Though Oliveira was able to take care of business in the first round, the real-life champ lost his rematch against former Bellator champ and recent UFC convert Michael Chandler. Without any further ado, let's get to the results of these tournaments.Ĭlick any bracket image to see its larger version. While this is a good idea in theory, when you're simulating fights to see how the game predicts they'd play out in real life, it results in some quite surprising upsets. This is likely an indication that developer EA Canada balanced the fighters to create more competitive bouts even with each fighter featuring different attributes and tendencies. However, regardless of the outcome, I noticed that very few fights were completely one-sided. Still, very few submissions were successful, perhaps a testament to the A.I.

It certainly wasn't for lack of trying because sometimes even the most striking-focused fighters jumped guard to attempt guillotines in these simulations. In fact, even with grappling specialists, I was shocked at how few submission attempts succeeded. Each fight was scheduled for three rounds, except for the championship fight at the end, which could go five rounds.Īs the nearly 80 bouts played out, it quickly became apparent that EA Sports UFC 4 skews heavily in favor of third-round knockouts or technical knockouts. I then watched every fight as the A.I.-controlled combatants duked it out. The seeding is based on current ranking, though for some high-profile fighters who are in the process of changing weight classes (like Jon Jones or Cody Garbrandt), I had to plug them in where it made the most sense. Using the current official UFC rankings found on the promotion's website, I constructed eight-person tournament brackets featuring the highest-ranked fighters of each weight class (aside from women's featherweight, since there are no official rankings and EA Sports UFC 4 only has two active fighters from that division). We decided to find out for ourselves, using the best tool at our disposal: EA Sports UFC 4. Still, with other major promotions like Bellator and the Professional Fighters League experimenting with bracket-style tournaments, many fans wonder what would happen if UFC returned to its roots and hosted its own. The UFC has evolved and grown in a multitude of ways in the nearly three decades since that first event in Denver. In 1993, the Ultimate Fighting Championship burst onto the scene, pitting masters of different martial arts disciplines against one another in a bracket-style tournament.

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