At UFC 298, Ilia Topuria knocked out Alexander Volkanovski along with my value bet. And I will include a link to the first video in the description. For now, let’s analyze the bet with the benefit of hindsight, starting with the fact that Volk was a slight minus 130 favorite. Ilia was a slight plus 110 underdog. I thought Volk should have been favored by more, and I put him at a -350 which would give him an implied win probability of 77%, not factoring in the house juice.
So what was my reasoning? Why did I think Volk should be favored by so much more? Well, it was basically that Volk is proven. Volk has beat all of the top 145 contenders. He had also nearly beat Islam Mahkachev, who is the dominant 155 champion. And that victory came just about one year and one week ago at, ah, UFC 284. So, with that history, with that background, I didn’t think there was anything that Ilia Topuria was going to bring that Volk hadn’t seen before. And so whereas Volk was proven, we knew his history. Ilia was not really.
There were only two significant matches that Ilia had, and they were against Josh Emmett, who was ranked number five. And this was the fight right before this Volk fight. And then Bryce Mitchell, who was ranked number nine. Now, two things I thought that could have factored into these lowered odds were the head kick that Volk took. So it was a vicious head kick from Islam. it knocked out Volk. And this head kick occurred just 119 days before this fight. So I thought, given the proximity, given the brutal nature, of the head kick, I thought that may have been what was factoring into Volk being only a -130 favorite.
And then, of course, as we know, we only get to win or we get to lose. So there’s a binary outcome. we don’t get to see this fight play out over and over again. It can only happen one time. And as it happened, Ilia Topuria knocked out Volk. And some of the commenters on my first video were saying that this would happen. They were saying, okay, someone brought up the point that, fighters that are 35 and over in title fights are one in 21 in the 170 pound division and under. Someone said that Ilia should have actually had better win probability. And then someone also said, it’s how he looked, not who he fought. And when he fought Josh Emmett and Bryce Mitchell, he did look really, really good.
But again, these two fighters weren’t, they weren’t of the same caliber of fighters that Volk was fighting. So what happened at UFC 298? I thought Ilia was just the better fighter. I thought Ilia was in control of the fight. I thought Volk was constantly off balance, and really importantly, and this is when I knew that Ilia was going to be a much, much tougher fight than, I was expecting, is Alex was constantly in danger, and when you’re constantly in danger, it’s really only a matter of time before you meet that danger. And so Ilia was putting himself in position to knock Volk out, and Volk was, avoiding a lot of damage, but he was really in a bad position many, many times.
And so the odds were against him here also. And this is in part because Ilia was the aggressor, and Volk was on the defensive. Now, Volk was landing some nice leg kicks, and he may have even outpointed Ilia in the first round. But Ilia, to me, he looked in control of the fight, and he looked like the more aggressive fighter. to me, he just had to look. And Volk was, like I said, defensive, off balance. And really what I thought was problematic was he was constantly in danger.
So getting back to my analysis, what happened here was Ilia was the better fighter. And I just didn’t think that would happen. I didn’t think that Ilia was going to come in and be better than all of these other guys that Volk had fought. Now, I’m not saying he’s better than Islam, but I didn’t think he was going to show Volk something that Islam had not. And then, so when we look at some of the rationale why, Volk shouldn’t have been favored by as much, or why he was only favored by, as a -130 favorite. we get to the age part, and so with age at 35, of course, we have this bad record, and we know that as age goes up, physical abilities are going to go down. and that’s going to be a strong correlation, right? Because with age, we get to this certain point, and then we plateau, and then we start going down.
And then someone said that especially with these lighter weight divisions, as you start going down, that speed really starts to matter. And it just takes a fraction of a second to make all of the difference. But the beauty of this fight is it didn’t come down to fractions of, a second. I didn’t see anything where Volk was really at a physical disadvantage. I just thought Ilia was better. I thought his game plan was better. someone said his boxing was tighter, he looked more in control, he looked like he knew where to attack. I just thought he was the better fighter.
So I don’t think this was an age thing, and I don’t think it was. It didn’t look like it was a head kick thing. Some people are saying volt came back too soon. when you’re older, you really don’t have the, luxury of waiting around to heal. But maybe he could have come back a month later. But he did wait about four months and he looked fine. he talked fine. Maybe it did factor in. But again, I didn’t see that he looked like a good fighter, he looked capable, he looked like he knew what was going on. maybe there were some effects. It’s always hard to tell, it’s hard to extract all of these different things.
But when the fight played out, we saw that Ilia was just the better fighter. And I think that’s something where, to me, when I was running down my reasoning for Volk, that’s what it was going to take. It was either going to take, a punch, which Ilia does have, like a ten of ten power. Volk possesses nowhere near the power that Ilia does. So maybe there would be something where Ilia just catches him. And Volk did say he got caught, but he also got caught, but he was also in constantly in a bad position. So when I look back at my analysis and my thinking, I really don’t see I’m okay with what happened. I’m okay with my decision, because, I didn’t think Ilia was going to be the better fighter, because all we had to go by were really this Bryce Mitchell fight and the Josh Emmett fight. He did look good, but he didn’t have the same record as Volk. We hadn’t seen him up against the same caliber of competition.
And I think this is the overriding factor here. I think Ilia being so good is what led to the odds being so close. I think this is why the oddsmakers had him at a near even favorite, is because the oddsmakers knew that Ilia was the real deal. That’s my suspicion. because I think that Ilia came in with a lot of hype. I think he came in with two nice victories, but it was nowhere near, what Alex had accomplished. And when you start stacking in, the head kick, you start, stacking in how soon it was, how recent it was, you start to figure in the age factor, the 35 and over, all of these things combined probably, led to Volk being only a slight favorite. And then when you stack in the insider information, that being people who had watched Ilia and Kamaru Usman said this, he said Ilia is the real deal or something, thereabouts. He said something, close to that. That’s paraphrasing there, but he said that Ilia is really, really good.
And I think ultimately that’s why, he was, ah, a near even matchup with Volk. and so that’s how it played out. I really don’t have, looking back, I like taking the guys that are proven over the guys that are maybes. It’s more like, we know what this guy has done, we know what this guy could do. But I’m not going to base a bet, on what is possible, on his confidence, on what people are saying, because people say all sorts of things. I’m going to look at what you’ve done versus what you could do. and as it turns out, Ilia was just the better fighter and I did not think that would be the case.