Arman Tsarukyan is officially the most underrated lightweight in MMA and every lost…

Yeah, and now you’re just adding petrol to a fire that’s already burning the whole bloody hall down. Every time we turn around there’s another Vegas card where Arman leaves with less than he walked in with, yet suddenly we’re supposed to take it as gospel that the cards are rigged against us? Split decision? Fine. Let’s talk the Islamov card: you show me the judge scorecards where Tsarukyan’s chain wrestling actually counted. All I see in the replay is three guys scribbling numbers while Arman snatches two legs and plants knees like it’s a highlight reel. If the judges missed that, then the problem isn’t some grand conspiracy—it’s that the scoring criteria are written by people who’d rather watch highlights than grappling.

Vegas got the whole thing rigged or what?! 😱 Islamov lands 10 flying knees, Arman DOES THE WORK round after round with takedowns they didn’t even get a look at—JUDGES LOOKING AT NOTHING BUT HIGH-ALTITUDE CHICKEN WINGS?! 🤬 Twenty-five times?! We’re NOT just crying, we’re SICK OF IT! They want highlights, fine—we’ll GIVE THEM HIGHLIGHTS! Imagine if Floyd had his legs locked out while judges “remember” to score those passes! These guys wouldn’t dare! Arman’s been carrying the whole welterweight division on his back for years and this is the thanks—SPLIT DECISION OR NO DECISION, HE OWNS THE OCTAGON! Through thick and thin, through all the Vegas theft—WE STAND WITH ARMAN OR NOT?! 🔥💪

Man, I was literally there when Arman carved up Islamov’s striking early in that card, then switched gears like a chess player and ate him up on the feet. The judges in Vegas didn’t just flip their pencils—they parked them on their high chairs while Islamov bounced around like a guy who’d just chugged an energy drink. Two judges out of three gave Arman the whole first three rounds on the feet because he was dictating the pace with crisp combinations and lateral movement, then Tsarukyan switched to two-leg snatches that kept Islamov flat on the canvas for entire minutes at a time. I timed it myself: in Round 2 alone Arman hit four takedowns that scored zero or one defensive-point on the cagecam replay. You can watch the same fight ten times, and every single replays shows Islamov’s best weapons—those flashy high kicks and flying knees—landed when Tsarukyan was already back on his feet catching his breath. The judges weren’t asleep; they were busy writing down the type of action they wanted to see, not the one that actually happened.

you ever remember back in the day when a fighter would get robbed in madrid or abu dhabi and we’d all shrug it off because it’s "part of the game" – well guess what, the game changed but the pencil-wielding gents in vegas? they’re still stuck in the eighties with their scorecards like it’s some friday night cards on terrestrial. take romeo tajik in stockholm, 2015: arman’s getting robbed left right and centre, nobody batted an eyelid outside norway, no uproar on social media worth the name. now we’ve got vegas two years ago against islamov, three weeks ago in another card where same judges clock out early to catch the sushi buffet before cage cleaning – and suddenly we’re all screaming conspiracy because the cameras are there and the replays don’t lie? the judges haven’t changed, the fighters haven’t changed, but the expectation has. back in my day you had to put on a three-round clinic of near-faultless striking to get your hand raised when it was close – now if arman switches to chain wrestling for thirty seconds they look like they’ve forgotten how to throw a punch. twenty-five times? try three hundred and seventy-four fights ago when we first noticed the pattern and the fans shrugged it off. now we’re filming the robbery live and screaming into the void because the void’s got a mic. it’s not about vegas hating arman. it’s about the whole system hating the style that doesn’t come in bite-size highlights. you want the judges to start scoring those double-leg plants again? start banning flying knees unless they knock the guy out cold. until then, grab a seat on the couch and wait for the next card – by the time you get up to fetch crisps, the pencils will already be sliding towards the islamov corner.

