The boxing scoring system explained, and why judges disagree

Three people sit at ringside with the same view of the same twelve rounds, and at the final bell they hand in three different results. Nobody has cheated. Nothing has malfunctioned. The boxing scoring system is built in a way that makes this outcome not merely possible but ordinary, and the argument that erupts after every close fight is the system doing exactly what its structure requires rather than the system breaking.

That is the part almost nobody explains. Boxing decisions are discussed as though a controversial card is a scandal, an isolated failure of one official on one night. Sometimes it is. Far more often it is arithmetic. The scoring method compresses an enormous range of outcomes into a very small number of possible scores, then forbids the judges from thinking about the fight as a whole, then seats them in three different places, then adds them up.

Understand the mechanism and you stop being surprised. You also, usefully, get much better at predicting what the cards will say before they are read out.

What the ten point must system actually demands

Professional boxing is scored round by round on the ten point must system, and the word doing all the work in that phrase is must.

It means the judge has no discretion about the winner's score. The boxer who wins the round receives ten points. Not nine, not eleven, not eight for a narrow round and ten for a wide one. Ten. Every round, every time, unless the round is even.

The only genuine decision a judge makes about the number is what to give the loser of the round. Nine is the default. Eight appears when the round contained a knockdown or was so one sided that a single point cannot express it. Seven appears when both of those things happen at once, or when a knockdown is combined with a point deduction. Below seven is theoretically available and effectively never used, because a round that bad has usually been stopped.

This was not always the arrangement. Older systems let judges score by rounds won, or by points accumulated for scoring blows, or on a five point scale with fractions. The ten point must was adopted because it is simple, it produces a clean total, and it prevents a judge quietly rewarding one boxer with a wider margin in every round.

What it also does, and this is the source of most of the trouble, is throw away information.

• 10Points awarded to the winner of a round
• 3Judges scoring a professional bout
• 12Rounds in a modern world title fight
• 3Judges who must favour one boxer for a unanimous decision

A round in which one boxer lands two more jabs than the other and a round in which one boxer batters the other from bell to bell without quite dropping him are both, on a great many cards, 10-9. The system has one setting for "won" and one for "won heavily", and the gap between them is enormous. Everything inside that gap is invisible by the time the cards are added.

That compression is deliberate. It stops a judge scoring a fight 120-108 out of enthusiasm. It also means a boxer gets no credit at all for the difference between edging a round and dominating it, which is the single most consequential design choice in the sport.

The four criteria, and the order they sit in

Judges are not asked for their opinion of who looked better. They are given four criteria and told to apply them in priority order. The order is not decoration. It determines which of them ever gets used.

Clean punching comes first, and in most rounds it finishes the job on its own. A clean punch is one that lands with the knuckle part of the glove on the front or side of the head or on the body above the belt, delivered with force, not blocked by a glove or an arm, and not merely brushing past. Two things follow that people consistently get wrong. Volume is not the criterion; clean landing is. And a punch that is caught on the gloves has not landed at all, however loud it sounded from the seventh row.

Effective aggression comes second. Note the adjective. Walking forward is not aggression in the scoring sense. Walking forward while landing is. A boxer who marches into a jab for three minutes has been aggressive and ineffective, and the criterion explicitly refuses to reward him for the marching. This is the criterion most often misapplied by crowds, because forward movement is legible from any seat and clean landing is not.

Ring generalship comes third, and it is the vaguest thing in the rulebook. It means control: who is dictating where the fight happens, at what range, at what pace, and who is being made to fight the other man's fight. A boxer who fights on the back foot all night and makes his opponent lunge is exercising ring generalship. So is a boxer who cuts the ring off and forces exchanges. It is a criterion about imposition, and two competent officials can watch the same round and disagree entirely about who imposed.

Defence comes last. Slips, blocks, distance, the shots that were not landed. It is the least used criterion for a straightforward reason: it only decides a round when the first three have failed to separate the boxers, and by the time you are down to defence you are already in a round nobody is going to agree about.

The priority order is the mechanism that keeps the four criteria from becoming a free-for-all. It is also where the conflict lives. A round in which one boxer lands the cleaner shots while retreating and the other pushes him to the ropes and lands less has clean punching pointing one way and aggression and generalship pointing the other. The rules say clean punching wins that argument. Judges are human, they are watching from the seat they were assigned, and the boxer coming forward is easier to see.

What 10-9, 10-8, 10-7 and 10-10 each signal

Every score in the professional system carries a specific meaning, and reading a card properly means reading those meanings rather than the totals.

