Information Dynamics in Boxing

Abstract

This paper is concerned with information dynamics in boxing. A world boxing title match of fly-class, Tanaka vs. Taguchi, held on March 16, 2019, at Gifu Japan has been analyzed. The defending champion, Tanaka keeps the advantage through the match, and thus the advantage increases with increasing the normalized game length (or time), except at 9th round. The certainty of game
outcome increases gradually with increasing the normalized game length until the end of the match, and then it jumps from about 0.04 to the full value of 1 at the end. Thus, this match is classified as a balanced game. It is found that Tanaka gets the safety lead against Taguchi at about 93 % of the total game length. This result reflects very clearly how this match is tightly balanced until near the end. It is inferred that if full information on both players such as ranking and/or game records are provided, history and outcome of the boxing are predictable before the match starts in terms of the proposed method of analyses.