The opening lines for UFC 333 are out, and the bookmakers have thrown up their hands on the main event. Alexander Volkanovski and Movsar Evloev opened at even money for their featherweight title fight, Sherdog reported Thursday. In the co-main event, Petr Yan opened as the favorite over Merab Dvalishvili in a trilogy bout that puts Yan’s bantamweight belt on the line.
Sherdog’s read on the numbers was that both title fights at the top of the UFC’s upcoming Abu Dhabi card project as close contests. That tracks. A pick’em in a title fight means the people setting the line looked at both guys and couldn’t find a reason to charge you more for one of them.
The UFC has been leaning into Yan’s status as champion in the buildup. The promotion posted a throwback to the night he first became undisputed champion and framed the Abu Dhabi fight as his title defense against Dvalishvili. This is the third time these two will share the cage, and that kind of familiarity tends to tighten a line.
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Volkanovski has spent fight week chatter talking about age, which is never what a bettor wants to hear from the guy he’s backing. He said he has eased off his training load a bit as he’s gotten older, though he insisted the hard work is still happening.
“I’m still doing them same fight simulators and very, very hard sessions. The intensity’s there, but we have to pull back a little bit. I can’t do what I was doing 5, 6 years ago,” Volkanovski said, in comments shared on X by Dovy.
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He’s also already talking about what comes after. On the Who The Fook podcast, Volkanovski floated a lightweight title superfight with Justin Gaethje. “Let’s do a superfight, lightweight title on the line and then we can both [retire],” he said, per Championship Rounds. Meanwhile, Sportsbet labeled him a movie star on X, and Volkanovski answered with a string of laughing emojis.
Evloev, for his part, says the scale is the least of his worries. He told the UFC’s Paramount broadcast that he gets through a 26-pound cut without touching a sauna. “I even don’t use the sauna to cut weight. So I just do diet a little longer before weigh in and I’m a good,” Evloev said, adding that he doesn’t think about tiramisu too much. I believe him on the diet. Nobody talks about tiramisu unprompted unless they’ve been thinking about it.
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My quick take: a dead-even opener is where the fun starts, because the first sharp money to hit this line will tell us more than any press conference. One fighter just told the world he can’t train the way he did five or six years ago and is already pitching a retirement superfight at a different weight class. The other is talking about clean cuts and discipline. If I’m hunting for the side that moves, I’m watching Evloev, and I’m not touching the Volkanovski side at even money until I see which way the number goes. Yan as the favorite in a third fight is a bookmaker paying respect to the belt, and I’ll want to see a real price before I take a swing at Dvalishvili.
