Daily Fantasy Sports has a new player… err, fighter.
After three years of development and plenty of secrecy, Verdict MMA and a group of co-founding friends are ready to bring a new product to market. Three high school friends, CEO Sanjay Thakur, COO Mandeep Singh and CCO David Chung started in Canada, relocated to Vegas and are ready for the biggest week in their company’s history.
Teasing users for weeks on end with a new tab on the app with a picture of a box and a tag line, “What’s in the box?” is over. It has been ripped open and they intend to deliver a new spin to a niche Daily Fantasy market.
Backed by former UFC and Bellator fighter Ben Askren, fantasy and gaming industry insider Chris Grove, former DraftKings executive Sean Hurley, along with plenty of venture capital, Verdict has the opportunity to bring the MMA community together for bragging rights or profit with their new product, Verdict Tournaments.
Thakur sat down with The Post this week to discuss future plans, new product launches, and (potentially) changing combat sports forever:
MMA DFS littered with issues
The market has expanded widely over the past few years. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the UFC was the only sporting outfit operating, so betting and DFS really grabbed a stranglehold of interest.
Typically with DFS, lineups are eligible to be changed right up to the start of an NFL or MLB game. That is not the case in MMA, in which lineups lock as early as four hours before the fight card.
This year, there have been 32 scheduled bouts that ended up being canceled or moved to another card. Many of these cancelations happen the day of the fight or during weigh-ins, 24-hours before.
Canceled fights essentially ruin your lineups and the genre as a whole. If one of the fights you choose for a DFS lineup is canceled, you lose your wagered amount thanks to that fat goose egg (zero-point fight) on your card.
“All of these edge cases are things we are fixing,” Thakur told The Post. “Conventional platforms have you lock in your lineup hours before an event even starts. As we move forward, fans are going to have a model where all fights that are in lineups are the same and can be changed right up to fight time.”
This would negate problems with canceled fights going forward.
Moreover, players will be able to play one-on-one, in groups, or tournament style for big-money prizes.
“DFS is booming but there are problems. Verdict Tournaments is the first Daily Fantasy product dedicated to MMA,” Thakur continued. “We are really excited to combine entertainment, emotion, and fun into the games.”
Verdict MMA Tournaments, as it is being dubbed, will be available in 28 states and is licensed in Colorado and New Hampshire. The hope is that Verdict Tournaments will continue throughout the United States and into Canada, Australia, Asia and the United Kingdom.
Importantly, there is no salary system with this game — it is multipliers and XP bonus points that determine scores.
“It is a smaller market with no salary system, we have developed an algorithm to determine multipliers based on who is going to win and how thanks to stats and past opponents,” Thakur said.
The UFC judging problem and possible solutions
The company actually started after UFC 167 in 2013, when most believe that Johny Hendricks was infamously robbed of the UFC welterweight title against Georges St-Pierre.
At the time, even UFC President Dana White was flabbergasted.
“I am blown away that George St-Pierre won that fight,” he said. “I think the Nevada State Athletic Commission is atrocious and the Governor needs to step in immediately before they destroy this sport like they did boxing.”
Fast forward nine years, nothing has changed. Fighters are losing bouts consistently due to bad judging every week. This isn’t just frustrating for entertainment but costs fighters their win-bonus.
Even this week, Jorge Masvidal was griping about it.
“You’re destroying careers, these guys [the judges] go by with no accountability,” he said on “The MMA Hour Podcast.” “I like open scoring. If the coach tells me, I am up a round or down a round, that would be great.”
On May 21, there were two particularly bad judge’s decisions on the main card. One gave Ketlen Viera a win over Holly Holm and the other a victory for Jun-Yong Park a decision win over Eryk Anders.
“As a guy that has done it at the highest level, I obviously don’t know [who is winning] because we all thought Holly Holm won,” former UFC light heavyweight and heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier said. “More people are on the side that I am sitting as opposed to the only three scorecards that matter. The Verdict scorecards are all saying the same thing that I am seeing.”
Verdict MMA could be a potential solution for this growing issue. Users are able to vote live on every round and scores are put together into a global scorecard. The voters are then ranked with a belt system to show their status and accuracy when scoring fights.
While the solution to the scoring problem isn’t figured out yet, Verdict is working on it. With the hope that this new DFS product is able to give them the resources needed to tackle this multi-million dollar problem.
“Everything we have worked on has been related to transparency within the sport,” Thakur said. “In a perfect vision, it would be about working towards having a better system where there were more judges grading fights and maybe one would represent a global scorecard or a professional scorecard that takes into account who the public believes won the fight.”
The hope is that the DFS product will help fuel future endeavors to solve problems for a sport that is still in its infancy.
For now, Verdict Tournaments are just the first step of many to bring the MMA community together, one round at a time.