If we start to dig down further then the next thing we can do is take a look at a breakdown of the outcomes of fights. Here we divide them up into Knock Outs, Technical Knock Outs, Submissions, Decisions (including draws) and Disqualifications & No Contests. It breaks down like this:

So around one third of fights get finished by a KO/TKO, around 20% via submission and around 44% of fights go to a decision. So approximately a 55% chance of seeing a fight getting stopped, that’s 1 in every 1.8 fights.

Going a step further we can drill down on the finishes themselves and ask ‘if a fight is finished then what are the chances of it being a KO, TKO or a Submission? The helps to bring a little more clarity to the likelihood of certain kinds of finishes and you can see that roughly 4 out of 10 finishes are via submission and 6 out of 10 are via KO/TKO. Hopefully you can already see how this data might be useful to guide your training, there’s a fairly even chance of you getting finished via some kind of knockout or some kind of submission so both elements need to trained well but it might be worth putting a touch more emphasis on your striking defence over your submission defence.

But wait…

As Mixed Martial Arts is a fairly young sport it progresses considerably over fairly short periods so it’s always important to note whether the statistics in more recent years are significantly different to the overall number. This also helps us to identify trends and make sure that we are on or ahead of the curve when we are considering the numbers. Next up we look at the finishes breakdown over the history of the UFC to see how things have changed over time. Here we combine KO/TKO finishes for clarity as it doesn’t really matter to your training whether it’s more likely to be a KO or a TKO.

You’re twice as likely to get knocked out than you are to get submitted

You can see here that the early years are far more erratic in terms of statistics as there are far fewer events and the sport is generally more unstable. As we come into the modern era around 2006 things start to settle down considerably and from 2010 we start to get much more predictability and consistency. In more recent years we can see that the breakdown between finishes is quite stable with submissions accounting for about 18% of finishes, KOs/TKOs accounting for around 32% and almost exactly half of fights finishing in a decision. So if we use more recent years as a guide then we can see that you’re actually almost twice as likely to get knocked out as you are to get submitted. Now you can see that it would be wise to make sure that you’re not over prioritising submission defence and not under prioritising striking defence.

Historic Trends and the rise of the decision victory

This is a good point to introduce a slightly different graph, it represents the same data as before but represents it accumulatively over the years, so at any data point on the graph the stat shows the total for that year and all previous years combined. The reason for this is that it allows us to get the clearest view possible of the trend of any particular set of data, how it’s moving now compared to its entire history.

You can see that it’s much easier to identify the general trend of any particular data set with this model, and with this you can see that decision finishes have basically been stealing market share from all over finishes consistently since they were introduced (remember, decisions didn’t exist in the first UFCs!). In the last couple of years things have finally settled down and fights going to decision has not made any additional ground – settling at 44%.

Finishes Round by Round

A reminder that our focus at UFC Secrets is to try and bring you statistics and data that can actually educate the way you fight. Data that shows how finishes happen round by round is useful because it helps us to understand how the level of risk typically changes throughout a fight, if certain things are more or less likely to happen as a fight progresses then it can help us to adjust our tactics accordingly. So in this next graph we take a look at how finishes change during each round. It’s important to note that here the calculations are made against the amount of times that round actually happens, for example, there have only been 7 submissions in the 5th round in the history of the UFC which if we calculated it against all fights would equate to just 0.0014% of fight finishes, but what we’re actually interested in is how often a fight finishes via submission IF it actually goes to a fifth round. When we calculate it this way we can see that it actually equates to around 5%, meaning that of all the fights that have ever been to a fifth round about 1 in 20 ends in submission. Take a look at the breakdown:

You’re 50% Safer In Round 3 & Beyond

So there are a few important things that we should take away from this. We can see that the chances of you getting finished in the first round of a fight are highest, however it only drops by 5% in the second round. Once you get to the third round and beyond your chances of being finished are cut in half. Understanding this data can help you to adjust your tactics, be more careful as you are in the first round and then be less afraid to take chances as you get into the later rounds.

Looking closer at the data we can see that there is also a difference between the way submissions and KO/TKOs start to drop as the fight progresses. The chance of you being knocked out in the first round is about 18%, second round it drops to 14% and third round it drops to 9%. So there’s a fairly steady decline as the fight progresses. But with submissions it is different, in the first round it is around 10% but this only declines to 9% for round two and then it drops considerably to 5.5% by the time we get to round 3.

So now our revised tactics might be that we are prepared to take more chances with our striking the longer the fight goes but that we’re particularly cautious with our submission defence until the third round where we can start to take a few more chances to go for the finish on the ground.