Beat The Monkey: A Little Experiment

For those who don't follow the intense world of stock trading (I'm generally one of those people) there was an experiment conducted about 10 years ago that pitted one of the top stock traders in the world against a monkey, and the two ran neck and neck for a very long time. I decided it might be fun to try this with MMA analysis, and see how effective I actually am, or if I suck so much that I get beaten by something that has no awareness of the matchups.

I've decided that, since monkeys are very expensive, I can only afford to play against a quarter, which will (in an ideal world) prove to be right about 50% of the time. Realistically, I have a much higher win percentage that 50%, but the coin might too, and it might be considerably worse (then again, so could I)

In order to make things really interesting, I decided to add another factor, and that is basic numerological analysis, purely analysis based on records. While I tend to analyze styles, there's always a way to look at the numbers. Pick the guy with the most wins, or the fewest losses, and the fewest decisions. I've decided to run a combination of that, but really the basic paper-based scoring system that doesn't look at past matchups, doesn't look at personal history or the styles of the fighters. We'll see how that does.

The scoring for this is going to be done two ways, or more realistically in two tiers. Any fight that has more than three top ten fighters on the card will be in the "Major events" category (so UFC 82, the upcoming World Victory Road Event, that kind of stuff). Any event that has less will go in the "Minor events" category, regardless of the size of the organization that puts it together.

I think that it will be a little more interesting in the "minor events" category, but I tend to think I'm pretty good at picking high-profile fights and the year of the upset has shown that that's not always true.

I'll post the first round of scores after tonight's event (my analysis will be on MMAOpinion.com) and give some thoughts about the future of the project.