G-Fight: How we combined Mortal Kombat and MMA?

Mixed martial arts is a real challenge for sports enthusiasts! There are no goals or points, and the outcome of the fight depends on the subjective opinion of the judges. Even MMA experts sometimes cannot reach a consensus after the fight. If the fight goes the full distance, it can be difficult for the average viewer to understand who won.

In sports, the most important thing is emotions and feelings for your favorite fighter or team. In football, you worry when your team concedes a score and starts losing, and when they equalize and take the lead, joy overwhelms you.
In MMA, during the round, nothing is clear: is the fighter winning or losing? Emotions can be caused by a knockout or a successful submission.

To make watching MMA fights even more exciting, we have created a parameter that shows who is currently dominating in the cage.This will help you understand whether your fighter needs to activate ("recoup") or he is already leading and should be careful not to get knocked out or submission.

We are the Stats Fight app team: MMA Picks & Score, we are fans of combat sports and numbers. We have been working in the data market in the world of MMA for 7 years, where we independently collect more than 100 indicators of fighters' actions in real time (Live Stats). For example, we collect the number of throw strikes and landed strikes that caused damage, the number of successful takedowns and attempts to submissions.

Mixed martial arts originated in the USA, and we took as a basis the rules of MMA from the Association of Boxing Commissions. We have carefully worked out the criteria of the judges' ratings, placing them in order and importance when determining the winner in the round. Then we translated each evaluation criterion into numerical indicators. For example, the most important criterion is the effectiveness of strikes. To evaluate it, we take into account the number of knockouts, the number of strikes that caused visible damage (bruise, dissection, etc.), the total number of strikes and the percentage of strikes from all thrown strikes.

In classical martial arts, the winner is evaluated according to the 10:9, 9:10 system. But this format does not allow you to visually and quickly track changes in real time. Then we remembered the computer games Mortal Combat, Tekken and Street Fighter, as well as UFC 4, where you need to beat an opponent until his life scale is reset. And we realized that the scale is a great way of visualization, which is also familiar to fans of fighting games.

A computer game and a life scale are good, but in order to adapt it to real MMA fights, you need to take into account that in the octagon you cannot evaluate the "life" of a fighter and understand how many blows you need to inflict so that it decreases to 0. We came up with a solution: two fighters participate in a duel, the probability of each winning is initially equal 50%. In this case, an excellent option would be to make a single scale and divide it into two parts: for the fighter of the red corner and for the fighter of the blue corner.

As a result, at the beginning of each round, each fighter has a 50% chance of winning. Based on digitized MMA rules, the scale changes in real time throughout the round. At the end of the round, the winner is the one with a higher percentage and a longer scale. We called this scale of dominance of one fighter over another — G-Fight.

During the live broadcast, you can open the Stats Fight app and in the "See live stats" section, follow the dynamics of the G-Fight scale by rounds, supporting your favorite fighter. If one of the fighters dominates 60/40, it is a clear victory in the round. If 55/45, the round was more equal. And if it's 50/50, then the round is absolutely equal. As a result, the fighter who won more rounds on the G-Fight scale dominated the fight as a whole.

The G-Fight scale was created in order to add emotion when watching MMA and take a fresh look at the fight. However, G-Fight should in no way be considered as a substitute or a reason to doubt the judges' assessments. Professionals in their field work in the world MMA refereeing, and even if some judge made a mistake, the competent commissions will conduct a more in-depth analysis of the situation. Although, by the way, according to our observations, in 90% of cases the G-Fight scale coincides with the decisions of the judges! 😉