10-9 is the ordinary round. It says one boxer did more than the other and nothing decisive occurred. It covers a range so wide it is almost comic: the round won by a hair and the round won convincingly are both 10-9, and the card records them identically.

10-8 is the round with a knockdown in it, and it is also, under modern guidance in most jurisdictions, available without a knockdown when a boxer has been thoroughly dominated for three minutes. That second route is used sparingly and inconsistently, which is itself a source of disagreement. Two judges watching the same battering can hand in 10-9 and 10-8 and both be within the rules.

10-7 requires accumulation. Two knockdowns in a round, or a knockdown plus a point deduction against the boxer who was dropped, or in rare cases a period of dominance so complete that a judge reaches for it without a knockdown at all. It is uncommon enough that seeing one on a card tells you something real happened.

10-10 is the even round, and it is the score most disliked by the people who supervise judges. Commissions and sanctioning bodies routinely instruct officials to find a winner in every round on the basis that someone almost always did marginally more. A judge who scores three rounds even in a twelve round fight will be asked about it. The score exists, it is legal, and using it is treated as an admission that you could not tell.

There is a practical reason for the discouragement. Even rounds create draws, and draws are commercially and competitively unsatisfying. A system that leans on its officials to break every tie produces fewer draws and more arguments, and the sport has decided it prefers arguments.

Knockdowns and deductions are different events that reach the card the same way

A knockdown is a ruling, and it is not the judges' ruling. The referee decides whether a boxer went down from a punch, from a slip, from a push, or from a combination of the three. If the referee calls it a slip, no knockdown occurred, and the judges must score the round as though the boxer never touched the canvas. If the referee begins a count, a knockdown occurred, and the judges are expected to reflect it.

The definition is broader than people assume. A boxer is down when any part of his body other than his feet touches the canvas as a result of a blow. He is also down, in most jurisdictions, when he is held up by the ropes and would otherwise have fallen, and when he is hanging over the ropes helpless. Some jurisdictions permit a standing count where the referee judges a boxer to be temporarily unable to continue without having gone down. Where the standing count exists, it scores as a knockdown.

A point deduction is a different animal entirely. It is a penalty for a foul, it is imposed by the referee, and it is applied to the score after the judges have decided the round.

That last part is the piece most viewers have never had explained. The judge scores the round on merit, then subtracts. A round the judge scored 10-9 becomes 9-9 if the winner of the round is deducted a point, and 10-8 if the loser of the round is deducted one. A round scored 10-8 for a knockdown becomes 10-7 if the boxer who was dropped also loses a point for a foul.

This is why deductions matter so much more than their size suggests. One point is one twelfth of the margin in a fight decided by a single round, and a deduction is worth exactly the same as a knockdown in card terms. A low blow in the ninth can cost a boxer a world title as surely as a right hand can.

1. 1The bell soundsThree judges begin watching from three fixed positions on three different sides of the ring. None of them may confer, then or later, and none of them can see what the other two are writing.
2. 2Each judge weighs the four criteria in orderClean punching first, effective aggression second, ring generalship third, defence last. Later criteria only come into play when the earlier ones have not separated the boxers.
3. 3The referee rules on anything that happenedWhether a fall was a knockdown or a slip, and whether a foul warrants a warning or a deduction. Judges do not make either ruling; they receive it.
4. 4The judge fixes the winner's score at 10This part is not a decision. The winner of the round gets ten points, and the only remaining question is what the loser gets.
5. 5The judge sets the loser's scoreNine in an ordinary round. Eight where there was a knockdown or sustained one sided dominance. Seven where both applied.
6. 6Any deduction is applied to the round just scoredA point taken by the referee is subtracted after the merit score is set, which is how 10-9 becomes 9-9 and how 10-8 becomes 10-7.
7. 7The card is collected between roundsAn inspector takes each judge's slip to the commission's official at ringside. The score for that round is now fixed and cannot be revisited at the end of the fight.
8. 8Totals are added and checked at the final bellThe commission adds each card independently, verifies the arithmetic, and passes the three totals to the announcer. Nobody compares the cards for sense before they are read out.

The sequence is the same in every professional jurisdiction. Which official does what, and when, is the part that determines how little any of them can be revised afterwards.

Why judges score each round in isolation, and what that does to a fight

Here is the structural heart of the whole business, and the thing that explains more disputed decisions than corruption, incompetence and bad seats combined.

