fight club

The Birth of the Worldwide Fight Club

admin — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:37:37 -0400

What started as a concept nearly six months ago is today seeing the dawn. It has moved from concept to reality and now it's ready to be released and utilized. It is functional and waiting for you. Are you willing to join...

Feel free to read through this entire document, but here are some quick links to important sections:

Worldwide Fight Club Mission
Fight Club Rules
Referree Guidelines
How to Become a Judge
How to Become a Prize Fighter
Offering Tips and Training Suggestions
The Future of Fight Club

See Fights

Submit Fights

Worldwide Fight Club Mission

"How to Box will provide a structure, ranking, and promotion system that will enable boxers of all skill levels and weight classes to receive fair judging, exposure, and even compensation and sponsorship in an easy to use, fun, and competitive environment."

I promise you, that first statement is as "professional and legalistic" as I plan on getting here.

Worldwide Fight Club

The How to Box Worldwide Fight Club can give structure and direction to backyard, amateur, and even professional boxing worldwide. Yes, I have grand goals for this club, but How to Box is keenly interested in making boxing accessible to everyone. People with no boxing skill and those with lots are all capable of participating in the fight club.

This system will allow any two people anywhere to video a boxing match and publish it on the site to be judged and critiqued by thousands of boxers, trainers, and judges worldwide. Not only will this help new boxers learn the sport, but it will assist seasoned boxers with exposure. All boxers of all skill levels will even be paid based on a "like it then donate" payment system.

I'll get into it more below, but basically if you watch a fight in fight club and believe it would have been worth buying a ticket to watch, then you make a donation that is split between the boxers and the promoter (How to Box). 70% of the donation goes directly to the two boxers.

I also want to talk briefly on honour and integrity. This fight club, at least initially, will only thrive in an environment of fair play and submission by all involved to the rules outlined. How to Box cannot enforce any of these rules and presents them more as guidelines, but How to Box strongly encourages you to follow these rules in your bouts. If everyone involved in fight club has the integrity and attitude to keep fights honourable - meaning no cheating, then this club has huge potential. Don't be part of the problem in trying to circumvent the system and cheat. In most cases only you will ever know.

Worldwide Fight Club Rules

The First Rule of Fight Club is that everyone talks about fight club. That's right, we want the fight club to expand and grow and have fights submitted by boxers all over the world so tell your friends.
Every fight will consist of a minimum of three people: two opponents and a third party who's only responsibility is to ensure the safety of the match. This third party is essentially a referree who should act in accordance with the ref's guidance.
Fighters will wear appropriate safety equipment. At minimum that means: 16oz gloves, headgear, handwraps, and mouthguard. It is impossible for How to Box to verify every fight meets these requirements and relies on your submission to the honor system.
Scheduling and matchups are an individual responsibility. If you want to fight, you find an opponent using the How to Box system or from your circle of friends and agree upon a date and location.
Matches will occur in a space that either is a boxing ring or mimics a boxing ring. At minimum, it must be square, 20'x20', and have some type of unmoveable corners and borders. A backyard is possible if it is roped off as the boundaries and corner work in boxing is an integral part of the sport.
Both opponents must agree to having the fight uploaded onto the Internet and both opponents must be registered members of How to Box. You will not be able to submit a fight unless both pers are registered. Registration is free. Registration and subsequent fight submission is an indication of consent.
All pers under the age of majority must have parental or guardian permission to submit their fights. Again, How to Box cannot monitor this and assumes that all registered users have obtained the requisite permission.
Matches will be judged by How to Box qualified judges. Any member of How to Box is free to take the qualification exam and then judge fights. In essence, determining a winner and loser will be a democratic process. Errors in judging and decisions will be minimized by the sheer volume of judges that will be looking at each fight - potentially thousands of judges will determine the outcome of your match.
Boxers are strongly encouraged to fight within their skill level and weight class. There is an open weight class that will allow you to fight anyone else, but for most matches and especially for beginners, boxers should choose opponents who are of the same experience level and within the same weight class.
Fights are a minimum of 3 rounds. Fights can be longer if agreed upon by both boxers.
A boxer's fight record will be determined by How to Box and consist only of those fights that have been submitted to How to Box and winners determined by majority decision of qualified How to Box judges. All judges will only be allowed to designate results for a fight once and the system will prevent attempts to do otherwise.
Rankings are based on win or lose. There is no draw. Judges will tally valid hits during the match and award 1 point per hit with 2 points per knockdown that was not deemed to be the result of a slip. At the end of the match whichever boxer is ahead is declared the winner by that judge. Holding, illegal hits, and other infractions will count as points against and weight in the judges decision to award the winner and loser of the fight.
The system will determine the rankings and How to Box will not accept any monetary or other incentive to alter the rankings.
Judges can contact the admin in suspicious bouts seeking disqualification or investigation of suspect matches. If a request is made, an appeal will go out to all judges to re-look at the match and vote on disqualification and subsequent removal from the rankings. Pers who are found to be intentionally cheating (taking dives, fixing fights, etc...) will be permanently banned from How to Box.
Rounds are to be 3 minutes long with 1 minute rest inbetween.
Fights that are interrupted due to referee stoppage, excessive bleeding, or other reasons will be judged up to the point of stoppage. Whoever is ahead at the time of the stoppage will be declared the winner.

