RIZIN 54 results: Sato upsets Patchy Mix, Akimoto beats Koike

Eight finishes in ten fights, a 20 year old cleaning out the featherweight division one legend at a time, and the co-feature result that should worry everybody who still calls Patchy Mix a top ten bantamweight. RIZIN 54 at Toyota Arena Tokyo was a very good Tuesday afternoon of violence, and the two fights at the top of the card both went the distance and still managed to tell us more than the eight knockouts and chokes underneath them.

Photo: Roger Gor / CC BY 3.0

In the main event, Kyoma Akimoto outpointed Kleber Koike Erbst over three rounds, unanimous cards, no drama at the scorers' table. In my preview I picked Akimoto by second-round TKO, so half credit: right winner, wrong ending. Koike did what Koike does, hunted the scramble and the neck for fifteen minutes, and Akimoto simply refused to be in the room when the trap closed. That is now six straight wins for a man born in March 2006. He is 13-1. He beat Patchy Mix with punches and soccer kicks in March and he just took a clean decision off a 46 fight veteran with 36 wins. RIZIN does not have a featherweight left who obviously beats him, and I do not say that lightly about a fighter who cannot legally rent a car in the country where UFC 330 is happening this weekend.

Koike falls to 36-10-1, and there is no shame in the loss itself. The trouble is the pattern: he has now dropped three of his last five, and the two wins in that stretch came on the cards against Vugar Karamov and Chihiro Suzuki. The submission threat is still real, nobody grabbed a neck on this card the way Koike can, but the fights where opponents simply walk him down and out-land him are stacking up.

On to the rest of the show:

• Shoko Sato beat Patchy Mix, and the market saw it coming. Sato took a unanimous decision off Mix in a fight our odds tracker had at -313 for Mix when I wrote the preview on Monday. By the walkouts the consensus had collapsed to -165, with Sato in from +225 to +93. Somebody knew something, or more precisely, everybody slowly admitted the same thing: a 38 year old in his 58th professional fight was the more reliable athlete in the cage than the former Bellator bantamweight champion. I picked Mix by decision and wrote that I did not feel good about it. I was right not to. Mix has now lost four in a row, Mario Bautista, Jakub Wiklacz, Kyoma Akimoto, Shoko Sato, and the first two of those were competitive decisions in the UFC while the last two were RIZIN fights he was favored to win, at -379 against Akimoto in March and -165 here by close. Fighters get better, fighters get worse, and sometimes the sport just tells you where a man is now and everyone refuses to listen because the tape from 2023 was so good. Sato, meanwhile, is 39-17-2 and has won four of five. Give the old man a ranked opponent, he has earned it.
• Tsuyoshi Sudario did what a favorite priced beyond -600 is supposed to do. Sudario stopped Ryo Sakai with a soccer kick and punches at 4:26 of the first. The biggest favorite on the card produced the least surprising result of the card, and heavyweight chalk that actually cashes is rarer than it should be.
• King Edokpolo needed 47 seconds of round two. A knee ended Mikio Ueda's night, Edokpolo's second stoppage of Japanese heavyweight opposition in two years by our records, and RIZIN should stop feeding him locals and give him Sudario. That fight books itself after tonight.
• Yuki Ito is quietly a problem at flyweight. Knees to the body put Alibek Gadzhammatov away at 3:50 of the second. Body work as a finishing weapon is the mark of a fighter who plans in rounds, not exchanges.
• The prelims were a highlight reel. Koji Takeda tapped Kazumasa Majima with a triangle armbar at 4:58 of round one. Joji Goto, an underdog at around +140, choked Azizbek Temirov out at 3:41. Joe Hiramoto needed 96 seconds. Naoki Tanaka won by doctor stoppage in the second against Issa Hosokawa. And Kaiwen Li, another underdog at roughly +140, flattened Arata Mizuno with punches 33 seconds before the end of the first. Five prelims, five finishes, two upsets. Whatever RIZIN is paying its matchmakers, round it up.

The bigger picture from Tokyo is generational and a little cruel. The two most accomplished imports on the card, Mix and Koike, went 0-2 against Japanese opposition with a combined age of 58, one of whom is 20 and one of whom is 38. The pipeline works in both directions now.

Akimoto against the winner of anything at featherweight is the fight to make, and if RIZIN wants to sell a stadium show on New Year's Eve, Akimoto against Mikuru Asakura sells itself. As for Mix, the kindest booking is time off and a rebuild fight, and he deserves the kindness. Four straight losses is a fact. It is not an obituary until he agrees it is.

Full results, scorecards where they exist, and the fight-by-fight breakdown are on our RIZIN 54 event page. The next big one on the calendar is UFC 330 this Saturday, and we will have plenty to say about it before the cage door closes.