A judge is required to score each round as a self-contained event. Round seven is scored on what happened in round seven. The judge is not permitted to carry anything forward, not momentum, not damage, not the sense that one boxer has been controlling the fight since the second round. Each round is a fresh three minute contest with a fresh winner, and the fight is the sum of twelve unconnected verdicts.

The reasoning is sound. A judge who scores holistically is a judge who has decided who is winning and then finds reasons in each round to support that decision, which is how a boxer builds an unbeatable lead by looking impressive early. Round by round independence is a defence against exactly that bias.

The cost is severe, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion.

Because the winner's score is fixed at ten, dominance inside a round is nearly worthless. Winning a round by a mile scores the same as winning it by a whisker. So a boxer who is genuinely better in three rounds and marginally worse in nine loses on every card, and there is no mechanism anywhere in the system that can register that he might have been the better fighter.

Consider a constructed example, invented for the arithmetic rather than drawn from any real bout. Boxer A knocks Boxer B down in the first, the fifth and the ninth, taking those three rounds 10-8. Boxer B does enough to edge the other nine rounds, taking each of them 10-9.

Boxer A: thirty points from three dominant rounds, eighty one from nine losing rounds. One hundred and eleven. Boxer B: twenty four points from three rounds in which he was floored, ninety from nine rounds he won narrowly. One hundred and fourteen.

Boxer B wins by three points having been knocked down three times.

• Boxer A
• Boxer B

A constructed example, not a real bout. Boxer A takes rounds 1, 5 and 9 by 10-8 with a knockdown in each. Boxer B edges the other nine rounds 10-9. The lines cross five times and the man who was floored three times wins.

Show the numbers

Invented fight one, running totals after each round

Item	Boxer A	Boxer B
R1	10	8
R2	19	18
R3	28	28
R4	37	38
R5	47	46
R6	56	56
R7	65	66
R8	74	76
R9	84	84
R10	93	94
R11	102	104
R12	111	114

Nothing here is a mistake. Every round was scored correctly under the rules. The system has simply been asked a question it is not built to answer, which is who was the better fighter over thirty six minutes, and it has answered a different question, which is who won more three minute segments.

Shift one round and the result inverts. Had Boxer A taken a fourth round by 10-8 and lost the remaining eight, the totals would be one hundred and twelve each and the fight a draw. One round, in a fight where the pattern was identical, moves the outcome from a clear loss to a share.

This is the reason boxers are taught to steal rounds. A flurry in the last twenty seconds of a round that was otherwise even is worth a full point, and a full point is worth exactly as much as three minutes of superiority. The tactic is not cynical. It is the only rational response to a scoring system that pays a flat rate for winning regardless of margin. Compare that with a sport where the scoring is a published formula and the outcome is checkable to the decimal point, the way tennis rankings are calculated from tournament results that leave no room for interpretation. Boxing has judgement at the level of every individual round, and the judgement is not required to be explained.

Referee point deductions, and the route from foul to card

The referee's authority over fouls is broad and almost entirely discretionary, which surprises people who expect a tariff.

The usual sequence runs: an instruction, then a warning, then a deduction. An instruction is quiet and off the record. A warning is formal, given with the action stopped, and the referee is expected to indicate it clearly so the judges register it. A deduction is announced to the judges, who are shown by hand signal or told directly which boxer loses a point.

Nothing obliges the referee to move through those stages in order. A deliberate and serious foul can cost a point immediately with no prior warning. A repeated minor foul may draw three warnings and no deduction at all, if the referee judges it accidental. Two referees officiating identical fights would produce different numbers of deductions, and both would be within their authority.

The fouls that generate most deductions are the ordinary ones: hitting below the belt, holding, hitting behind the head, pushing off, leading with the head, and hitting after the break. Each is a judgement about intent as much as about contact, and intent is precisely the thing that cannot be verified from the outside.

Boxing has no review mechanism for any of this. A referee who deducts a point for a punch that was in fact legal has made a decision that stands, and the point is gone. The contrast with a sport that built a whole apparatus for second-guessing its officials is instructive; football's decision to introduce video review of refereeing calls came from the same complaint boxing has never resolved, which is that a single official's real-time judgement decides outcomes worth a great deal of money. Boxing looked at the same problem and kept the human. A handful of commissions permit instant replay for a narrow set of questions, principally whether a stoppage followed a legal punch or an accidental headbutt, but nothing in the mainstream professional game allows a scoring decision or a routine deduction to be reviewed.

