“Lucia Szabova introduces herself with a debut finish in RD3!” the UFC wrote on X on Saturday, minutes after the Slovak bantamweight put away Tainara Lisboa in the opening bout of UFC Vegas 123.
That’s a loud way to say hello. Szabova was handed the first slot on the Halloween card, the fight nobody plans their evening around, and she turned it into the one people were clipping. UFC Brasil had billed the matchup a day earlier as the night’s opener, Szabova against the Brazilian Lisboa. By the time it ended, the promotion’s Portuguese-language account confirmed the result in a single line: a technical knockout win for Szabova.
It wasn’t a quick blitz, either. Before the finish, the UFC posted a clip captioned “Saved by the bell,” noting Szabova was applying heavy pressure, which tells you Lisboa had already been in serious trouble and survived to the horn once. Szabova kept coming and closed it out in Round 3. Boxing News described the finish as violent in its headline, and the bonus committee apparently agreed.
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The payday
When the card wrapped, the UFC announced four Performance of the Night winners: Tom Nolan, Julian Erosa, Joe Kropschot and Szabova. “They came to collect money,” the promotion wrote on X. Grabbing a bonus in your debut, from the first fight of the night, with a full card’s worth of finishes still to come behind you, is a real accomplishment. Those first-fight performances get forgotten fast unless they’re nasty enough to stick in someone’s memory, and hers was.
Who she is
Szabova fights out of Hanuman Gym Bratislava in Slovakia, a gym that rarely shows up in UFC broadcast graphics. That’s exactly the kind of story worth paying attention to. The win keeps her record perfect at 11-0, according to Cagefile data, and she sits at No. 10 in the Knockout Daily women’s bantamweight rankings.
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Undefeated through 11 is a résumé, and a third-round stoppage says more than a first-minute flurry would have. It shows she can push a pace for two-plus rounds and still have enough left to finish a fighter who’d already been rescued by the bell once.
No next opponent has been announced. On this evidence, though, the UFC should be in no hurry to bury her on another opener. Give her a ranked name and a later slot, and find out what an 11-0 finisher from Bratislava does when the arena is actually full.
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