Scorecards! How Did Beterbiev Beat Bivol?

*** Controversy?!?!? Watch Dmitry Bivol vs. Artur Beterbiev full fight video highlights right here! ***

Dmitry Bivol just lost his undefeated record and world championship in the most frustrating of ways.

Against the marauding power puncher Artur Beterbiev, Bivol was tasked with fighting a perfect fight. By and large he did just that, becoming the first man to not only avoid the Beterbiev KO entirely but also evade any knockdowns. Meanwhile, he was landing a lot of jabs and his own hard counter punches.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a close fight by any metric. Most watching, however, seemed to think Bivol had done enough, leaving viewers flabbergasted when Bivol didn’t win a single scorecard. After the decision was announced, the full scorecards have been released, and you can take a look below:

Looking over the scorecards is difficult, because there were a lot of very close rounds. A 114-114 draw — the card handed in by Judge Manuel Oliver Palomo — was certainly reasonable. Ultimately, the judges were largely on the same page for the first half of the fight, but it all got a little weird in the back half.

It feels a bit strange that two of three judges awarded Beterbiev the final three rounds. There were momentum swings in each, but the 11th and 12th also saw some of Bivol’s best connections in the entire fight. Beterbiev was aggressive too, but he did a whole lot of glove hitting in some of those exchanges.

Just one of those rounds going the other way on Judge Glenn Feldman’s card would have resulted in a majority draw. As for Judge Pawel Kardyni, the scorecard of 116-112 is fairly baffling, and it’s up for debate whether the cause was incompetence or something more crooked.

What did you think of the fight and the decision? Should this one have gone Bivol’s way? Let us know in the comments below.

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For complete Beterbiev vs. Bivol results and play-by-play, click here.