Unanimous, split, majority, and how a draw actually happens

Three cards produce more possible outcomes than most viewers realise, and the names for them are precise.

A unanimous decision is all three judges scoring for the same boxer. The totals can be miles apart. Two judges seeing a wide fight and one seeing a razor thin one still produces a unanimous decision, which is why the word implies far less agreement than it sounds like.

A split decision is two judges for one boxer and the third for the other. Nobody has scored the bout even. It is the outcome that produces the most noise, because one official has openly disagreed with the other two.

A majority decision is two judges for one boxer and the third scoring it even. The winner has two cards, and crucially nobody has scored against him. A majority decision is a narrower result than a unanimous one and a cleaner one than a split.

Draws come in three shapes and the distinctions matter.

A unanimous draw is all three cards even. It is very rare, because three officials independently arriving at the same tie in a twelve round fight requires either a genuinely balanced contest or a great deal of coincidence.

A majority draw is two judges scoring the bout even and the third scoring a winner. Two cards say nobody won, so nobody does.

A split draw is the one that confuses everybody: one judge for each boxer, and the third even. No boxer has two cards, so the result is a draw, and both fighters walk away convinced they won it on the strength of the judge who agreed with them.

• Boxer A
• Boxer B

Judge one115113

Judge two113115

Judge three114114

A constructed set of cards illustrating a split draw. Judge one has Boxer A ahead by two rounds, judge two has Boxer B ahead by two, judge three has it level at six rounds each. No boxer holds two cards, so the bout is drawn.

Show the numbers

Invented fight two, one bout as seen by three judges

Item	Boxer A	Boxer B
Judge one	115	113
Judge two	113	115
Judge three	114	114

The arithmetic behind those cards is worth spelling out, because it shows how little separates the three officials. A card of 115-113 with no knockdowns and no deductions means the judge gave one boxer seven rounds and the other five. A card of 114-114 means six rounds each. Across twelve rounds, judge one and judge three disagreed about a single round, and judge two disagreed with judge one about two. Three officials who were within one or two rounds of each other have produced a draw in a fight that two of them thought had a winner.

That is not incompetence. It is what happens when twelve independent close calls are made by three people and the margin of the whole contest is one call wide.

A technical decision is the other category, and it applies when a bout is stopped early through an accidental foul, most commonly a clash of heads that opens a cut a boxer cannot continue with. Past a threshold round set by the jurisdiction, usually the fourth, the judges' cards are totalled as they stand and a winner is declared on the incomplete fight. Before that threshold the bout is generally a technical draw or a no contest, on the basis that too little has happened to score. A technical decision can therefore turn on which round the heads clashed in, and a boxer who is behind has a genuine incentive to keep going and a boxer who is ahead has a genuine incentive to point at his eyebrow.

Open scoring against blind scoring, and the case each way

Most professional boxing is scored blind. Nobody outside the commission's table knows the running totals until the final bell, and the cards are read out in an order calculated to maximise the drama.

Some jurisdictions and some sanctioning bodies have experimented with open scoring, where the totals after a set number of rounds are announced to the arena and to both corners. The arguments on each side are better than their proponents usually make them.

For open scoring. A boxer who is losing has a right to know he is losing. The alternative is a fighter coasting through the last four rounds of a contest he has already lost, because his corner has guessed wrong, and then discovering at the final bell that a knockout was the only route and nobody told him. Open scoring also strips away the suspicion that surrounds a surprising card, because a judge who has publicly declared a wide lead after eight rounds cannot quietly produce a narrow total at the end. It makes the officials accountable in real time rather than after the event, when accountability is worth nothing.

Against open scoring. A boxer with a commanding lead announced to the building has been given a reason to stop taking risks, and the last third of the fight becomes a man on a bicycle. Boxing sells jeopardy, and open scoring removes it at exactly the point where it is most valuable. There is also a subtler objection: announcing the totals mid-fight invites the crowd to react to them, and a judge who has heard eighteen thousand people boo his card in the eighth round is a judge under pressure in the ninth.

The compromise most often floated is announcing scores only to the corners rather than to the arena, which preserves the information for the people who need it and withholds the spectacle. It is used rarely, and it has never displaced blind scoring in the sport's major markets.

Three judges, three seats, three genuinely different fights

The structural problem sits underneath everything above, and it is not really about the rules at all.

Judges are positioned on separate sides of the ring, at ringside, roughly at canvas level. This is not a good vantage point. It is a low, flat angle into a raised platform in which two people are constantly moving and frequently obscuring each other. A judge on the red side spends part of the fight looking at one boxer's back. A judge on the blue side spends that same part of the fight with a clear view of the punches the first judge could not see.

