It's been a while since I've written a rambling thoughts post. I'm still way too tired from the UFC/WEC/K-1/Pride marathon I went through to bother with a vale tudo/Pancrase/Shooto marathon, but in the meantime, here are my rambling thoughts on yesterday's K-1 MAX tournament.

• Overall, I was bored with the show, with the prelims being particularly dull. I'd advise just watching the Murthel Groenhart fights.
• Was Murthel Groenhart always so good? Before this event, his name barely registered on my radar, but he destroyed his opponents. Dude looked like a LW version of Remy with all of his flying knees, and he got 3 finishes in one night, damn. Also, how much weight does this guy cut? He made Artur Kyshenko, an already big dude at 70kg, look small.
• Yasuhiro Kido wore some awesome shorts. I don't have a picture of it, but it looked like its sides were lined with downy feathers. FEATHERS ! !
• Why of all countries does Suriname seem to produce so much kickboxing talent? Groenhart, Andy Ristie, Chris Ngimbi, Tyrone Spong, these are all some big names out of a tiny country few people have even heard of.
• Andy Souwer looked old. He still managed to beat Ristie, but he looked so shot as a fighter while doing so.
• The show had somewhat of a low-budget porn film feel. The music they played between breaks during the prelims sounded exactly like music you'd hear on a crappy porn film, and the ring girls looked like they were straight out of the 90's with the clothes they wore.
• As usual, the show reinvigorated my hatred of pro kickboxing rules. Souwer vs Ristie would've been a much more fun fight to watch if extended clinching was allowed, because that's where Ristie was really muscling around and tiring out Souwer, but nope, stupid kickboxing conventions say that clinches are 'boring.'
• Something else I became very aware of while watching the show: 3x3 rounds are fucking dumb. Like, seriously, they're dumb as fucking hell. It's just incredibly hard for fighters to accumulate much damage and fatigue their cardio when they fight for such a short period and have comparatively long breaks between rounds. Under muay Thai rules, the first two rounds are typically ties, with the latter rounds being the actual deciders, but under kickboxing rules, you don't see much dominance from either fighters until right when the fight's over. Yeah, it's under a one-night tournament format, but even having 3 fights in one night doesn't affect a fighter's cardio that much because they get so much rest in between matches.
  
  Another reason the 3x3 format is dumb is that it doesn't build up much gravitas. I'm not into boxing, but I can see why boxing fans would value 12 round wars. You get to see boxers really pushed to their limits and late-fight comebacks, but these sort of spectacles just don't exist in fights that only last 9 minutes total. I anticipate that Glory's 2x3 elimination rounds are going to lead to even more boring, unsatisfactory fights that should end in ties instead of lame point-decisions.

In completely unrelated news, I'm very strongly considering training BJJ/luta livre in Leopoldo Serao's academy. Is anybody currently training or have trained there? Also, what are some good beginner's brands for gis? I'm considering purchasing either a Bad Boy or a Fuji gi since they seem like a good balance of affordability and quality.