How the numbers are made.
Two numbers carry the site: the First Light Rating, for skill, and the First Light Index, for fame against that skill. Here is what goes into each, and how well the rating predicts fights.
The First Light Rating.
The FLR is a skill rating built for MMA. It starts from Glicko-2, a rating system that tracks both how good a fighter is and how sure it is of that, and adds three things a win-loss record cannot see.
- How the fight was won. A dominant finish moves the rating more than a split decision.
- Every round, scored. First Light Scorecards learn how judges score a round from its strikes, takedowns and control time, then score the rounds no judge saw because the fight ended early. A fifth-round loss after four dominant rounds is no longer the same as one after four losing rounds.
- Where a fighter has been competing. Records built in a regional promotion are weighed by how that promotion’s fighters actually do when they move up.
The published number is deliberately conservative: it is the rating minus twice its uncertainty, so a fighter with few fights on record sits lower until the results are in. The First Light Rankings order each division by it.
How accurate it is.
Every fight from January 2015 to September 2026 was predicted with only what was known the day before it, and the prediction checked against the result. Nothing was fitted on the fights it was scored on.
| Picking the winner | Same fights | FLR | Compared with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Against Fight Matrix | 10,198 | 62.3% | 58.5% |
| Against the betting market (closing odds) | 13,266 | 63.8% | 68.9% |
| Every rated fight | 21,643 | 64.3% | — |
On the fights both rate, the FLR picks the winner 3.8 points more often than Fight Matrix, the longest-running algorithmic MMA ranking. Its probabilities are also better calibrated: when the FLR gives a fighter a 70% chance, they win close to 70% of the time (log loss 0.639 against 0.680, lower is better).
The betting market is better still, and is expected to stay that way: closing odds know about injuries, weight cuts, short-notice replacements and styles, none of which a rating can see. The FLR is a measure of what fighters have shown in the cage, not a betting tool.
The First Light Index.
The FLI compares a fighter’s fame with what their FLR would predict. Fame is the size of the audience a fighter commands, read across Google Search, Wikipedia, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and X, each weighted by what it is worth and brought to one scale. A curve is fitted to fame against skill over every rated fighter, because fame is winner-take-most: the very best are disproportionately famous.
The FLI is where a fighter sits against that curve, on a scale from −1 to +1. Above zero, their audience is bigger than their skill explains. Below zero, they are better than their audience knows. The arrow on the rankings is its change over about 30 days.
What a fight does to the FLI.
A fight moves both sides of the FLI. The rating moves with the performance. Attention moves with how the public took it: the fame the fight added across the platforms the Observatory reads, each weighted by what it is worth, the same way the FLI weighs them. The fight’s FLI change is the two together, in one number.
When attention goes against the result. A fighter who lost, whose rating barely moved, and whose fight added at least the attention a winner typically gains, won the night in the eyes of the public. A fighter who won and whose fight added no more attention than a loser typically gains lost it, and the more the rating rose, the more the performance went unrewarded. A rise in the FLI that comes only from a heavy defeat never counts.
Career phase.
Each month, a fighter’s FLR is compared with their best so far.
- Developing. Near their best and still climbing.
- Prime. At or near their best.
- Declining. Clearly below their best.
- Inactive. No fight in two years.
- Unproven. Too few fights to say.
Using this data.
Journalists and researchers may publish anything on this site, with the credit Source: First Light Observatory and, online, a link to the page it came from. The current rankings are downloadable as CSV and JSON. For anything else, or deeper data on a fighter, write to [email protected].
First Light may hold interests in athletes covered by the Index.