Those two officials have watched different fights. Not metaphorically. Literally different sets of visible events, in a sport where the criterion that ranks first is whether a punch landed cleanly, which is precisely the thing an obstructed angle destroys.

Rotating the seats would not fix it, because the obstruction moves with the boxers rather than with the seat. Adding cameras would help, and boxing has broadly declined to add them for scoring purposes. The consequence is that a certain amount of disagreement between three judges is not error at all. It is three honest reports of three different observations, and no amount of training removes it.

Sitting on top of that is the appointments question. Judges for a championship bout are approved or assigned by the sanctioning body whose belt is at stake, working alongside the local commission, and the sanctioning body is funded by fees paid out of the purses of the fighters contesting its title. Nobody needs to allege anything improper for that to be a structural problem. An official whose future assignments depend on an organisation with a commercial interest in the outcome is in a position no other major sport would accept for its referees. The way the belts are awarded, ranked and monetised is a whole system in its own right, and the scoring sits inside it rather than beside it.

The final piece is that there is almost no accountability mechanism. Judges are not required to publish reasoning. Cards are released as totals, sometimes round by round, rarely with any explanation. Appeals against a decision exist in theory in some jurisdictions and succeed almost never, because overturning a result requires proving something more than that the reviewers would have scored it differently. A bad card carries no consequence that the public can observe.

Why aggression and ring generalship produce the widest disagreement

If you compare cards that diverge sharply, the divergence almost always sits in the middle two criteria rather than the first or the last.

Clean punching is contestable but bounded. Two judges may count differently, but they are counting the same kind of thing, and a punch either landed flush or it did not. Defence is used so rarely that it seldom moves a card.

Effective aggression and ring generalship are different in kind. Both require a judgement about who is imposing on whom, and imposition is a story rather than an observation. A boxer backing up while landing counters is either exercising superb ring generalship by making his opponent miss and pay, or he is being walked down and forced to fight off the back foot. Both readings describe the same three minutes. Both are defensible. The rulebook does not resolve them, because it cannot: the criterion is written in language that assumes a competent official will know control when he sees it, and control is not a physical event.

This is why the two most common categories of disputed decision look so different from each other. One is the pressure fighter who is given rounds by judges reading his forward movement as effective aggression while a boxer picks him off. The other is the slick counterpuncher who is given rounds by judges reading his control of range as ring generalship while an opponent lands the heavier work. Both readings can be produced from the identical footage, and the criteria as written give a judge cover for either.

Combat sports have tried to write it more tightly elsewhere. The unified rules used in mixed martial arts spell out damage, striking, grappling and control in a hierarchy that is far more prescriptive than boxing's four criteria, and the effort to define how MMA judges are meant to weigh those elements is a direct response to the same complaint. Tighter definitions have reduced neither the volume nor the heat of the disagreement. That is worth knowing before proposing that boxing simply write better criteria.

The amateur and Olympic system is a different sport with the same words

Amateur boxing now uses a ten point must system as well, which has caused a lot of confusion, because using the same numbers does not make it the same method.

The older amateur system counted scoring blows. Judges pressed buttons, a blow registered when enough of them pressed within a short window, and the winner was the boxer with more registered blows. It rewarded fast, light, high-volume punching, it punished body work almost entirely, and it produced a style of boxing that looked nothing like the professional game. It was abandoned because it measured the wrong thing precisely rather than the right thing approximately.

The replacement scores rounds on the ten point must, but the criteria are written differently. Amateur judging weighs the number of quality blows landed on target, technical and tactical superiority, and competitiveness, with infringements affecting the score. Domination is explicitly a criterion in its own right rather than something read into a knockdown, and judges are instructed to distribute rounds across the range rather than defaulting to 10-9.

Three structural differences matter more than the criteria.

Amateur bouts are short, at three rounds rather than ten or twelve, so a single round is a third of the fight rather than a twelfth. There is no room for the slow accumulation the professional system rewards, and no possibility of stealing a fight in the championship rounds.

Championship panels are larger than three, and the technical rules provide for only a subset of the judges' cards to count, selected after the bout rather than before. The intention is to make it impossible for a single compromised official to know in advance that his card will decide anything.

And the amateur game keeps a much shorter leash on stoppages and standing counts, which changes the risk calculus entirely. A professional trailing on the cards can gamble on the last three rounds. An amateur trailing after round one has one round to change the fight before it is effectively decided.

