Article about Jim Watt's scoring of Pascal-Bute

[powerpuncher]

Does anyone think if they had to call a fight and score it at the same time without any influence they wouldn't make themselves look like a cunt?

Every single week on this forum there are people that see fights different. Everyone thinks their scorecard is perfect.

most fights have a range where scores are acceptable. for example, there is no way to score the fight a win for bute in a shutout. there were obvious rounds that he lost that it would be impossible to score for him. i would also say the same for the other side. bute clearly won the 12th round and there is no way that a judge should give it to pascal. this is because there is common sense in judging fights. certain rounds are just obvious to anybody who knows anything about boxing.

certain rounds are close or at least semi close and i can see how you could score it for either fighter. the problem comes when you intentionally score every semi close round for the same fighter because of bias or influence even when the other fighter probably did better.

so for this fight, there is a range of scores which are acceptable and scoring 6 or more rounds for bute is unacceptable.

That is the problem though. If you acknowledge that a particular round is "close" you have to accept the possibility it can be scored either way. Therefore there's nothing wrong with scoring all the close rounds for one fighter. When you have to submit a score on a round by round basis there's the possibilty the "dominant" fighter comes out losing.

There are literally dozens and dozens of fights every year where you can make a case for either fighter depending on who was "favoured" by close rounds.

If the majority of people scored Pascal the winner then Pascal is the winner (IMO). But it's understandable without corruption or incompetence that people can find a different winner with a bunch of uncompetitive rounds with not a lot happening.

while i agree with your point altogether, i dont agree with it relating to the pascal-bute fight. i have scored fights in the past a draw or even for the fighter that i thought should have lost. this is pretty uncommon but it has happened. as i already stated though, some rounds cannot be disputed. so in the case of this fight, there werent more than 5 close rounds that could be given to bute (and that is being generous). the question is, at what point is a round a sure win for a fighter? obviously its up for the judges to decide, but if they cant do it competently then they shouldnt be judging.

for example, lets take the martinez-chavez jr fight. it was clear that martinez was winning every round other than the last round. the only explanation that somebody could give in order to give chavez any of those rounds is that he came forward and was the aggressor. but if you watched the fight, that didnt matter because it was extremely ineffective and he obviously wasnt landing and was getting hit. so, if your reasoning for giving a round to a certain fighter is so basic and ridiculous, then you shouldnt be judging a fight. again, just like in the bute-pascal fight. pascal may have threw only in spurts, but he threw a few a round and landed while bute threw a punch once every 30 seconds which were usually ineffective.

my point is that you could always point to something to say that a certain fighter won the round but thats not how a round should be judged. it should be judged on who actually did better, not on anything else.