In Fairness to Kevin Holland, Getting Success Backwards, and Strikes
The only part of writing these newsletters that ever gives me trouble is the intro. And I always write it last because all of the other parts are things I’m excited about.
Maybe I’ll start skipping the intro in the future.
Or maybe I’ll start trying to tie in other things I’m excited about. I’ve started fermenting food recently. I just made my first batch of kefir, and it worked on the first try. That’s 100% accuracy.
You know who else has really high accuracy?
(How’s this for nailing a transition from the intro?)
In Fairness to Kevin Holland
I've not been shy about highlighting how bad Kevin Holland's numbers are when his opponents go wrestling-heavy him. And after the Derek Brunson fight, that weakness is fresh on everyone's mind.
As the always-contrarian nuisance that I am, I feel like that means it's time to highlight his strengths. And I don't have to stretch to paint him in a favorable light.
Holland is legitimately one of the most efficient distance strikers in UFC history.
His 53.3% distance strike accuracy rate ranks 6th among all fighters with 500+ distance strike attempts in UFC history. He was out-landed 20-17 in distance strikes in his UFC debut (on short notice against Thiago Santos, no less). Since then he has not been out-landed from distance in any of his 10 fights, with a +160 differential.
With the hate he's received post-Brunson, I think Holland has become underrated at this point.
The problem this week is that Marvin Vettori is pretty damn good himself. He has 41% accuracy and elite 68% defense from distance over his UFC career, and his 0.77 landed distance strike ratio against Israel Adesanya was the 4th best any of Adesanya's 10 UFC opponents have managed. And that’s before factoring in his wrestling (46% takedown accuracy on 2.91 attempts per 15 minutes).
If there's any betting value on this moneyline I'd lean toward Holland at +270, thanks to his public perception plummeting, but ultimately I think this fight is priced pretty close to fairly.
A Quote I’ve Been Thinking About
“When luck plays a part in determining the consequences of your actions, you don't want to study success to learn what strategy was used but rather study strategy to see whether it consistently led to success.” - Michael Mauboussin
If you’ve spent even 15 minutes reading about betting strategy, you’ve probably encountered the phrase “process over results.”
With short-term variance playing such a big role in sports, even a good bet isn’t going to win every time. Even a good bettor will have losing streaks. So we don’t focus on short-term results, but rather on whether our “process” that led to making the bet was good or not.
But it’s also easy to fall into traps when analyzing process. And a lot of people get it backwards.
You can look at your 10 biggest winning bets, think about the process that led you to those bets, and decide that’s confirmation it was good process.
But that would be approaching the situation in reverse, and leave you susceptible to the “base rate fallacy.”
As usual, I find exaggerated examples the easiest way to highlight the issue.
Let’s say you have an incredible simple process. You give fighters striking grades on a scale of 1-10 and grappling grades on a scale of 1-10. When someone has an edge of at least 2.5 on either scale, you bet them.
Now let’s say you analyze your 10 winning bets, and 7 are from fighters with a striking edge, while 3 are fighters who had a grappling edge. It looks like “focus on the strikers” is the process takeaway.
But what if 95% of the bets you make are because of a striking edge, and 5% are from the grappling edge? If that’s the case, your striking bets are actually underperforming in this sample, while your grappling bets are overperforming. By a big margin.
Instead of working from success, we want to work from the strategy.
So you should look at all the bets you made because of the striking edge, and see how those fared. Then the same for grappling.
Of course in reality things get more complicated — things aren’t as clear-cut as in this example. But if anything, the added layers of confusion make it that much more important to analyze from strategy to results, as opposed to results to strategy.
John Makdessi …
… is one of only four fighters in UFC history (min. 1 hour fight time) to eclipse both 50% accuracy and 70% defense from distance. He's joined by only Cris Cyborg, Pat Barry and Ciryl Gane.
He has landed 22.3% more accurately than his opponents.
Missing Ground Strikes
Thiago Santos missed on 57 significant ground strikes (landing 47 of 104) against Kevin Holland.
That's the 5th most ever missed in a single UFC fight.
The top-4:
John Hathaway vs Paul Taylor (61 - 75/136)
Merab Dvalishvili vs Terrion Ware (61 - 51/112)
Amanda Nunes vs Germaine de Randamie (73 - 62/135)
Alexandr Romanov vs Roque Martinez (91 - 50/141)
Until next week, when I’ll hopefully have more tales of fermenting success,
Jason