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Originally Posted by wufwugy
I have a hunch that traditional sportsbetting lines don't work for combat sports. What I mean is something along the lines of when a fighter has a small edge, say 55/45, he has a small edge, but when he has a slightly larger edge, say what people would call 65/35, it's really a huge edge around 80/20 or 90/10. I don't know if this is accurate, but I think we see it in fights like Belfort vs Hendo. Even though Hendo is not that much worse a fighter than Belfort, stylistically, Hendo rarely wins that. So Belfort may only have 55% of the equity when it comes to how good he is compared to Hendo, but 90% of the equity when it comes to how often he's able to beat Hendo
I think most fights have more variance than you might think. It's so easy to make one small mistake for a second, get caught with enough to stun that the fight can be easily finished as we saw with vitor v hendo when hendo came in too wildly and got caught on the jaw. Most of the fighters with large win streaks are known for fairly "boring" fights, because they're desperately trying not to make any mistakes, which I suppose does reduce variance when you have the luxury of being able to play the long cautious game and out-whatever your opponent like GSP does. Anderson would almost always have "boring" first rounds, sizing people up, machida same thing, and the latest bones fights it seems like he's fighting more cautiously, trying to hold the belt.
So maybe you're right for GSP, but I think rashad chael is more high variance than one might think.
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