Tanner Boser says controversial judging has changed the way he fights, and he is taking that mindset into UFC Edmonton on Saturday. Speaking on Wednesday at UFC Edmonton media day, the 22-11-1 heavyweight said he is now far more intentionally violent because he does not trust judges to always get it right.
That matters now because Boser is not talking about theory. He is heading into a fight in Edmonton after saying he has already lived through both kinds of losses: the kind he accepts and the kind he believes were flat-out wrong. He said he has lost a couple of fights fair and square and a couple of absolute bullsh*t decisions, and that experience has made him more willing to leave the outcome in the cage rather than in someone else’s hands.
Boser was blunt about what that looks like. He said he would rather go out on his shield than lose because judges do not care, and that points only matter if the judges are paying attention. His answer, in his words, is to go there looking to kill, even if he also accepts that two world class fighters may need more than 15 minutes to truly settle it inside the ruleset.
He did not pretend the system is broken beyond repair. Boser said most fights are scored right, but he also said the mistakes can matter in a very personal way, including the kind of decision where his mom at home knows who won while the officials do not. He said five judges might help, but he was not sure, and admitted he does not know how to fix the problem. That uncertainty is part of the frustration: he believes the sport usually gets it right, but when it gets it wrong, it can change a fighter’s life.
The criticism also fits Boser’s own path. He is on his second UFC run, and his first included a brief move to light heavyweight before it ended after a win. He has said the questionable losses from that stretch taught him to be more deliberate about violence, not less. In his view, if there is any lesson to take from MMA judging, it is that a fighter cannot count on the scorecards to protect him when the rounds are close and the interpretation is not.
For Saturday, that means Boser is likely to enter UFC Edmonton with a clear plan and no appetite for leaving anything to the judges if he can avoid it. The bigger question is not whether he trusts the scorecards. It is whether the sport can keep asking fighters to build their careers around a system they can respect but never fully trust.
