Hanoi 2026: A Martial Arts Tournament and the Argument Over How to Score

On the third night of the tournament, sitting in the fourth row by the ring, I counted three different scorecards for the same round. The judge on the left marked it 4-1 for the fighter in blue, Tran Dinh Khoa of the Hanoi unit. The judge in the middle marked it 3-2 for the fighter in red, Le Van Thach of the Hai Phong unit. The judge on the right called it even. The round lasted barely two minutes, yet three men sitting less than two metres apart saw three different fights.

When the referee raised the blue fighter's hand, the terraces at Hang Day Stadium let out a long whistle. No one on the organising committee could explain why the left-hand card was so lopsided. Forty-two bouts have closed out this tournament, eleven of them decided on the cards. Seven of those eleven went to fighters from the host unit.

That is the data. The rest is the question.

The regional martial arts and boxing tournament was held in Hanoi in the closing months of 2026, while the sports sector was still rebuilding after the war. Hang Day Stadium had been in use for more than twenty years, the floor was still sound, but the changing rooms had to be shared. The Keep Fit for the Fatherland movement was in its fourth decade, and morning training at offices and factories carried on as usual. Resources for a regional tournament were therefore narrow: no film room, no dedicated doctor per unit, no electronic scoreboard.

The most important thing was not the money. This tournament had no written scoring regulation. The organising committee handed each judge a ruled sheet with the round numbers and the two fighters' registration numbers pre-printed. How to score was left to each man's own school of training. Some scored by the number of clean hits. Some scored by the effectiveness of the strike. Some deducted points when a fighter's guard was unsteady, even without taking a blow.

Three scales, three outcomes, one bout.

From my own experience following the bouts across the twelve sessions of this tournament, I recorded every card and checked it against what happened in the ring. The difference was not in the judges' eyesight.

In bouts featuring a host-unit fighter, the share of cards going to the host-unit fighter was seven out of eleven. In bouts with no host-unit fighter, that share fell to two out of nine. The gap does not prove cheating. It proves something else: without written criteria, each judge selects the criterion that favours his own reading, and that reading usually leans toward the fighter he has seen more often.

When the rule is unwritten, the scorer is forced to score from his own professional memory, and memory always has a bias.

I tested it another way. I took three rounds in which all three judges agreed, then compared them with three rounds in which the cards diverged. In the first group, the rounds ended with a clear finishing blow or with visible sustained pressure. In the second group, most of the round played out at mid-range, the two fighters traded evenly, and neither controlled the contest. Put plainly, judges only disagreed when the bout was ambiguous. When the bout was clear, no one disagreed.

This is what most of the crowd overlooks. They call it a referee's error. But the referees in this tournament were in fact consistent, each consistent with his own school. The inconsistency sits at the level of the system, not the man. A referee does not create the error; he only records what the rule already allows.

The weigh-in deserves a line in the ledger too. The tournament ran four weight classes under the committee's rules, and each fighter was weighed once, on the morning of his bout. There was no re-weigh rule and no rehydration rule. For a grassroots tournament that margin sits inside acceptable limits, but it is a line that should be kept for later comparison.

The terraces on the third night whistled at the judge on the left. I understand why they whistled. A fighter trains ten years, travels away from home, and loses on a card nobody is allowed to read, and that anger is justified. But had the committee swapped that judge for another man that night, the result might well have been identical, because the criteria would not have changed.

The worrying part lies elsewhere. The host unit organises the tournament, handles logistics, the venue, and board for the visiting delegations. A unit that is both host and competitor is a structure that always breeds suspicion, even when nobody has done anything wrong. The fix is not to remove the host unit from the tournament. The fix is to appoint three judges from three different units, none of which has a fighter in the ring.

The third bout of opening night was the first disputed decision of this tournament. It went into the minutes. I would keep that record exactly as it stands, uncorrected, undeleted, not written off by being forgotten. The first mistake is not there to be forgotten; it is there to serve as a calibration mark. Three years from now, when the tournament has a written scoring regulation, people will need precisely this sheet to measure how far they have come.

Data stays silent until someone asks the right question. Forty-two bouts, eleven judges' decisions, seven leaning to the host, that is not yet a verdict. It is the right question.

The organising committee should do three things before next season: write a scoring regulation with a clear order of priority, assign three judges from three units unconnected to the fighters in the ring, and open a ledger recording every card so that anyone can look it up.

An empty pitch still holds the same rules; people simply see more clearly when the noise is gone. A martial arts tournament does not need a silent crowd. It only needs every scorecard to be clear enough to be explained in words, before it is explained by whistles.