Comments Thread For: AIBA's Secretary General Discusses Amateur Boxing, Planned Changes

[BIGPOPPAPUMP]

The World Amateur Championships that finished in Belgrade on Saturday was the last major amateur tournament with a ten-point must scoring system, as AIBA look to introduce a new transparent scoring method to root out corruption.
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[gingerbreadman]

This is really not going to go well, both in real terms and as a result of how it gets perceived. Boxing is inherently split into rounds, so a scoring system that tries to pretend that it isn't shouldn't be encouraged.

I'd much rather we return to judges scoring 10-10 rounds, which would disincentivise trying to nick early rounds in a close fight, which you see at the top of the amateur game, with the longstanding Cuban style of boxing being built around it. It's also increasingly seen at the top of the pro game - so many of the top p4p fighters in the past 15 years, by virtue of being exceptionally skilled decoders of styles, plan for wholly defensive approaches in rounds 1-3, and are content for them to be really tight rounds because they're confident they'll come on strong later. It's without doubt a completely legitimate strategy for in individual boxer, but with the current scoring paradigm as it is we don't see nearly as many title or elite fights that really light up before round 5 as we used to, and to me that hurts boxing.

Moral of the story, don't solve the problem of tight rounds by changing the scoring system wholesale, just make the rounds where there's a true difference between the fighters matter more by scoring the tight rounds as even.

[THC]

The 10-point must system is big-time ripe for abuse. All close rounds can be justified for the house fighter or the fighter whose promoter has offered the bigger bribe.

Only score a point for a fighter who has clearly won that round. Better yet, only score knockdowns and remove judges out of the mix. Any questionable calls can easily be reviewed between rounds. Boxers who operate off the back foot will need to commit more to counters; otherwise they'll have a lot of draws on their record (and lower fan draw).