Luis Gurule handed Bilal Hasan the first loss of his pro career Saturday at UFC 334, taking a split decision in the flyweight bout that opened the pay-per-view main card at Madison Square Garden. Two judges had it 29-28 for Gurule and the third went 29-28 for Hasan. FanDuel had Hasan at -1150 and Gurule at +730, which works out to roughly a 92 percent implied chance for the prospect. He lost anyway.
The first round went about how the line said it would. Hasan threw everything on the menu: oblique kicks, body kicks, a spinning back kick and a head kick that snapped Gurule’s chin back. Then Gurule found a counter right hand and put Hasan on the canvas. Hasan popped right back up, but the fight started to change from there. In the second, Gurule ate a shot to the body on his way in and finished a double-leg, then rode Hasan along the fence with ground-and-pound until the horn. Aaron Bronsteter called that the swing round on X, and the scorecards back him up.
The third belonged to Gurule’s wrestling. He caught Hasan with another right, shot again, and took an inside elbow that opened a cut and left him bleeding heavily. He finished the takedown anyway and kept Hasan underneath for most of the round, smothering the submission attempts from bottom. MMA Fighting’s live blog scored it 30-27 for Gurule. Kevin MacDonald refereed.
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Gurule had a plan, and he told people what it was. Ariel Helwani posted pre-fight audio in which Gurule said, “We just gotta be patient, push him, and put him in uncomfortable positions where no one else has really been able to do that.” After the result, Helwani added that Team Nomad called it.
In the cage afterward, Gurule went straight at the betting market. “ChatGPT don’t know shit,” he said, then added, “I dragged him into deep waters, I knew he couldn’t take it. I knew he couldn’t swim.”
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The 25-year-old Hasan falls to 10-1 (1 NC). He’d been on a sprint since August, when he knocked out Mridul Saikia in 45 seconds on Dana White’s Contender Series. Eighteen days later he made his octagon debut at UFC Shanghai and won a bonus for knocking out unbeaten Nilson Rojas in Round 2. That’s two UFC fights and a pay-per-view main card slot at MSG, placed above Stephen Thompson, who retired later that night after a spinning wheel kick knockout. Bloody Elbow rounded up the reaction, which included the predictable wave of “fraud checked” posts.
Gurule moves to 12-4. He’d gone 1-4 in the UFC since debuting in April 2025, with the lone win a decision over Daniel Barez, and his last fight ended in a first-round submission loss to Rei Tsuruya. He walked in as a guy the matchmakers expected to lose and walked out with the biggest win of his career.
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My take: -1150 on a guy with two UFC fights is a number nobody should touch, and I mean that for the bettors more than for Hasan. The kid’s speed is real. What he’d never faced was a veteran willing to eat a head kick to get a hand on his hips, and a fighter who has only shown you highlight knockouts gives you no data on what happens off his back in Round 3. Now there’s data. Gurule at +730 was the kind of live dog I complain nobody looks at, a wrestler with a plan he said out loud on camera, and $100 on him paid $730.