you ever try sitting through an entire tsarukyan fight with your mother in law watching over your shoulder telling you “it’s not fair it’s not fair” every thirty seconds? like literally, i had to mute my phone halfway through the islamov card because all i heard was “they’re robbing him blind he’s working so hard why don’t they see it” paired with her three-year-old trying to shove cheese puffs into the remote. yes Cageside, the judges in madrid and stockholm twenty years ago might have been asleep at the wheel, but vegas two years ago had every camera angle, every slow-mo capture, every cagecam replay zooming in on arman’s chain like we were supposed to collectively remember how to score chain wrestling after a decade of flying knees stealing every round. i’ll give you romeo tajik in stockholm, 2015: back then arman was a baby, still learning how to turn a takedown into three more punches while the judges weren’t even sure what a body lock was. now? he’s the same guy who, three weeks ago on the same vegas card where some clown hit a spinning back kick that barely clipped his chin, still spent 5:47 of that first round flat on his stomach turning islamov’s legs into his own personal hamster wheel. five minutes and forty-seven seconds of cage pressure that scored—if you squint—exactly one card point on the cagecam replay. that’s not nostalgia talking; that’s the same five minutes i timed while scrolling tiktok on my couch because someone upstairs thought i needed a reminder that life is suffering. the system didn’t change, the judges didn’t change, but our eyes did. we used to celebrate a guy who stayed on his feet dictating pace for fifteen minutes straight; now we clap when he lands a flying knee that flickers on the replay like a cheap neon sign. arman’s style is chess, not checkers, and the judges are stuck on checkers. until they unlearn the eighties highlight reel, we’ll keep screaming into the void—preferably with headphones on and cheese puffs out of arm’s reach. ah well, we’ll see.

So let me ask you this — how many times have you seen a judge suddenly scribble down a takedown only when a fighter lands a flashy high kick two seconds later? I saw Islamov land three flying knees in Round 2 right after Tsarukyan planted him on the canvas with a chain triple — and the same judge who gave Arman nothing for thirty seconds of grinding on the fence suddenly awards him a round win. Tell me that isn’t scoring by association rather than merit.

Man, I was right there in the MGM Grand that night, front row, and I can tell you the judges weren’t just biased—they were actively ignoring the parts of the fight that don’t fit their highlight reel. They see Arman press Islamov against the cage for five straight minutes, all grinding and chain work, and what do they write down? One defensive point if they’re feeling generous. Meanwhile, Islamov lands a flying knee two seconds after the takedown lands, and suddenly the same judge who gave Arman zero for 30 seconds of cage pressure is scribbling away like he just saw the knockout of the century. It’s not that they’re asleep—it’s that they’re scoring by association, and that’s worse than bias because it’s lazy scoring.

Ah, lads, I was the one timing the Islamov card on that sofa in Sheffield with a brew that went cold twice while I scribbled notes on the back of a menu. What sticks with me isn’t the flying knees—those get the crowd to its feet for a clip on YouTube—it’s the five minutes and forty-seven seconds in Round 1 where Arman had Islamov’s legs pinned like they were part of his own body. The judge in question recorded zero activity for Tsarukyan during that stretch; Islamov’s three flying knees later in the same round? That judge gave him the round. There’s a pattern here that isn’t Vegas-specific. Remember Madrid back in 2017 against Abasov? Two minutes thirty of takedown chain on the fence, no points awarded on any card, then a flash knockdown five seconds after Arman swapped stances and the same judge swung the round. Same night in the co-main event, a brawl that finished 3-0 because every judge could spot a spinning elbow from orbit. Highlights sell; sustained chain wrestling does not—unless you’re willing to wait the seven minutes it takes to explain why the takedown chain is the most efficient way to gas a man out of any offensive rhythm. I could be wrong, but we’re not dealing with judges who have forgotten how to hold a pencil. We’re dealing with judges who have simply decided which strokes count before the pen ever touches the card. That’s the nuance they don’t show on the highlight reel: a takedown chain scores one point per three-second increment once the opponent is off his feet, yet if the same motion ends in a cage crash that doesn’t produce blood or a flash knockdown, the point vanishes like it was never there. Arman has averaged 4.2 takedowns per fifteen-minute fight this year; the average point return for those entries sits at 1.1. When you do the arithmetic across six cards, that’s roughly six full minutes of top control that the official score does not reflect. Six minutes—more than a quarter of the total cage time in a three-round fight—rendered invisible by a scoring rubric that privileges spectacle over process. Still, I’ll not close the ledger just yet. The question remains: at what threshold does sustained, technical chain wrestling start to register on a judge’s card if it never erupts into highlight footage? Or are we stuck waiting for the sport’s rule-makers to redraft the criteria so that minutes spent dictating pace count for more than a footnote?