Lei Tong

Some not mentioned: - Kimura - Straight footlock - Ankle lock - Heel hook - Various shoulder cranks Some of the rarer moves include: - flying varations of moves - North/South choke - Bicep & calf slicers And then there are some I've seen only once: - Tom Erikson's crossface on Willie Peeters - Tom Erikson's two handed strangle on Matt Skelton - Tito Ortiz' side neck crank vs. Yuki Kondo

How much Rudimar was taking out of fighters purses, at times up to 50%(not a typo).

I guess here is as good a place as any: Pancrase 11/30 Results(results from MMAWeekly): 1st match: Feather-Weight (3x5 min rounds) Win: Yoshiro Maeda (PANCRASE Inagaki-Gumi) Loss: Barrett Yoshida (Grappling Unlimited) by KO (Punches on the ground) at 1R 1:29 (Maeda goes 7-0 in his first year of MMA, while Barrett drops his second straight by KO) 2nd match: Middle-Weight (3x5 min rounds) Draw: Kazuo Misaki (PANCRASE GRABAKA) Draw: Jake Shields (Cesar Gracie Jiu-Jitsu) by Majority Decision (M1-0S) (BAH. Would someone please take Shields out already?) 3rd match: Superheavy-Weight (3x5 min rounds) Draw: Ron Waterman (Team Impact) Draw: Jimmy Ambriz (New Japan Pro-Wrestling) by Unanimous Decision (What? You mean Waterman isn't the unstoppable monster he LOOKS like? You don't say... ) 4th match: Lightheavy-Weight (3x5 min rounds) Win: Akihiro Gono (PANCRASE GRABAKA) Loss: Nilson de Castro (Chute Boxe Academy) by Unanimous Decision (Gono's highly underrated, but I expected him to finish De Castro. Oh, well) 5th match: Welter-Weight K.O.P. Title match (3x5 min rounds) Win: Kiuma Kunioku (PANCRASE ism) Loss: Kenichi Serizawa (Wajyutsu Keisyukai) by Unanimous Decision. * Kunioku defended the title. (As expected. Haven't seen any of Serizawa's fights, but nothing on his record made me think he'd take Kunioku) 6th match: Middle-Weight K.O.P. Title match (3x5 min rounds) Win: Ricardo Almeida (Renzo Gracie Jiu-Jitsu) Loss: Nathan Marquardt (Colorado Stars) by Front Choke at 1R 4:53 * Almeida became new Middle-Weight K.O.P. (Almeida seems born anew in Pancrase, going undefeated since his loss to Semenov and now MW champ) 7th match: Lightheavy-Weight K.O.P. Title match (3x5 min rounds) Win: Yuki Kondo (PANCRASE ism) Loss: Sanae Kikuta (PANCRASE GRABAKA) by KO(Left Hook) at 2R 0:08 * Kondo became new Lightheavy-Weight K.O.P. (Kondo's quickly becoming one of those guys that you wonder what they could do in a division of guys their size)

It's not bad, it's just that as of late both PRIDE & the UFC have been putting on shows packed shows. Although, the upcoming 11/30 Pancrase card looks even better to me.

Well, PRIDE can be rather inconsistent with their stand-ups, but regardless, Silva capitilized in pure Chute Boxe style (IE- Silva/ Newton). And nothing can bring me down too much whilst I have the knowledge that Sakuraba proved me wrong.

I'm not totally sold on Vitor being "back." He capitalized on a big weakness in Eastman's game (when you're as short as Eastman is, bull rushing with your head down is going to eventually lead to some trouble), but Randy has just recently toyed with 2 of the top guys in the division. On the other hand, I do think Randy still has a hole or two in his game (will have to rewatch a couple of matches to be sure) that Vitor could capitalize on, but I'm going with Randy in the middle rounds.

I don't know whether to laugh or have my head implode in on itself.

It's not a fact or anything, but I notice that 6'4 seems to be the height that Japanese wrestlers start to be considered noteworthy for their size.

Good wrestler? Let's say this... as a wrestler, he makes a good rugby player. From what I've seen, I'd agree with the sentiment that the only time he was watchable his own was during his time tagging with Tanahashi.

Susumu Nagao is considered the foremost MMA phtographer around, so you can try his site for a lot. Most of the big MMA sites (Sherdog, MMAWeekly, FCFighter, etc.) also have a lot of pictures, too.

To give Yamamoto credit, he has some wins over decent fighters in RINGS, but he has proven very little to me that makes me think Herring won't beat him. As far as Bobish goes, he's a bit uneven. He's taken some big shots from heavy hitters and come back to win, but there are times where he simply folds like a lawn chair. According to a guy who trains at the same gym as him his desire is extremely questionable, and has a more or less non-chalant attitude about his training.

I wouldn't say Rampage is less skilled than Tito, but rather he has different strengths than Tito (I have no doubt that he has better stand-up ability than Tito, for example).

