BoxRec

I don't know if this is really "lucky" but when Oliver McCall knocked out Lennox Lewis, that seemed like a very lucky night. I would say Lewis an A level fighter got knocked out cold by McCall who is arguably below b level.

There are lucky punches and they come in different forms. Often a guy will lose his balance just before his opponents throws a shot, which will lead to a knockdown even though the dropped fighter wasn't hurt and didn't get budged earlier by similar punches. ..there are loads of examples like this.

I'd say there was luck involved in cases like Jack-Edwards as well. Edwards has never beaten anyone else remotely as good as Jack, and just a year later Jack was beating top 10 and solid hitting guys like Dirrell and Groves, taking their shots just fine. He wasn't hurt by Degale or Bute either, and I have little doubt that if he fought Edwards 20 times he'd win nearly all of them; anyone disagree?

People always seem to get uptight and defensive when it's suggested that luck is involved, but it's a fact of life that chance exists and contributes to anomalous outcomes. That fact certainly doesn't mean that skill and talent are irrelevant!

Pkipp32 wrote:I don't know if this is really "lucky" but when Oliver McCall knocked out Lennox Lewis, that seemed like a very lucky night. I would say Lewis an A level fighter got knocked out cold by McCall who is arguably below b level.

Good exmple

Lewis/rahman

Lewis wasn't knocked out cold by McCall. He got up too early on wobbly legs and the ref waved it off.

We have threads about this all of the time.

Anyways, yes, I believe some punches can be characterized as lucky. JMM - Pacquiao is a good example of a situation where a fighter was moving into or falling into the path of a punch, and it basically caused the punch to be 50 times as likely to score a KO as any other punch. An opponent could slip or move to his right at the exact time that you're throwing a left hook, and boom, explosion. The same thing happened in Casamayor - Katsidis, if I recall; except Katsidis was moving into the punch instead of tripping into the punch. Similar to the Codrington - Green fight, if two hookers hook each other at the same time, they get knocked backwards by the opposing hook and also the reactionary force of their own hook, sometimes causing knockdowns, and sometimes causing knockdowns that are so hard that when your head hits the mat, you get f*cked up. In all of these examples, there is the possibility that a boxer's sharp reflexes noticed the path that the opponent was moving, and they threw the perfect punch to intercept the path. In all of these examples, there is also the possibility that they just threw a run-of-the-mill punch, having no idea that it would be any more important than any other punch they throw, but it turns out to be 100 times as important, because luck.

A second kind of example occurs when a vastly inferior boxer is winging wild shots all fight and missing all fight. If they happen to connect with just one, then it's all over; but there is no doubt that they have inferior skill, and their connect percentage is very poor. We saw this in Mike Jones vs Randall Bailey, where Bailey was missing and getting schooled all fight long, behind by 6 points on the judges' scorecards, but probably behind by 10 on the viewers' cards; the first time he landed in round 11, it was all over. But what were the odds of him finding Jones in round 11? Probably pretty abysmal. We saw in the Vitali - Briggs fight that Briggs was winging shots and missing all fight long, and I think that there is no doubt that there was knockout potential if any of those punches landed, and I think there is also no doubt that Briggs would be a lucky bastard if his amateur ass landed on Vitali even once. There are lots of fights like the Breidis Prescott - Mike Alvarado fight, in which one fighter is clearly inferior and way down on the cards, almost no chance of winning a decision, almost no chance of scoring a knockout, but you land one punch in particular that staggers the opponent, and suddenly the clearly inferior boxer wins it all.

A third type of example occurs when a punch is lucky to cause a critical injury. This could be like the time that Ken Norton broke Muhammad Ali's jaw. This wasn't a special punch, but it landed while Ali was talking, it broke Ali's jaw, and it cost Ali the entire fight. We see many cases where a punch causes a cut, and the cut proves to completely alter the fight. But there are no special cutting punches, there are just punches, and if it happens to produce a cut, then it was in no way a product of deliberate intent, you simply won the lottery. You punched your opponent, and he got cut. Some other guy punched his opponent, and he didn't get cut. You're not better than the other guy, you just got luckier.

keithmoonhangover wrote:

crusader wrote:Chance and randomness are very real things.

There's nothing random about punching someone on the nose.

