Criteria for judging boxing

[SplitSecond]

What if press row judged the fight? Take a tally for the winner.

[Citizen Koba]

TBH I don't envy judges. I generally keep and save the scores from fights I've watched and go back a while later to see if I still agree with myself. One thing that I uniformly find is that my scorecards tend to reflect a natural bias towards my disposition on those fighters. If I prefer a particular fighter over another... there are just instances in which I'm going to defer to my bias. I've seen this in my review of fights like Khan/Barrera, Broner/Malignaggi, Hatton/Collazo and, most recently, Porter/Ugas.

Sure, I wish there were more clearly empirical methods, but I do understand that the "sense" of a round also has to be taken into account. Unfortunately, try as I might, there's no getting around the fact that when I assess a fight, I'm doing so as a human being who is intrinsically biased, I doubt judges are capable of doing different, but I suppose we have to just trust that they're a bit more discerning.

This is unfortunately unavoidable - our biases and preconceptions are an intrinsic part of how we perceive the world. I often see the question asked 'were you watching the same fight' and the answer which no-one ever gives is actually, no. Because each of us quite literally sees a different fight, notices different shots, different blocks, estimates the effects of each impact differently and so on.

You may know of a relatively famous experiment where people were asked to score how many shots were scored in a basketball game - and in doing so utterly failed to notice the guy in a gorilla suit running across the court... because they were focused on something else and weren't expecting him to be there... well, we all do something similar all of the time, mentally editing our perceptions - generally in a way that accords with our expectations and a narrative we have built round an event.

Anyways - that's just a long winded way of saying we're all biased at a fundamental level - and the stronger the emotional attachment we have to a narrative (such as the quality of a fighter) the stronger our tendency to see things in a way that conforms to it. Best thing you can do to score a fight well is firstly to use people with the least possible attachment to either fighter or outcome, and secondly to get as broad a consensus as possible... one reason I think the idea of crowd sourced judging (with the appropriate statistical tools in place to minimise bias or rigging) is definitely worth investigating.

Those guys who tell you they're utterly objective and always score a fight fairly? They're the most delusional of all.

[Froch_uppercut]

Ring generalship, effective aggression, clean effective punching.

Seems to me ring generalship is an excuse to score the fight for the one who keeps running away. Effective aggression is redundant when there is effective punching.

Why not just score the round for the one who was hurt less. After all it is about hitting and not getting hit.

Your thoughts.

Leaving in ambiguous criteria like 'ring generalship' is asking for trouble. Whoever hits the other guy the most / most damaging wins the round.

I like the suggestion on here of doing some type of consensus scoring. I'd be all in favour of having 5 judges and 3 out of 5 have to be in favour of one fighter winning that round for it to be scored that way.

Any fixing / bribing / corruption becomes harder the more people that are involved.