By Francisco Salazar

Super middleweight contender Gilberto Ramirez will fight Maxim Vlasov in a 10 round bout on January 24, Top Rank matchmaker Brad Goodman confirmed to BoxingScene.com on Wednesday night.

Top Rank announced the bout on its Twitter account, but BoxingScene.com was aware talks were in place for the bout to take place on this date.

The bout will precede the welterweight showdown between Brandon Rios and Mike Alvarado. Both bouts will take place at the 1stBank Center in Bloomfield, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, and will be televised live on HBO.

Goodman told Boxingscene.com that the agreed upon weight will not exceed 171 pounds.

Ramirez (30-0, 24 KOs) has had a coming out year in 2014, winning all four bouts he fought in impressively by knockout. In his last bout on November 15 in San Antonio, Ramirez dominated Fulgencio Zuniga, eventually stopping him in the eighth round.

Ramirez also had technical knockout wins over Giovanni Lorenzo (April 11) and Junior Talipeau (July 19). A resident of Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico, Ramirez is ranked amongst the top three in all major sanctioning bodies at 168 pounds.

In his last bout on July 26 in Riga, Latvia, Vlasov (30-1, 15 KOs) knocked out Ruben Eduardo Acosta in the seventh round, winning a regional light heavyweight title.

Up until the Acosta bout, Vlasov campaigned as a super middleweight, even getting ranked in the top 10 by a few sanctioning bodies.

The Russian fighter has won his last 11 bouts in a row since losing his only bout as a pro: a 10 round unanimous decision to Isaac Chilemba in February of 2011. Vlasov had resided in the Los Angeles suburb of Camarillo from spring of last year until this April, where he trained at the nearby Robert Garcia Boxing Academy in Oxnard.

Francisco A. Salazar has written for Boxingscene.com since September of 2012 and has covered boxing in Southern California and abroad since 2000. Salazar also covers boxing for the Ventura County (CA) Star newspaper, RingTV, and Knockout Nation. He can be reached by email at santio89@yahoo.com or on Twitter at FSalazarBoxing