There is, though. That's why we don't see the better fighter landing 100% of his shots and the worse fighter landing 0% of his shots every fight. Each individual punch has an individual element of probability. Pretty comparable to jumpshots in basketball or swinging at pitches in baseball. The more you practice and the better you are, the better your probably of a successful outcome "p". But each individual event is still its own little lottery ticket. In basketball, the outcome is the accumulation of a lot of shots, and the law of averages causes the better team to win most of the time. In baseball and soccer, scoring is infrequent enough that the random outcome of a single scoring attempt can overwhelm the weight of everything else that happened all game. Most boxing matches are comparable to basketball games in that so many punches are thrown and landed that the law of averages is going to reward the better fighter almost every time. But sometimes a single punch in boxing can be so much more critical than every other punch, because of how it lands, that it's comparable to hitting that one home run in baseball and winning the game 1-0, overwhelming the other 350 or 400 times that bats were swung with the intent of scoring. It is also similar to poker. The outcome of a game of poker has a skill component and a luck component, with each hand having its own individual element of probability, and a lot of games being determined by an accumulation of incremental gains made by the superior player, but some games being decided by a single hand which scored many more chips than all of the other hands combined. Luck, skill, and sometimes the inferior player scores a home run, in any of these games.

Lackeos wrote:We have threads about this all of the time.

Anyways, yes, I believe some punches can be characterized as lucky. JMM - Pacquiao is a good example of a situation where a fighter was moving into or falling into the path of a punch, and it basically caused the punch to be 50 times as likely to score a KO as any other punch. An opponent could slip or move to his right at the exact time that you're throwing a left hook, and boom, explosion. The same thing happened in Casamayor - Katsidis, if I recall; except Katsidis was moving into the punch instead of tripping into the punch. Similar to the Codrington - Green fight, if two hookers hook each other at the same time, they get knocked backwards by the opposing hook and also the reactionary force of their own hook, sometimes causing knockdowns, and sometimes causing knockdowns that are so hard that when your head hits the mat, you get f*cked up. In all of these examples, there is the possibility that a boxer's sharp reflexes noticed the path that the opponent was moving, and they threw the perfect punch to intercept the path. In all of these examples, there is also the possibility that they just threw a run-of-the-mill punch, having no idea that it would be any more important than any other punch they throw, but it turns out to be 100 times as important, because luck.

A second kind of example occurs when a vastly inferior boxer is winging wild shots all fight and missing all fight. If they happen to connect with just one, then it's all over; but there is no doubt that they have inferior skill, and their connect percentage is very poor. We saw this in Mike Jones vs Randall Bailey, where Bailey was missing and getting schooled all fight long, behind by 6 points on the judges' scorecards, but probably behind by 10 on the viewers' cards; the first time he landed in round 11, it was all over. But what were the odds of him finding Jones in round 11? Probably pretty abysmal. We saw in the Vitali - Briggs fight that Briggs was winging shots and missing all fight long, and I think that there is no doubt that there was knockout potential if any of those punches landed, and I think there is also no doubt that Briggs would be a lucky bastard if his amateur ass landed on Vitali even once. There are lots of fights like the Breidis Prescott - Mike Alvarado fight, in which one fighter is clearly inferior and way down on the cards, almost no chance of winning a decision, almost no chance of scoring a knockout, but you land one punch in particular that staggers the opponent, and suddenly the clearly inferior boxer wins it all.

A third type of example occurs when a punch is lucky to cause a critical injury. This could be like the time that Ken Norton broke Muhammad Ali's jaw. This wasn't a special punch, but it landed while Ali was talking, it broke Ali's jaw, and it cost Ali the entire fight. We see many cases where a punch causes a cut, and the cut proves to completely alter the fight. But there are no special cutting punches, there are just punches, and if it happens to produce a cut, then it was in no way a product of deliberate intent, you simply won the lottery. You punched your opponent, and he got cut. Some other guy punched his opponent, and he didn't get cut. You're not better than the other guy, you just got luckier.

Top notch post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DPETfi0Zx8

Wasn't McCall's eyes closed during this exchange?

There was a Commonwealth Light heavyweight Title fight in 1978/79 between Tony Mundine (Australia) and Gary Summerhays (Canada)
Mundine dominated the whole fight, the referee was going to stop the bout in the 8th round and again got the doctor to look at
the Canadian at the end of the 10th.. He gave Summerhays one more round and the rest is History, Knocked Mundine cold with a shot he had been throwing all night to no effect but in the 11th. it floored Mundine and put him to sleep..

