Boxing: LESSON TWO – It’s the Points Stupid!

judgesBy “Old Yank” Schneider: So your fighter punched the stuffing out of his opponent and he lost anyway. How in the world did that happen? The judges must be crooked. The fix was in from the start. Your fighter ended the bout looking like he was ready to pose for a shaving cream commercial while his opponent looked like he barely survived a trip though a meat grinder. Were the judges blind? Or did you just miss something? Wake up fan! “It’s the points stupid!”

So what is the “Ten Point Must System” and why should you care? Guess what? Every decision that does not go your way is much more likely due to your lack of understanding of the “Ten Point Must System” then it is to a collection of incompetent or crooked judges. Simply put, the “Ten Point Must System” is the scoring system used by judges to score an individual round in a boxing match. The system requires giving ten points to the fighter who won the round (unless instructed to make a scoring deduction by the referee). If you don’t care what the scoring system is all about, then remain forever in the dark over why your fighter lost when you thought he won. Learn it and you will come to understand that the scoring system does not necessarily always yield a decision that satisfies the basic question of determining which fighter is the better fighter.

The most important thing to take away from an understanding of the Ten Point Must System is that each round is scored as a stand alone fight unto itself. There should never be a prejudice in the mind of a judge that can be carried over from one round to the next. How each fighter performed in the previous round is ancient history. How a fighter will perform in the next round is fortune telling. To properly judge a round, the judge is only interested in the present; being “in the moment” is all that exists. If you lose this concept you will be prejudiced by ancient history or prone to fortune telling. Stand up each round as its own fight and give the winner of this one round, “stand alone fight” ten points.

If you really liked the way Herman Ngoudjo dominated round number 7 by stunning Paulie Malignaggi and you allowed that to taint anything you saw in round number 8 then you broke a cardinal rule in judging; each round can not be prejudiced by what you saw in the previous round or what you expect to see in the next. I smiled as I read one analysts round by round description of the fight. He opened his remarks for his coverage of round number 8 by wondering if Malignaggi would have an answer for the tough round he had just survived. Wrong! Oh, so wrong! It does not matter if Malignaggi had or did not have an answer for what happened in the previous round; the previous round was ancient history! Never get suckered into this kind of thinking when judging a fight. The judge does not care what happened; he’s supposed to be living in the “moment”!

As a judge you are looking for the four elements of judging in each and every round as if no previous or subsequent rounds exist! Who scored the clean, effective punches? If you can identify one of the fighters as objectively better in this element, then give him ten points for that round. If you need to evaluate effective aggression, ring generalship and defense in order pick the winner of the round, then so be it. Make your judgments in the moment, and then move on to the next moment. Move on to the next round.

Not so fast! How many points did you give to the loser of the round?

Scoring for the loser of the round is currently seen as fairly automatic. If you can identify a winner and a loser for the round, give the winner ten points and the loser nine; a 10-9 round. If the round was decisively one-sided (one fighter scored often and heavily and the other barely scored any clean, effective punches), then you are free to score the round a 10-8 round. Generally, if one fighter knocks down his opponent, then the winner gets 10 points and the loser (normally scoring 9 points), gets an additional point deducted; a 10-8 round. Each subsequent knockdown scored by the winner of the round results in an additional point deducted from the losers round score. Some of us might wish things were different, but since this is the current “automatic” state of affairs in implementing the Ten Point Must System, you will be best served to be just as automatic in your view.

Unfortunately the current state of scoring rarely finds the 10-8 round being used unless a knockdown is involved. In addition, judges are under pressure to do all they can to identify a winner for a round. As a result we rarely see the 10-10 round being scored. In my view this is an overly-judicious use of 10-10 and 10-8 rounds. It yields far too many subjective and controversial decisions. There are more and more officials calling for more liberal use of 10-10 and 10-8 scoring from judges. But if your goal is to better understand judges’ scorecards, then you should continue to be overly-judicious as well in scoring 10-10 and 10-8 rounds. Obviously when a knockdown is involved there is nothing overly-judicious about properly scoring the round a 10-8 round.

Scoring mistakes can and do happen. Here we can point to the scoring mistake made by judge Burt Clements in the first round of the Pacquiao/Marquez fight. Pacquiao knocked Marquez down three times in the round. Two of the judges properly scored the round a 10-6 round for Pacquiao, but Burt Clements (admitting his mistake after the fight), scored the round a 10-7 round for Pacquiao. In this case, the mistake cost Pacquiao a win and a championship belt. Getting the Ten Point Must System right is the goal. Getting it wrong can and does have seriously negative consequences for at least one fighter.

Remember your fighter who you thought punched the stuffing out of his opponent? Did he accomplish that goal for 5 rounds, but his opponent snuck by with an indecisive edge in the remaining 7 rounds? In contests like these it certainly looks like one fighter won his rounds decisively while the other won his rounds by weak margins. But it is not about who looked like he won the fight; it’s about who scored the most points.

So the next time you score a fight remember to score only one round at a time and never allow anything to prejudice how you score the subsequent rounds. Use the Ten Point Must System and award the winner 10 points and use the somewhat “automatic” system for awarding lesser points to the loser of the round. When it comes down to your scorecard, add it up and announce the winner. If you get an argument, let them know what it’s about. “It’s the points stupid!”