Dulgarian was a -240 favorite coming into his main card fight against Yadier del Valle, but in the hours leading up to the match something strange happened: a lot of money started coming in on del Valle to win in the first round.<\/p>\n
As the fight approached, Dulgarian\u2019s line shrunk to -130 \u2026 at least amongst sportsbooks still taking action. Many shut down bets on the fight, and \u2014 after Dulgarian did indeed lose in the first via a very poorly defended rear naked choke \u2014 several large bookies took the extremely unusual step of refunding players<\/a> with Dulgarian in their bets.<\/p>\n The UFC hasn\u2019t made any official statement regarding the situation, but on Sunday they quietly cut Dulgarian according to Uncrowned\u2019s Ariel Helwani.<\/p>\n \u201cThe official reason was attributed to last night\u2019s loss,\u201d Helwani wrote on X<\/a> (formerly Twitter). \u201cHowever, the bout has been the center of controversy after a ton of money started to come in on Dulgarian, a sizable favorite, to lose in the first, which is what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n So was this some blatant fight rigging or another example where a fighter competed sick or injured, with word of said handicap making it out into the betting world? A similar incident occurred back in 2022 with Darrick Minner, whose line swung wildly leading into his fight. He\u2019d lose in the first round<\/a> and it was later disclosed that he fought with a badly injured knee.<\/p>\n But a quick glance a little closer into Minner\u2019s world revealed that his coach James Krause was running a sizeable sports betting ring<\/a> where people payed for online access to his picks. Krause, Minner, and others were suspended for years<\/a> and ejected from the UFC, with the promotion declaring that anyone who continued to train under Krause would be kicked off the roster.<\/p>\n What will be discovered when people look a little closer into Dulgarian\u2019s situation? It\u2019s already been noted that Dulgarian used to train under Krause and now trains with Factory X, where several of Krause\u2019s former students went. There\u2019s also video footage of Dulgarian saying fighters deserve a piece of all the money being bet on them.<\/p>\n With sports betting only becoming more prominent and fighter pay still sitting so low for those competing on Apex cards, we\u2019re shocked this kind of obvious corruption doesn\u2019t bubble to the surface more often. The question now is whether this situation is investigated thoroughly or pushed under the rug.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dulgarian was a -240 favorite coming into his main card fight against Yadier del Valle, but in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256556,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,785,85,1396],"class_list":{"0":"post-259722","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-mma","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}