At UFC on Fox 6, Ryan Bader felled Vladimir Matyushenko with a variation of the guillotine choke.  The choke itself is one of the more common ones in MMA; in coach/author Mark Hatmaker’s ”No Holds Barred: Essential Submissions,” he notes that out of 640 Pride and UFC bouts he analyzed, 34 were ended via guillotine choke.  While [...]

The upcoming match between UFC Welterweight king Georges St-Pierre and former Strikeforce Welterweight champ Nick Diaz has got the internet all abuzz.  Again.  The assent of the two fighters nearly coincided, with GSP systematically cleaning out the UFC’s roster at 170lbs while Diaz fought almost every notable Welterweight outside of the company.  The two were [...]

I recently watched a DVD of Pride 4 and had a few thoughts.  Among them: Gary Goodridge may be the most underrated fighter of his era; Allan Goes might be able to beat Kazushi Sakuraba in a grappling match; Hugo Duarte should be embarrassed for his performance; and, relevant to this article, ten-minute rounds are way too long.  [...]

On November 7th of this year, the world lost Joseph William Frazier, better known to boxing fans as “Smokin” Joe Frazier.  Frazier was born to a family of poor sharecroppers in the still-segregated American South on January 12th, 1944.  Early in his life, the hostility and limited resources of his environment developed qualities that would [...]

I remember the first time I saw a trailer for “Haywire”.  I’d walked into the theater a little late and missed the early scenes when they showed Gina Carano’s face.  Instead, I saw clips from a very good fight sequence.  Not in the “ooh, that looks pretty” sense but in the “wow, that looks pretty realistic” sense.  You see, [...]

The first Ultimate Fighting Championship tournament was ostensibly created to determine what the most effective form of martial arts was.  Though early MMA went through phases where single systems dominated the action, eighteen years later, the answer appears to be, “all of them.”  MMA fighters today come from a wide range of backgrounds, and fighters like Lyoto Machida, Shinya Aoki, [...]

Recent matches, especially in the UFC, have highlighted a pattern in American MMA: superior wrestlers can take their opponent to the mat and safely nullify the strikes and submission attempts of their opponents.  Fighters like Georges St-Pierre, Randy Couture, Jake Shields, and Jon Fitch in particular have come under criticism for these tactics on the [...]

In this reprinted article, originally published on Informativesports.com, we look at the categories on which MMA greats can be judged.