ONE Friday Fights 170 Went to Split Decision Four Times

Twelve fights reached a scorecard or a stoppage at Lumpinee Stadium on September 11, and the judges could not agree on four of them.

ONE Friday Fights 170 closed its main card with a clean unanimous nod for Pompet PongSuphan PK over Yodlekpet Or Atchariya, a flyweight fight that went the full three rounds without a single dissenting scorecard. That was the exception on this show, not the rule. Two other bouts on the card, Kongchai Chanaidonmueang against Sandro Bosi and PTT Apichart Farm against Hamza Rachid, fell out before fight night and were marked cancelled, leaving twelve completed fights. Eleven of those twelve went the distance to a decision. Four of the eleven, better than a third of every decision handed out that night, came back split.

That is not a rounding error. It is more than double what this exact show, by its own history, normally produces.

The four the judges split on

Break the card down by weight class and the strawweight bouts were the worst of it. Four strawweight fights went to a decision on 170, and two of the four, exactly half, came back split. The bantamweight and flyweight brackets each produced one split out of three or four decisions apiece. Every one of the four fights that split went the full three rounds, and every one produced a genuine two judges to one card, not a majority draw-adjacent result. Three separate panels of officials watched the same fights the rest of the room watched and came away seeing two different winners.

Is this normal for the show

ONE Championship has run 170 completed editions of Friday Fights since the series began on January 20, 2023. Across all of them, 1,045 fights have gone to the judges, and 196 came back split, 18.8 percent. That is the promotion's own long-run baseline for this exact card format, week after week, at the exact venue where 170 was staged.

Zoom in tighter and the picture holds. In the fourteen Friday Fights cards immediately before this one, running from May 29 through September 4, 110 fights went to a decision and 23 of them split, 20.9 percent, essentially in line with the series average. Friday Fights 170 posted a 36.4 percent split rate on its decisions. That is not a subtle deviation from the baseline. It is close to double the rate the same show produced across the preceding three and a half months.

For an outside benchmark, split decisions accounted for 863 of 4,301 completed UFC decisions in our database, 20.1 percent, essentially the same number as ONE Friday Fights' own long-run average. Whatever explains four splits out of eleven decisions on September 11 is not a case of Muay Thai judging simply running hotter than MMA judging as a rule. The promotion's week-to-week numbers and the UFC's sit within a point of each other. Something specific happened at Lumpinee that night, not something structural to how the sport is scored everywhere, every week.

To be fair to the judges, this is not the single worst split rate the show has posted recently. Friday Fights 160, on June 26, saw five of nine decisions go split, 55.6 percent, the highest share in the fourteen-card sample examined here. So 170 is not unprecedented. It is, however, the second time in fifteen weeks that the scorecards at a Friday Fights show have broken down this badly, and the second time is the one that turns a bad night into a pattern worth tracking.

The home cooking theory doesn't survive contact with the card

The easy read on a night full of split decisions at ONE's home stadium in Bangkok is some version of hometown scoring. It does not hold up cleanly against these four fights.

Three of the four split verdicts did go to fighters with ties to Thailand or the region: Thway Lin Htet of Myanmar over Xavier Gonzalez of Spain, Ferrari Fairtex of Thailand over Julio Lobo of Brazil, and Yonis Anane, who fights out of France and Thailand, over Ricardo Sanchez of Mexico. But the fourth split cuts directly against that theory. Jurai Ishii of Japan got the nod over Maisangngern Sor Yingcharoenkarnchang, a Thai fighter, on the same card, in the same building, in front of the same crowd. If the judges at Lumpinee were simply defaulting to the local name, that fight should have gone the other way too. It didn't.

What is left, once the simplest explanation is ruled out, is a scoring process that produced inconsistent readings across an entire card rather than a single, explainable thumb on the scale. That is a harder problem to fix than a biased judge, because there is no one name to point at.

Nobody outside Lumpinee knows who scored these

For UFC cards, and for the other organizations covered by our judges database, UFCalendar can tell a fan exactly which official scored which round and by how much, receipts that let a bad night follow a specific name into the next assignment. ONE Championship does not publish that breakdown for its Muay Thai judges, and no one in the industry currently compiles it the way MMA's scorecards are compiled. So the three panels of officials who split four fights on September 11 stay exactly as anonymous tonight as they were before the show started.

The eight fighters who heard a split decision read for or against them at Lumpinee don't get that same anonymity. Their record updates either way.