Worldwide Fight Club Referree Guidelines

The Ref or valid third party is to be present at a fight club fight for one reason - SAFETY. Both boxers must follow the ref's direction. If the ref decides a fight is over, it is over - no questions asked. You can still upload the fight as per Rule 16 above.

If you are acting as a referree, your job is extremely important. You should be willing and capable of stopping the fight for any of the following reasons:

One or both boxers are bleeding.
The proper safety equipment is not being used: sparring gloves, headgear, handwraps, mouthguard.
One of the boxers is obviously severely outclassed and outskilled by his opponent. DO NOT allow a match to continue until someone is knocked out "cold".
One of the boxers is taking excessive blows to the head without defense or counterattack.
Either boxer continues to throw illegal hits or use illegal techniques after being warned twice.
Any other instance in which you feel the safety of either boxer is threatened.

Nobody wants to be in a situation where someone who is participating for fun and to learn a great sport ends up seriously injured. Please take your job seriously.

How to Become a Worldwide Fight Club Judge

Become a Judge

In order to judge a match on How to Box you must pass the judging qualification. Once you register a free account, proceed to the judging qualification. The test is based on amateur boxing rules, the rules posted above, and common sense. You have 5 attempts and your qualification will be automatically granted once you successfully pass the exam. The exam will change regularly and questions are randomized so do not attempt to pass your answers to a friend.

Once you have received your qualification you will be presented with a judging field on all fights in the fight club. You simply pick the winner and loser and hit "Designate Results". The system will stop you from trying to judge a fight more than once or otherwise trying to cheat the system.

You can verify if you have been granted the judging qualification in on your profile page once logged in to How to Box.

How to Become a Prize Fighter

Make Money with
Your Fights!

Every fight submitted to the fight club is potentially a prizefight for both boxers involved. You do not have to do anything special. That is, if you submit a fight, there is a chance that both you and your opponent, win or lose, will receive a cheque from How to Box sometime in the future. For this reason, it is important that you keep your profile and address updated. Paypal is How to Box's method of choice for payment, so ensure your Paypal email is also in your profile.

How does this work?

Whenever someone views a fight in the fight club, they have the option of donating to that fight. In general, How to Box asks the viewer if they would have bought a ticket to watch the fight they just saw. If they say "Yes", then How to Box asks them to consider rewarding the boxers for their efforts and donating whatever amount they would like. Once How to Box receives that amount, it is divided up: 45% goes to the winner, 25% to the loser, and 30% to the promoter (How to Box).

You can check how much your fight has made at anytime by looking at the fight page where you will also see the names of the last 5 people who liked your fight enough to pay you.

How to Box will send you a cheque or make a Paypal deposit monthly on or around the first week of the month, once your account has a minimum of $25 in it.

Offering Critiques and Suggestions to Boxers

The primary purpose of Fight Club is to help you learn to box. To that end, anyone can offer advice and suggestions on training and technique shown during your fight. How to Box moderates all comments and ensures any that do not offer some sort of learning value never see the light of day, however, sometimes it hurts to hear the truth. Take all criticism for what it's worth. Get what you can out of a comment and forget about everything else. By the same token, leave comments for other people, talking to them like you would like to be talked to. Consider that everyone here is a human being, equal under God, and deserving of a minimum level of respect.

Comments and suggestions are highly encouraged and for some people are the only means of feedback and chances for improvement that they can get. Done right, they are highly valued - I have tonnes of emails lending testament to that fact. Do someone a favour and help them learn the sport.

The Future of Fight Club

The Worldwide Fight Club is a newborn baby and will grow and develop and improve over time. Your suggestions and comments are critical to creating a club we all can all be proud of and that helps you learn to box and have some fun with the greatest sport on Earth. As such, leave comments below - good and bad so How to Box can improve this for you.

