Author: Michael David Smith

Filed under: K1, News

Strikeforce heavyweight champion Alistair Overeem will take on Tyrone Spong as he continues his quest to claim the biggest title in kickboxing, and Semmy Schilt will fight Japan’s Keijiro “Kyotaro” Maeda as he seeks an unprecedented fifth K-1 World Grand Prix Final title. Those are the two most significant fights in the K-1 World Grand Prix Final 8 brackets, which were announced Monday.

Overeem and Schilt are on opposite sides of the bracket, meaning they could meet in the final. They’ll both be favored to get there, although Schilt’s path looks a little bit easier, and Schilt has to be considered the favorite to win the whole tournament.

Filed under: DREAM, WEC, Sengoku, Bellator, Featherweights

World Extreme Cagefighting featherweight champion Jose Aldo is steadily clearing out the 145-pound weight class in North America. Most MMA observers consider Aldo the best featherweight in the world and the last three men he’s beaten — Manny Gamburyan, Urijah Faber and Mike Brown — to be the next best.

So now that Aldo has beaten Gamburyan, Faber and Brown, and beaten them in decisive fashion, who are the future challengers for the WEC champ? That’s a tough question, because most of the next-best featherweights are fighting outside the WEC.

See how the rest of the featherweight division stacks up below.

Filed under: WEC, Bantamweights

During his year and a half as the World Extreme Cagefighting bantamweight champion, Miguel Torres seemed to be head and shoulders above the rest of the weight class, both literally and figuratively, and it seemed like his title reign could last for years.

Instead, Torres lost two straight fights, first to Brian Bowles and then to Joseph Benavidez, and he dropped in the bantamweight rankings.

But Torres looked much better at WEC 51, notching a solid win over Charlie Valencia, and he said afterward that he’s a different fighter now that he’s training under Firas Zahabi. He’ll need at least one, and maybe two, more wins before he’ll get another shot at the title, but I think Torres can get back to the top of the bantamweight heap. See where he ranks right now below.

Filed under: K1

The best pound-for-pound kickboxer in the world put on a display of technical wizardry, and one of the most exciting in the world finished the show with a devastating knockout, at the K-1 World MAX 2010 Final 16 in Seoul.

The best in the sport, Italy’s Giorgio Petrosyan, was masterful in beating Vitaly Gurkov by unanimous decision. And in the final fight of the night, Armenia’s Gago Drago used a right high kick to knock South Korea’s Su Hwan Lee out cold in the second round. Petrosyan and Drago were among five kickboxers who won Sunday to advance to the K-1 MAX Final 8 on November 8 in Tokyo.