Micky Bey vs John Molina? .... But Molina wasnt C level but he lost every round before he knocked out Bey

not seen any real evidence yet, all the punches mentioned so far were thrown at the opponent with the intention of landing on the chin,which they did, Nigel Benns ko of Logan looks lucky on first inspection, but again it was thrown at Logans chin and it landed on Logans chin, so wheres the luck ?

zojo, wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DPETfi0Zx8

Wasn't McCall's eyes closed during this exchange?

Rubbish. McCall told Manny Stewart mid round that was punch. Nothing lucky about it. He thew it with the intention of it landing, which it did.

keithmoonhangover wrote:

crusader wrote:Seems to be a lot of people who think boxing is somehow exempt from luck and randomness, which is nonsensical.

Oh, but he meant to throw that punch! Okay, and the guy who won the lottery meant to fill in his numbers so he could win the lottery. Of course some punches are lucky...

Name me one punch in a fight that wasn't fixed, where the guy throwing the punch didn't intend it to land.

It's like a snooker player playing a really hard pot. He's still aiming for that pocket.

You've not seen many Stephen Lee matches have you?

Exoddus wrote:

keithmoonhangover wrote:

crusader wrote:Seems to be a lot of people who think boxing is somehow exempt from luck and randomness, which is nonsensical.

Oh, but he meant to throw that punch! Okay, and the guy who won the lottery meant to fill in his numbers so he could win the lottery. Of course some punches are lucky...

Name me one punch in a fight that wasn't fixed, where the guy throwing the punch didn't intend it to land.

It's like a snooker player playing a really hard pot. He's still aiming for that pocket.

You've not seen many Stephen Lee matches have you?

Going off five cushions is a fluke, but if you're aiming for the pocket and the ball goes in, there is no luck involved.

Of course there is such a thing as a lucky punch, ask Iran Barkeley or Chris Eubank for that matter. Conor McGregor might need one tomorrow night to avoid humiliation. He might get one. There is a big difference between a desperate eyes closed wild swing and a carefully set up calculated counter, its called skill. Luck is the name given to events of low probability. If a plane lands on your head you can count yourself very unlucky.

A physicist might argue that luck is just our perception and that random events are few and far between. But If we take luck to represent outcomes that we can't control (lottery numbers, blind dates, idiotic/drunk drivers, good genes, random germs, ineffective immune systems, the weather etc etc.) then you can see that even 21 century life is still subject to luck. The best we can do is to improve our chances but we can't control them. Only total 100% control can eliminate luck. So unless Floyd Mayweather casually drops his guard and sticks his chin out awaiting McGregor's left, his chances of winning remain high.

Snooker is a game where we have little control of what happens to the balls once we miss a shot. Accidental snookers, in-offs, missed balls going safe, lucky canons, kicks are all often outside our control which is why some estimate luck to be as high as 10% in that game. I couldn't win a single frame off Ronnie O Sullivan unless my luck was freakishly high. He's far, far more than 10% better than me on any given day.

Thomastearns wrote:Of course there is such a thing as a lucky punch, ask Iran Barkeley or Chris Eubank for that matter. Conor McGregor might need one tomorrow night to avoid humiliation. He might get one. There is a big difference between a desperate eyes closed wild swing and a carefully set up calculated counter, its called skill. Luck is the name given to events of low probability. If a plane lands on your head you can count yourself very unlucky.

A physicist might argue that luck is just our perception and that random events are few and far between. But If we take luck to represent outcomes that we can't control (lottery numbers, blind dates, idiotic/drunk drivers, good genes, random germs, ineffective immune systems, the weather etc etc.) then you can see that even 21 century life is still subject to luck. The best we can do is to improve our chances but we can't control them. Only total 100% control can eliminate luck. So unless Floyd Mayweather casually drops his guard and sticks his chin out awaiting McGregor's left, his chances of winning remain high.

Snooker is a game where we have little control of what happens to the balls once we miss a shot. Accidental snookers, in-offs, missed balls going safe, lucky canons, kicks are all often outside our control which is why some estimate luck to be as high as 10% in that game. I couldn't win a single frame off Ronnie O Sullivan unless my luck was freakishly high. He's far, far more than 10% better than me on any given day.