I know the Fight Club as it stands in its functional form today is not 100%. It is closer to 75%, but over the coming days, weeks, and months, it will improve and grow based on your suggestions. Take the opportunity to shape this into something even better than what it currently is.

Things you will see at some point. Consider this my to do list:

Consolidated Rankings page by skill level and weight class.
Allow corporate sponsorship for boxers.
Better tools for finding opponents and setting up matches.
Better integration of fight club fights with the How to Box boxing schedule.
Expanded qualification exam for judges.
Better prizes and incentives for top performing boxers.
Marketing tools - badges, buttons, widgets, banners, graphics in order to help spread the word about fight club and see just how big we can make this thing.
Whatever else you suggest...

In Conclusion

Fight Club is an evolution of learning to box online. Boxing promoters and managers, clubs, trainers, and gym owners can use this tool to promote their boxers and in the future, I see it as a means to bringing together and expanding the reach of boxing. Seize this opportunity and help me push the limits of boxing today.

Creating a Worldwide Fight Club - Are You Up For It?

admin — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 12:07:25 -0400

Let's face it, boxing by yourself eventually gets boring. Not all of us are able or capable of joining a gym. Not all of us have access to sparring partners and trainers. What we do all have access to is friends.

It only takes one friend and suddenly you are in a position to spar or even fight. Backyard boxing and basement boxing are testament to that fact. By the same token, unsupervised matches and matchups between different sizes and skill levels can be dangerous and one-sided.

The Evolution of a Fight Club

I'm proposing that How to Box members start a real life fight club. Anyone wishing to will arrange fights in their own towns and cities, video them, and upload the videos to How to Box where they will be judged by a panel of qualified boxing judges which will continually grow. Every fight uploaded will potentially make the participants some money essentially turning everyone in the fight club into prize fighters.

This idea is still in the prototype phase, but here are the details so far and I would be very interested in any comments and suggestions you may have to flesh it out and make it better.

1. First rule of fight club is that everyone talks about fight club: We want this to spread world wide and to that end I will be developing buttons and widgets that can be added to websites everywhere that show you what your current fight club ranking is. For the most part, it will be up to you, using this site, to arrange and schedule matches.

2. It is worldwide, not regional: At the moment, I see this as one club with each town or city as a part of that one worldwide club. Therefore, the rankings would reflect a worldwide fight club champion and not an Arkansas champion, Ontario champion and so on. There should be one ranking list so everyone knows where they stand on it.

3. Weight and skill level is important: The rankings will reflect weight categories and skill levels. Not only to help ensure safe matches, but to prevent lopsided victories as much as possible. Not sure how this will work yet, but the judges will decide a boxer's skill level and promote/demote him or her based on fight performance.

4. Fights uploaded will be critiqued: This is as much about learning as it is about becoming the How to Box World Fight Club Champion, so every fight uploaded will offer some constructive criticism from the judges and be open for comment from the community. The rankings will be point based, so even though fighters in different countries may never actually fight (although potentially they could in the future...), we can still rank them in their weight and skill level classifications.

5. There will be rules: I'll go into this in some more detail, but all fights have to be standardized in some way including having proper gear (mouthguards, headguards, 16oz gloves), be supervised, follow usual boxing conventions (ie.. no illegal hit), and so on.

6. Fighters will be rewarded: Everyone who submits is potentially a prize fighter. Every fight uploaded will ask viewers if they would have paid for a ticket to watch the fight. If so, they can then buy a ticket and the proceeds will be split between the fighters and How to Box (the promoter). This follows the same income model How to Box has now where you all decide if How to Box is worthy of your donations.

7. Tie it into gyms and clubs: Where possible, I'd like to tie this into the current amateur system in place in most countries. This is a huge undertaking though, and has implications that would have to be worked out.

8. The judges will consist of qualified individuals: Initially, it will be a panel of three. However, in the spirit of community, any member on How to Box will be able to become a judge simply by completing a boxing quiz to ensure they know what they are looking for in the scoring system. Over time, the panel will grow ensuring corruption and bad decisions are overturned or are prevented from occurring. Majority will rule.

I envision this as taking all the basement boxing and backyard boxing currently going on without regulation and turning it into something that is not only safer, but potentially a new league of boxing that is accessible to anyone with a computer connection and a video camera.

As I said, there is a lot to be worked out yet, so please leave your comments and suggestions.