FightOdds.io hung an opening number on October 24 for a fight that doesn’t exist yet. Lightweight champion Justin Gaethje opened at -200, and featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski came back at +170. Sherdog ran the same futures board a couple of days later, with Petr Yan installed as the favorite in two potential rematches after he and Volkanovski both kept their belts at UFC 333.
I don’t have a quarrel with the Yan numbers. The Gaethje price is the one that bugs me, because it looks like it was set by somebody who watched the Topuria finish on loop and forgot to read the injury report.
What -200 actually says
Laying -200 means you put up $200 to win $100, which works out to an implied probability of 66.7%. The +170 on Volkanovski implies 37%. Add those together and you get about 103.7%, and that extra 3.7 is the house’s cut. Strip it out and the book is telling you Gaethje wins this roughly 64% of the time and Volkanovski about 36%.
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So the market thinks Gaethje wins two of every three. That’s a confident call on a fighter who, according to Heavy’s reporting, hasn’t decided whether he’s stepping back into the Octagon at all.
The hands
Gaethje’s last outing was the TKO over Ilia Topuria at UFC Freedom 250 in June, a result Heavy described as one of the biggest upsets of all time. Great night. He also hurt his hands in that fight, and per the same report he isn’t sure he wants to compete again.
I have one rule I’ve kept longer than any marriage I know of: I don’t lay short odds on a guy coming off a long layoff. We can’t even measure Gaethje’s layoff yet, because there’s no date to measure it against. Every month that ticks by between June and a booking is another month of a 38-year-old champion with banged-up hands deciding whether he still wants this. And the market wants me to pay a premium for him?
There’s a second thing going on here, and it’s the oldest story at the window. Bettors just got burned fading Gaethje against Topuria. Now they’re overcorrecting and paying full freight for the guy who burned them. That’s a hangover, and I’ve had enough of those to recognize one.
What Volkanovski brings to the table
Volkanovski is coming off a successful featherweight title defense against Movsar Evloev at UFC 333, so he’s active, he’s healthy enough to have just fought for a belt, and he’s been asking for this one by name. Heavy noted he’s brought up Gaethje several times in recent weeks and said after the Evloev win that this is the fight he wants the UFC to make.
One champion is lobbying for the booking. The other is weighing whether to keep fighting. Motivation is a soft factor, and soft factors make a numbers guy itchy. It also shows up in a fight’s opening price about as often as I show up to the gym, which is never. It’s the kind of thing oddsmakers can’t price until somebody signs a bout agreement.
The honest case for Gaethje is size. Volkanovski would be moving up to 155 to take this, and that’s a real cost against a natural lightweight. That’s why I’d stop short of calling Volkanovski the favorite. My argument is simpler: 36% is too low for him.
Age is a wash. Both men are 38, and both have talked about retirement, which is exactly why Heavy pitched it as a double retirement fight with both belts on the table. Cute idea. It also means neither guy gets an edge from the calendar.
How I’d play it
Futures on unbooked fights are a weird corner of the market, so check your book’s rules on what happens if the fight never materializes before you get cute. The UFC has an obvious alternative sitting right there in No. 1 lightweight contender Arman Tsarukyan, and Heavy argued that Volkanovski makes more sense for Gaethje as a legacy fight. I lean the same way, but “makes more sense” and “gets booked” have never been the same thing in this promotion.
If it does get made, I’d expect that +170 to shrink once there’s a date, a weigh-in and a clean bill of health on Gaethje’s hands. That’s the whole argument for grabbing the opener. You’re getting paid for the uncertainty, and right now there’s a lot of it, nearly all of it on Gaethje’s side of the ledger.
I’d put a half unit on Volkanovski at +170 and sleep fine. Laying -200 on a champion with question marks for hands and no plans to fight is the kind of ticket I used to buy, and I keep the stubs in a drawer so I never forget what they cost me.