The two systems produce different fighters, which is the clearest evidence that scoring shapes the sport rather than merely recording it. Everything from tempo to guard position to whether a body attack is worth investing in follows from what the judges are counting.

What a corner actually knows about the cards, and what it does with the information

In a blind-scored fight, the corner knows nothing official. That is worth sitting with, because it makes the most important tactical decision in boxing a decision taken without the key piece of information.

What a corner has instead is an estimate. Most serious teams have somebody scoring the fight independently, often more than one person, sometimes with the trainer keeping his own count between rounds. Broadcasters run unofficial scorers whose cards are visible on screen and are frequently wrong. Experienced trainers develop a feel for which way the officials are leaning based on how the crowd is reacting and how the referee is behaving, which is guesswork with confidence attached.

The instruction that comes out of that estimate is the whole job. "You need this round" is a different fight plan from "stay behind the jab and get home". A corner that believes its fighter is two rounds up will tell him to box, hold the centre, and take nothing on. A corner that believes he is four rounds down will tell him to walk through something in order to land something, and that instruction gets fighters hurt.

Get the estimate wrong and the consequences are permanent. A corner that thinks its man is winning when the officials have him losing will spend the last three rounds protecting a lead that does not exist. Fighters lose titles that way with a full tank of energy and no marks on their face.

The estimate also has to account for the trainer's own bias, which is substantial and unavoidable. Everybody in a corner has watched their fighter train for twelve weeks. They know what he was trying to do, so they see him doing it. Judges have no such context and score what actually landed. A corner that scores its own fighter honestly is doing something genuinely difficult, and the good ones deliberately ask somebody with no emotional stake to keep the card.

There is a version of this that runs across a career rather than a night. A run of narrow losses on the cards changes what a fighter is offered next, because matchmakers read decisions as evidence about level even when the decisions were arguable. The way opponents are selected and how a record is built around them is a business decision as much as a sporting one, and three close cards going the wrong way can reroute a career that a single knockout would have made.

The other thing a corner is quietly managing is the fighter's condition, which has been shaped by everything that happened before the first bell. A boxer who took the weight off late tends to fade in exactly the rounds where a narrow card is decided, and the arithmetic of making a division's limit is one of the least visible influences on how the last four rounds get scored.

Scoring a round yourself, and how to argue about it properly

The useful end of all this is that you can score along, and doing it changes how you watch.

Take a piece of paper. Two columns, twelve rows. Write your score as soon as the bell goes and do not change it later, because the moment you revise round four after seeing round nine you have stopped scoring rounds and started scoring the fight, and that is precisely the habit the system is built to prevent.

Four questions, in order, and stop as soon as one of them gives you a clear answer.

Who landed more cleanly? Not who threw more, not who looked busier. Who landed flush, on the head or the body above the belt, with the knuckle part of the glove and without it being caught on an arm. If that question separates them, the round is done and the other three criteria are irrelevant.

Who was aggressive and getting somewhere with it? Only if the first question was too close. Forward movement counts for nothing on its own. Forward movement that produced clean work counts.

Who was controlling where and how the fight happened? Only if the first two failed. Who dictated range, pace and position, and who was made to fight in a way he did not choose.

Who made the other man miss? Only if you are genuinely stuck, which will be one or two rounds a night at most.

Then apply the numbers. Ten to the winner. Nine to the loser unless there was a knockdown or a period of one-sided dominance, in which case eight. Seven if a knockdown and a deduction landed on the same boxer in the same round. Then subtract any point the referee took, from whichever boxer he took it from, after you have scored the round on merit.

Add them at the end and compare with the official cards. You will find that you agree with the officials most of the time and that your disagreements cluster in the same two or three rounds every fight, which are the rounds where clean punching failed to separate the boxers and the middle criteria took over.

That is the honest position to argue from. Most of the decisions people call robberies are two or three rounds' worth of legitimate disagreement, amplified by a system that pays a flat rate for winning a round and gives you no way to record that one man won his rounds far more convincingly than the other. Some decisions genuinely are indefensible, and the way to identify those is not that you disagreed with them but that the disputed round count required to reach that card is larger than any reasonable person's margin of error.

Learn where the arithmetic bites and you will spend a great deal less time being surprised by the cards and rather more time watching what the judges are actually being asked to count. The rest of the archive on fighting and its rules sits in the combat sports section, where the same argument keeps reappearing in different gloves.