Why ask them,they trained for years to hit people and when they do it's considered luck ?

There's 2 types of lucky punch I think first say when a punch is thrown at the other fighter and it hits them on the ear out high on the head it wasn't meant to land there but it does a lot of damage when it does off the the top of my head I think David price Vs Thompson 1 was that type of punch that probably isn't the best example as price was Chinny anyways . second a fighter closing his eyes and punching and the other fighter moving in to the path of the punch ,I don't mean a skilled fighter timing the other guy rather a hail Mary as I think the yanks call it .

Tarkus wrote:

Lackeos wrote:We have threads about this all of the time.

Anyways, yes, I believe some punches can be characterized as lucky. JMM - Pacquiao is a good example of a situation where a fighter was moving into or falling into the path of a punch, and it basically caused the punch to be 50 times as likely to score a KO as any other punch. An opponent could slip or move to his right at the exact time that you're throwing a left hook, and boom, explosion. The same thing happened in Casamayor - Katsidis, if I recall; except Katsidis was moving into the punch instead of tripping into the punch. Similar to the Codrington - Green fight, if two hookers hook each other at the same time, they get knocked backwards by the opposing hook and also the reactionary force of their own hook, sometimes causing knockdowns, and sometimes causing knockdowns that are so hard that when your head hits the mat, you get f*cked up. In all of these examples, there is the possibility that a boxer's sharp reflexes noticed the path that the opponent was moving, and they threw the perfect punch to intercept the path. In all of these examples, there is also the possibility that they just threw a run-of-the-mill punch, having no idea that it would be any more important than any other punch they throw, but it turns out to be 100 times as important, because luck.

A second kind of example occurs when a vastly inferior boxer is winging wild shots all fight and missing all fight. If they happen to connect with just one, then it's all over; but there is no doubt that they have inferior skill, and their connect percentage is very poor. We saw this in Mike Jones vs Randall Bailey, where Bailey was missing and getting schooled all fight long, behind by 6 points on the judges' scorecards, but probably behind by 10 on the viewers' cards; the first time he landed in round 11, it was all over. But what were the odds of him finding Jones in round 11? Probably pretty abysmal. We saw in the Vitali - Briggs fight that Briggs was winging shots and missing all fight long, and I think that there is no doubt that there was knockout potential if any of those punches landed, and I think there is also no doubt that Briggs would be a lucky bastard if his amateur ass landed on Vitali even once. There are lots of fights like the Breidis Prescott - Mike Alvarado fight, in which one fighter is clearly inferior and way down on the cards, almost no chance of winning a decision, almost no chance of scoring a knockout, but you land one punch in particular that staggers the opponent, and suddenly the clearly inferior boxer wins it all.

A third type of example occurs when a punch is lucky to cause a critical injury. This could be like the time that Ken Norton broke Muhammad Ali's jaw. This wasn't a special punch, but it landed while Ali was talking, it broke Ali's jaw, and it cost Ali the entire fight. We see many cases where a punch causes a cut, and the cut proves to completely alter the fight. But there are no special cutting punches, there are just punches, and if it happens to produce a cut, then it was in no way a product of deliberate intent, you simply won the lottery. You punched your opponent, and he got cut. Some other guy punched his opponent, and he didn't get cut. You're not better than the other guy, you just got luckier.

Top notch post.

Perfectly put, everything I was thinking and so much more. Very good post Lackeos.

keithmoonhangover wrote:But there isn't some mystical force called luck, it's a word from when people believed in magic.

That's so asinine it's hard to believe it's an earnest statement.

squiggy wrote:

keithmoonhangover wrote:But there isn't some mystical force called luck, it's a word from when people believed in magic.

That's so asinine it's hard to believe it's an earnest statement.

Squiggy, is it possible you just don't understand the statement?

You go ahead and correct me if I'm wrong: The statement means, "Luck doesn't exist."

Whether you guys will say it's lucky or not, but herol bomber graham was absolutely school Julian Jackson, till Jackson landed a bomb. Jackson was probably a round away from being stopped himself

Froch stopping jermain Taylor with 13 seconds left could be seen as kinda lucky, or brilliant... depending on what side of the ring you sit

I figured at least one person would bring up JMM's KO of Pacquiao a lucky punch. It wasn't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5NX2XTHLVk