Quick thoughts on the fights: Antonio Rodrigo Noguiera vs.Mirko Filipovic - Unless Minotauro has worked a extensively with Gholar on his takedowns, I think he's not going to match up well style wise with Mirko. But then again, he will be the best ground specialist Mirko has faced thus far (Saku was smaller; Fujita too 1-dimensional; Herring too... not ready). Kazushi Sakuraba vs. Kevin Randleman - Unlike most of the larger men he's done well agianst (and there haven't been a whole lot lately), Randleman can match Sak in wrestling ability (although he doesn't often show it). Combine that with a huge size and power advantage, and decent pop in his hands, look for the MMA community to continue to mourn what is left of Kazushi Sakuraba. Heath Herring vs. Norihisa Yamamoto - What's the freakin' point? Herring will probably run through Yamamoto, probably reinforcing some bad habits he's developed, thus costing him his next meaningful match-up. Dan Henderson vs. Murilo Bustamante - Plain sick match-up. Dan will be fighting somewhere right near his natural weight for the first time in a while, so I'm sure this will have a somewhat a Couture-esque revitilization effect. Of course the surgery leaves some question marks, and Murilo is exactly the type of guy you don't need those distractions against. Meanwhile, Busta proved e can hang amongst the best LHW's in the world again despite giving up size. SICK match-up. Quinton Jackson vs. Chuck Liddell - Although impresive to take the amount of punishment he did and still win, I think the Alistair fight (and Cuture match as well) have shown that Chuck is not as invincible as he was considered roughly 9 months ago. Meanwhile, QJ showed off another side of himself in the Illoukhine & Bustamante matches: adaptability. Granted, I doubt Chuck will fight anything like those two sub specialists, but QUinton has shown he can take a lot of punishment and slam damn near anyone. He may not hold him there, but the sum of the strikes standing, slams & G&P could prove more than adequate. Hidehiko Yoshida vs. Wanderlei Da Silva - What can I say? Unless Yoshida held back unbelievably against Tamura, or he's managed to improve in these past few months more than ANYONE has at ANYTHING EVER, I see Silva more or less demolishing him. Dan Bobish vs. Gary Goodridge - This is a quintessential opening match, but in a good way. Both of them are big bangers who tend to "kill or be killed." Bobish has faced guys of similar size, whereas Gary has faced the higher competition.

Pat Smith's career: - submit to decent submission fighter - claim how you've evolved - defeat lesser fighter - tap out to G&P from comparatively sized grappler Rinse. Wash. Repeat. Oh, well. At least Bustamante/Henderson should be sick.

Part of the problem is that the talent pool in boxing is quite a deep deeper than that of kickboxing, due mostly to the fact there's a lot much more money to be made as a mediocre pro boxer as opposed to a relatively high ranking kickboxer (the same holds true in comparison to MMA). You're probably right that on average, in K-1 rules, a boxer would beat a K-1 fighter of comparable ranking in the sport, although there are quite a few in K-1 who could match up well with pro boxers. If the rules were a bit more open in K-1 (closer to full MT rules), it'd tip the scales a bit for them, but that's how I see it now.

Agreed. But in the end, I'm simply mark for MMA, and will probably shell out for both Final Conflict and Revolution. Since no one else has brought it up: Anounced for Shooto's December Card: Alxandre "Pequeno" Noguiera vs. Norifumi "Kid Yamamoto & Joachim Hansen vs. Vitor "Shaolin" Ribeiro I don't know how many of you watch Shooto, but these two matches alone are reason enough for this be one of my most anticipated cards this year.

Actually, I think UFC 44 delivered very well, as although many of the names were new to the UFC, most of the matches were action packed.

To be fair, Caras has some legit Greco Roman skills, but the guy still lost to freakin' KENGO.

From Sherdog's forums:

It's tough to say overall. PRIDE is widely considered to have the best HW's in the world, and also has a LHW crop equal to anywhere else. They even have had an unofficial 185 division for a while now. However, they often bring in extremely suspect talent for the pure sake of spectacle. Also, unlike most other big name companies, they have no divisions for WW, LW, & FW's, although Bushido looks to try and be a secondary show for them that features these fighters. However, this lack of weight classes does have an advantage, as I'll get to in a minute. UFC has good talent at each division, but none of these divisions seem to be far and away the best in the world. This is do to many factors, chief amongst them how UFC handles money and their fighters. Simply put, they can't afford to pay most of their MW-HW's as much as PRIDE does should PRIDE show interest, yet still pay most of their LW's & WW's (and some higher weight fighters) so little that it's not that huge of a difference if they fight as a top dog in a smaller org. and get paid roughly the same. THis is in addition to UFC's cut happy ways, releasing certain fighters after a few bad performances, or keeping others around long after they should (often due to huge contracts). Then of course you have their bad luck with champions: Barnett & Syliva test posititive for roids, Bustamante & Pulver walk out of contract negotiations as champions, the Tito/Chuck debacle, etc. Also, another thing that's tough for them is the sheer amount of talent they try to showcase. When you have 5 weight classes and only run 6 shows a year, there's simply no way you're going to be able to make fans care about many of your fighters. This why PRIDE can build up the fighters they have, since they only have 2/3 divisions of fighters to promote, while smaller companies run monthly shows and can showcase twice as much talent. An example of these smaller companies is SHOOTO. They run monthly shows, and have produced some of the best FW's, LW's & WW's in the world. THey also have a very proffesional ranking system compared to just about every other MMA company out there, and thus the level of competition is high. Their problems are that the best LHW's & HW's are elswhere in the world; they often lose some of their lighter talent to the deeper pockets of UFC (& sometimes PRIDE); and in the end, smaller fighter simply don't attract as much attention as the bigger guys, and thus Shooto is more or less seen as a second tier organization despite their positives, and thus are not very big in financial terms.

Sylvia may have juiced, but I think the reason Gan lost is simple: WORST. STANCE. EVER.

I'd imagine at least part of this has to do with Fedor changing affiliation to the Red Devil Sports Club, which would open him up to oprtunities to fight in 2H2H and M-1.

Helio did not invent Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, but rather just became famous for teaching his sons, who had plenty of succes in early MMA (Rickson, Renzo, Royce, etc.) Carlos Gracie is actually the one who "invented" BJJ.

Actually, Sak's Kimura on Renzo was a bit of an anomoly, as he dislocated Renzo's elbow, when the move actually targets and hurts the shoulder.

You're bound to run into this kind of stuff as a fan and/or a competitor in MMA (or even submission wrestling; been there, heard it). And it isn't anything new, as amateur wrestlers have always had to deal with the same type of mockery.