Written by Glenn | 27 October 2011

Full credit for this goes to Ryan "Filipino Champ" Ramirez, who suggeted I try to check out a new statistic. Whether this will result in anything remains to be seen, but I think we have something legitimate.

Filipino Champ's idea was to look at what happens on wake-up. What do players do in that situation? I didn't think much of it at first because my thought was "Players fall down 500 times in a round, so what?" But as I thought about it more, it seemed to make sense. Falling down and wake-up can be big turning points in a contest, especially late.

I decided to do my first test on last night's Wednesday Night Fights 2.4 finals match between Floe and Alex Valle (stats of the match are here, if you'd like). 

I decided to break down the wake-ups much like how I do with EX meter usage. In this case, a player either got up and did nothing (Empty), a player blocked an attack (Block), or a player hit their opponent (Connect). If a player whiffed on a move, it would be considered Empty. If a player got hit on wake-up, it would also be considered Empty, but I would make a special note of it.

So how did the two players stack up? Here you go:

Player	Connect	Block	Empty	Punished
Floe	2	5	18	6
Alex Valle	2	7	16	8

Here's a couple things I gathered after breaking down the numbers:

First off, if you want the quick summary, the player that produced more knockdowns won every round. 

Valle got hit more times after wake-up than Floe. But all eight punishments, and 15 of his 16 empty wake-ups came in the first three games in which he trailed 2-1. In the final two games, his wake-up line looked like this: 0/3/1/0. Predictably, he won both games. In the final two games, Floe was knocked down 15 times and punished three times on wake-up.

I'll keep looking at more matches to see how much knockdowns and wake-ups matter, but on the surface, it appears this is a stat that will take us one step closer to finding out who the best players are.