Petr Yan spent the UFC 333 press conference interrupting, needling and trash-talking Merab Dvalishvili, and Dvalishvili just sat there and took it. The challenger now says that was the plan all along. Speaking to MMA Fighting ahead of Saturday’s trilogy fight, Dvalishvili said he has outgrown the urge to bite back and is saving every ounce of emotion for fight night.
“Right now, I know Petr Yan very well,” Dvalishvili said. “He’s a good fighter, but he’s just who he is. He’s always been disrespectful. He talks shit, and this doesn’t bother me anymore.”
That calm caught people off guard. At the presser, which also featured headliners Alexander Volkanovski and Movsar Evloev, Yan was relentless while Dvalishvili stayed respectful and never fired back, enough that some pundits wondered if something was off with him. Dvalishvili’s explanation is simpler. He told MMA Fighting he has matured as a person and a fighter, and that his job this week is to make weight, show up Oct. 24 and settle the argument inside the cage. He predicted he’d leave as the winner and that Yan would come away humbled, or in his words, “I’ll be winner, and then he will be humble.”
This is the same guy who has blown up at fighters and even fans who disrespected him over the years, so the shift is real. Dvalishvili pointed to a recent episode where he shared an opinion about a politician online and caught heat from plenty of people, including fellow Georgians. He said he used to take that kind of thing personally, but he’s decided life’s too short to stay angry about it. “I’m just [a] fighter and I’m not a politician,” he said.
The stakes explain the focus. Dvalishvili challenges Yan for the bantamweight title in the UFC 333 co-main event. He dominated their first fight at UFC Las Vegas in March 2023, then went on a tear that included four title defenses in 2025. That run ended in December at UFC 323, when Yan won the rematch to become a two-time bantamweight champion and snapped Dvalishvili’s 14-fight win streak. Yan has won four straight since that lopsided first loss. Saturday is Dvalishvili’s first fight of 2026, and he didn’t hesitate when asked if it’s the biggest of his career.
“Right now, yes,” he said, before calling Yan the most dangerous guy he could be facing. “[I’m] fighting [a] champion, most dangerous guy, Petr Yan.”
My take: I love a villain, and Yan is playing the part beautifully, but trash talk only works if the other guy flinches, and Merab refused to give him the reaction. That’s a smart read. Dvalishvili’s whole game is pace and pressure, the kind of fighter who wins by making you do things you don’t want to do for 25 minutes, and a version of him burning energy screaming across a press table is the version Yan wants. The 1-1 tiebreaker goes down Saturday, Oct. 24, and if Merab’s cardio is anywhere near what it was in 2023, Yan is going to spend the back half of that fight wishing he’d saved some breath.
