The international federation in charge of Olympic boxing has decided to get rid of any scoring system that relies on punch count, and to use “10-point must” based on subjectivity.
That made me wonder…what “unofficial” scoring rules exist, or at least appear to exist, in boxing?
Case in point: if Boxer A dominates a round, but Boxer B knocks A down right at the end of the round, how do you score it - 10-9 for A, who controlled the round? 10-9 for B, under some “Rule #1: most knockdowns wins the round” policy? 10-8 for B, since “B won the round, so that’s 10-9, and he had one more knockdown than A, so that makes it 10-8”?
There are no rules like that for scoring outside of knockdowns or points taken for fouls. It’s up to the judge to make a subjective determination. The traditional criteria to consider are Punching, Aggression, Ring Generalship, and Defense. However the judges make their own decisions about who wins a round and they rarely have to explain their decisions. Even with knockdowns the rules are highly flexible. The judges are supposed to take away 1 point for each time a boxer is knocked down. In a round where 1 boxer is knocked down it is typically scored 10-8, 1 point for winning the round plus another point for the knockdown. But a judge may decide the knockdown was inconsequential and score the round 9-9, taking one point away for the knock down, but giving the knocked down boxer credit for winning the round. A judge may also ignore the knockdowns and give no credit for them, it depends on the jurisdiction and contracted terms of the fight if anything can be done about that. In the last few decades there’s been an effort to avoid even rounds. Judges used to look for decisive rounds to call a winner. Some people thought this led to dull fights with boxers doing just enough to get through rounds so now the judges are encouraged to pick a winner in each round even if it’s just a matter of one extra punch. IMHO this leads to a lot of bad decisions. Finally there is what I call the Sugar Ray Leonard rule, the idea that you can score a round 10-8 because one boxer was the overwhelming winner of the round even though he never knocked down his opponent. I consider that idiotic, if you can’t knock a guy off his feet your dominance is not that impressive, but it gets applied a lot to the advantage of slick entertaining boxers.
The principal tacit agreement in boxing scoring is that it favours the champion. Very rare to squeak out a 50:50 on the boards against the incumbent - if you want the belt, you have to get in there and unequivocally take it off him.
No problem with this tbh. It is similar to a lot of sports, or life in general, I guess. The establishment figure often gets an easier run of things.
“Supposed to”? According to whom? This is my point.
In fact, this is a requirement under the new amateur boxing rules - the only way a round can be even is if a point was taken away from the winner.
When you call it the Sugar Ray Leonard Rule, are you thinking of the second Hearns fight, which, IIRC, Hearns would have won a split decision had the judge that scored the fight even scored the last round 10-9 for Leonard instead of 10-8? I don’t think that was scored on the 12th round itself so much as it was, “I don’t think Hearns did enough to beat Leonard, so I’ll score the round 10-8 and call the fight even.” I call that a “Ray Leonard decision”, similar to a “Champion’s decision” where they give the fight to the champion because “the challenger has to decisively beat the champion to get the decision”, but in this case the beneficiary isn’t the champion (remember the Leonard-Hagler fight, where one judge gave Leonard something like 10 of the 12 rounds?).
In addition to the traditional (and still very subjective) criteria listed by Tripolar the even more subjective standard sometimes espoused by Harold Lederman (HBO’s unofficial judge/commentator) is “who would you rather be at the end of the round?” That’s how I kinda score the fights I watch at least.
There’s no such thing as a 9-9 round in professional boxing. That’s why it’s called the “10-point must” system. At least one guy MUST receive 10 points. The other guy gets 10 or less.
Sometimes, you’ll see on TV, the commentators show a 9-9 round. This is because of a foul. The round was really scored 10-9, the the winner lost a point to make it 9-9. The real score is ten minus one to nine. They just do it this way for shorthand.