Boxing official Tom Schreck, in his latest BoxingScene column, explores the term robbery and looks at the scoring of close fights and how fans might interpret them differently to the judges
Every close fight seems to end the same way now.
Before the official scorecards are even read, social media fills with the same word, typed in all caps and followed by fire emojis: ROBBERY.
It’s an understandable reaction. Boxing is emotional. Fans invest time, money, and loyalty in fighters. When the decision doesn’t match what they felt watching the fight, outrage feels justified.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: most fights fans call robberies are not robberies at all. They’re close fights decided by criteria fans don’t always prioritize – or fully understand.
A real robbery is rare.
It isn’t simply a close fight that goes the “wrong” way. It isn’t a decision where one fighter landed more punches, looked busier, or pushed the action. A robbery is a fight where one boxer clearly wins most of the rounds under the official scoring criteria and the judges’ scores cannot be reasonably defended.
Those fights exist. Anyone who has watched boxing long enough can name a few. But they are far less common than the label suggests.
Most disputed decisions fall into a different category entirely. They are swing-fight losses.
Judges don’t score fights. They score rounds.
And close rounds – especially tactical, low-output rounds – are where opinions diverge. A fight with six close rounds can easily produce multiple legitimate scorecards: 7–5 Fighter A, 7–5 Fighter B, or 6–6 even. All three can be defensible.
From the outside, fans often experience a fight as a single narrative. One boxer “took over late.” Another “controlled the action.” Momentum feels decisive.
Judges don’t get that luxury. Each round resets to zero.
A fighter who clearly wins the final rounds may still lose the fight if he dropped several close rounds earlier. That doesn’t feel fair to fans, but it is consistent with how boxing is scored.
Fans and judges also value different things.
Fans tend to prioritize aggression, volume, visible dominance, and forward motion. Judges are instructed to prioritize four specific criteria: clean effective punching, effective aggression, ring generalship, and defense.
Notice the word effective appears twice.
Aggression without results doesn’t score. Activity without impact doesn’t score. Forward motion without control doesn’t score.
A fighter backing up, landing cleaner shots, slipping punches, and controlling distance can win a round quietly – and decisively – without ever thrilling the crowd. That disconnect fuels most robbery accusations.
Here’s something many fans don’t realize: if you flip one close round on a scorecard, the entire fight outcome can change.
A 6–6 fight becomes 7–5. A split decision becomes unanimous. A disputed verdict becomes “clear.” Judges are trained to accept that margin. Fans are not.
Fans want certainty. Judges live in probability.
Consider how a single round is judged in real time. A judge is not tallying totals or waiting to see who finishes stronger. He or she is evaluating three minutes in isolation. Who landed the cleaner punches? Who controlled the geography of the ring? Who made the other fighter miss? Those answers can change subtly from seat to seat.
Two judges can agree on 10 rounds and still disagree strongly on the other two. Those two rounds decide the fight.
Television angles don’t help. Broadcast replays highlight dramatic moments, not incremental advantages. Crowd noise swells around flurries, not jabs that snap a head back or body shots that quietly drain a tank. What looks decisive on television may not be what carried the round from ringside.
There’s also the issue of style bias. Many fans favor aggression over efficiency. A fighter moving forward feels like the one “doing the work.” But if that pressure is met with cleaner counters, superior defense, and control of distance, the round may belong to the boxer moving backward. That isn’t passivity. It’s ring generalship.
Judges are trained to resist emotional momentum. A strong final minute does not erase two earlier minutes. A dramatic rally does not outweigh sustained effectiveness. That discipline can look cold. It can also look wrong to fans who score fights holistically instead of round by round.
None of this means judges are infallible. They miss rounds. They misread exchanges. They are human. But the leap from “I disagree” to “this was a robbery” skips several necessary steps.
The next time a decision sparks outrage, try a simple exercise. Rewatch the fight and score it round by round. Write the numbers down. Identify which rounds you feel strongest about and which ones you struggled with. Those difficult rounds are where judges disagree, too.
If your card differs by one or two rounds, that’s not injustice. That’s boxing.
Reserve the word robbery for the truly indefensible outcomes. When everything becomes a robbery, nothing is. And the sport deserves a vocabulary that reflects reality, not just reaction.
Boxing will always live with close decisions. The goal isn’t unanimity. It’s credibility. And credibility starts with understanding how fights are actually judged, not how we wish they were.
Close fights are uncomfortable because they expose subjectivity. But subjectivity isn’t corruption. It’s the cost of a sport scored by humans in real time. Accepting that distinction doesn’t weaken boxing. It strengthens it. The sport improves when fans argue rounds, not motives, and demand clarity instead of conspiracy from every disputed scorecard after close fights.
Tom Schreck’s latest mystery, Split Decision: A Duffy Mystery is available on Amazon. Publisher’s Weekly called Duffy “Fresh, Intense and Funny…Duffy packs a knockout punch.”
