Watched some of the other fights, spoilery stuff to follow (in tags)
[spoil]
-Kid getting KO'd cold in like a minute was pretty nuts. Getting reckless and taking his opponent too lightly, or just getting a bit slower with age? I dunno.
-The fight his brother Atsushi had with some other crazy guy was hilarious, definitely worth watching if only for entertainment value.
-Petrosyan's head movement is sick, Kraus was whiffing on like 4 out of 5 punches he threw. Gotta like him to take the tourney at this point I think. Souwer/Kyshenko was a pretty great fight as well.
-Kawajiri I thought did pretty well all things considered. Yeah he was really outclassed and ended up getting TKO'd, but for only his second K-1 fight and against a former champ, he had nothing to be ashamed of. He stood in with him and wasn't afraid to trade, and refused to go down until his corner threw in the towel. The last 20 second or so of the fight are pretty nuts, you can see some media guys in the audience jumping up and down screaming for him to go down but he just won't
.[/spoil]
Also DREAM 10 is next weekend, but again I dunno whether it'll be aired live here or not. They must be planning to announce some more fights this week because as it stands the card is pretty thin.
Welterweight Grand Prix
*Jason High vs. André Galvão
*Hayato Sakurai vs. Marius Zaromskis
*Winner of Hayato Sakurai/Marius Zaromskis vs. Jason High/André Galvão
Other bouts
*Vitor Ribeiro vs Shinya Aoki
*André Dida Amade vs Katsunori Kikuno
*Paulo Filho vs Melvin Manhoef
They need at least one reserve bout for the tourney, probably someone to replace CroCop against Mighty Mo, maybe a couple more to round things out. That's a lot to get done in a week but par for the course in Japan I guess.
Have to figure that the WWGP final will be Mach vs Galvao though of course anything can happen. That's a hard fight to pick though, Mach obviously has tons more experience, but Galvao's grappling is sick. In the end I'll go with Mach but I'm not all that confident that he can avoid getting caught in something.
Shaolin I think has the solid technical grappling to ride out a decision over Aoki, and Filho/Manhoef has huge gongshow potential but Melvin's sub defense is so bad that I gotta go with Filho despite having no idea what kind of shape he's in for this fight. Though if he starts talking to ghosts again or whatever midfight he's going to get a fist right through his face.
Hopefully it's as good as the first round was, that was one of my favourite cards so far this year and all four tourney fights were sweet.