Denis Tiuliulin vs Jamie Pickett Prediction: the Opponents are Pretty Similar

On the night of September 11, the big mixed martial arts tournament, UFC 279, will take place in Las Vegas. In one of the preliminary rounds, Russian fighter Denis Tiuliulin will share the cage with American Jamie Pickett.

The fight will take place in the middleweight division — none of the fighters are in the top 15 of the official rankings of the pretenders. In bookmaker's betting odds, the American is the favorite.

Tiuliulin and Pickett were supposed to fight on July 9, but it was postponed due to Denis' injury.

Denis got into the UFC by accident, took a chance, and came out as a replacement in March this year and lost that fight to Aliaskhab Khizriev by technical sub. Even though Tiuliulin was the underdog in the bookmakers' eyes, he did not lose the first round. The guys fought hard, and it was as close as they got. But in the second round, Denis ran out of energy, he let the opponent behind his back and was choked, but he chose not to give up and fell asleep.

Before that fight, Denis traveled through foreign leagues, never staying in more than one fight. He's won eight of his nine bouts by knockout. He prefers to fight in standup, as he came into mixed martial arts from karate, but he can't actually fight. It's possible, though, that by the time he fights Pickett, he has improved his wrestling. We'll see.

Pickett has fought five fights in the UFC but won only two. He is also a puncher, and he regularly loses on the ground. In his previous bout he lost in wrestling - Kyle Daukaus forced him to tap in the last second of the first round.

His last two defeats Denis suffered after he was replacing the others against strong fighters, who are definitely tougher than Pikett (like Aliaskhab Khizriev and Ikram Aliskerov). Now he had time to prepare properly, to go through a full camp for a particular opponent with very tough sparring partners (Sean Strickland, Rinat Fakhretdinov and not only).

The skills of the fighters are very similar, they both don't like parterre, but Tiuliulin seems to be more aggressive in the standup. In general, there is every reason to hope that the Russian fighter will get his first win in the strongest league in the world.