Fightcard

Fightcard is an iPhone app designed to help you judge boxing matches. It will enable you, when called upon to offer an opinion as to who won a fight, to give a precise and defensible answer. Your friends will be awed by your detailed analysis of the fight, proclaim you a genius, and buy you a drink. The app will thus pay for itself the first time you use it.

Boxing

Boxing is a fine sport. It is unusual in that it is semi-judged. Most sports are either scored on more-or-less objective criteria (e.g., football, baseball and hockey), or else strictly judged (e.g., diving and figure skating). Boxing is scored objectively when it ends in a knockout (one of the fighters is knocked down, and cannot resume the contest within 10 seconds) and judged otherwise.

The rules by which a boxing match is judged have changed considerably over the last century, but today the standard is the 10-point-must system.

10-Point-Must

Under the 10-point-must system, each round is judged individually, and each fighter awarded 10 or fewer points for each round. In any one round, the fighter judged the winner must be awarded 10 points, and the other fighter awarded 9 or fewer. (If a judge sees a round even, he scores it 10-10.) Points deducted for fouls are taken away from these initial awards; such point deductions are the only way for the winner of a round to receive fewer than 10 points.

Criteria

Individual rounds are judged according to four specific criteria:

• Clean, effective punching is the dominant criterion for determining the winner of a round. Clean punches are legal blows which land without interference. Effective punches are those which disrupt the strategy of their target.

• Defense is the ability to avoid an opponent's punches or, failing that, to move so as to make them less effective (e.g. by moving away when being struck). It is not a measure of "toughness", but rather of skill.

• Ring generalship is the art of controlling the space and pace of a fight to one's benefit. In a contest between two fighters with differing styles, the one who is better able to "fight his fight" displays superior ring generalship.

• Effective aggression is a matter of successfully executing a strategy of attack. Between two otherwise evenly matched fighters, the criterion of effective aggression will award the round to the aggressor.

Fightcard tracks these four criteria, knockdowns, and point deductions for each round. It computes a recommended score for each round (which you are always free to override), and totals up a winner at the end of the fight. It also supports all types of stoppages, such as Technical Decisions, Technical Draws, and No Decisions, in addition to the more common KOs and TKOs.

Bonus Features

Fightcard stores all the fights you've scored, so that you can review (and argue about them) at a later date. Be the terror of your favorite web site's forums.

Fightcard 2.0 offers Twitter integration! Tweet your scores in real-time to your friends and followers. Make like Harold Lederman.

It's only $0.99; that's just 2.5% of a single PPV! You should go buy it right now.