.

Yet in combat sports, people do want to see these one-sided ass kickings. A couple years back, Silva put on a couple of uninspiring performances over Thales Leites and Patrick Cote. The UFC's solution was to match him with Forrest Griffin, someone they figured (rightly) would continue pressing forward even against a sniper like Silva. The result was one of the most embarrassing blowouts in modern UFC history, ending with this absurd Matrix-like sequence:

Both tomorrow's UFC 153 card and the Jones/Belfort UFC 152 card featured interesting co-main events. UFC 153 has a very close matchup (-120/+110) between Erick Silva and Jon Fitch, and UFC 152 offered the inaugural flyweight title fight between Demetrious Johnson and Joseph Benavidez. The reception to this latter fight was quite interesting.

For much of the fight, Johnson controlled the ring with quality ring generalship and brilliant footwork, getting in range to land combinations on Benavidez while evading the latter's counters. But except for a brief moment in the fourth round where Benavidez locked up a dangerous-looking guillotine, there was never the sense that either fighter would be able to stop his opponent. I thought the fight was not a great fight by any means, but reasonably entertaining. Yet many in the audience seemed to hate it and booed the fight vociferously.

It got me to thinking about what draws people to combat sports versus stick-and-ball sports. Of course, there are numerous great examples of epic fights that are close, edge-of-your-seat nail-biters or amazing come-from-behind miracles (Edgar/Maynard II, Silva/Sonnen I). Any time you get the best of the best putting on a dramatic back-and-forth match, it's a classic, regardless of the sport.

But on the opposite end of the spectrum, I don't know of any really memorable 61-3 football games, 8-0 hockey games, or 6-0, 6-2, 6-0 tennis matches. But anyone who was around sports 15 years ago remembers how Mike Tyson would be the hottest ticket in Las Vegas, uppercutting people's heads off in the 1st or 2nd round. People famously showed up for Tyson fights late (skipping the undercard) only to find out that the fight was already over. Silva/Griffin was such a memorable fight not in spite of, but because Griffin was so overmatched. Both Johnson/Benavidez and even a more entertaining affair in the recent Frank Edgar/Ben Henderson match fell under the radar, but people consistently go crazy when there is an obscene knockout or a dude helplessly takes 30 consecutive punches en route to a TKO. I can name many examples of truly uninteresting fights that people stood up and cheered for simply because someone's ass was being badly beaten.

I am (obviously) not a member of the holier-than-thou crowd which thinks that MMA and boxing are barbaric. I love the combat sports and they are beautiful to me. And I hold myself no better than anyone else: I am legitimately interested to watch Silva/Bonnar tomorrow night because it means I get to watch Anderson Silva do what he does best, which is use his fists, elbows, feet and knees to destroy people in mind-blowing ways. But it is interesting to me that this totally lopsided fight will likely draw more viewers than say, the Edgar/Henderson and José Aldo/Chad Mendes fights from earlier this year which both featured the consensus #1 versus the consensus #2 fighters in the division. When the two best teams in football, basketball, baseball or hockey meet up, you can be sure that fans of those sports will tune in. Yet in combat sports, unless someone is about to be beaten to a bloody pulp, only the hardcores seem to care.

Thoughts? Are people -- and in particular fight fans -- secretly actually snuff fans? Do they really just want to watch someone get pulverized? Or is there more to this?

The correlation of KOs suffered and age amongst UFC fighters

Cage Potato has an article up entitled The Price of Wisdom: Age and Knockouts in MMA. I'm actually off to the gym myself shortly and I haven't had a chance to go through this entire article carefully, but it seems fascinating so far. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the author finds that the older fighters get, the more likely they are to lose by knockout.

But is this because older fighters actually have worse chins, or simply because they get outstruck more frequently as they age and slow down? After compiling some data, the author writes:

[T]he basic trend is clear that it takes fewer and fewer head strikes to knock down older fighters. When it comes to standup striking, it takes half as many landed strikes to knock down a fighter approaching 40, than it did when he was in his early 20?s.

Here is the link again. Some food for thought as this 31-year-old prepares to leave the house to get hit by a bunch of dudes wearing small gloves. :)

Mixed Emotions: Sweating the WSOP Final Table

I love watching championship moments. I'll watch the finals of a sport I don't even like, only to get bored and stop paying attention. But I'll always watch the last few seconds on the clock, or the game-winning score, or however it is the game ends. I love watching the absolute unbridled joy of the winner when he realizes his dream. He can't believe it's happening. It's not real...but it is! It's such a great moment and I always get a little bit choked up, even when I have no emotional investment in the player or the team (or even the sport).

Poker is no exception. From what I've heard, Pius Heinz is a really nice, humble kid who is a deserving winner, and so it was great to see him over the moon and jumping into his rail when the harmless river card fell. I love watching moments like that. But in some sense it's harder in poker. I've known for pretty much my entire life that I will never hoist the Stanley Cup or win an NBA title or a World Cup, or even a UFC title. But I am a poker player. I've been playing poker for over 12 years; it's been my entire adult life. It's what I do. I'm pretty good at it, I've achieved a lot of success in it, and made lots of money doing it. Yet I know that realistically, when it comes to the WSOP main event all I can really do is daydream about winning it. Even if I play great and run tremendously good, it almost certainly won't happen. I'll never know what that final river card hitting feels like; I can only imagine it.

And that kind of leaves me with a sad feeling inside. I think most of the time I'm at peace with the thought of never winning the main event (ever since the 2004 WSOP, this has been obvious to anyone who can do basic math). Maybe I'm a little extra emotionally vulnerable since I bricked yet another big buy-in live tournament today. Or maybe it was even the fact that I watched the Heinz-Martin Staszko heads-up battle with nine other top-notch, highly successful poker pros, analyzing their every move and talking about how much better we could have played those hands. To be sure, we have egos, and our comments were borne of a genuine belief that we could play certain hands better than they did. But not a single one of us wasn't at least a little bit jealous, hoping against hope that we'll have the chance to be there one day.

I guess that's what keeps people coming back to poker. It's what puts 6,865 people putting up $10,000 in the wake of both Black Friday and the big economic recession of the late 2000s. Because even the most cynical of poker pros who say we "have to play the main" because "it's sooooo much value" are, at least a little bit, dreamers too.

Congrats to Pius Heinz, the new world champion of our game. I hope you enjoy every bit of it, Pius, because 6,864 of us wish it were us.