Three Judges, Three Scores: The Missing Standard in Vietnamese Martial Arts Scoring

In the fourth minute of the second round, a fighter threw a spinning kick that landed on his opponent's hip. The stands erupted. The three judges sitting at three corners of the mat raised their cards — and none of them matched: 2-1, 1-2, and one draw. The organisers needed seven minutes to resolve it. I sat in the technical area, beside the slow-motion monitor, logging every frame. That was the fourth time in a single season I had watched the same situation produce three different outcomes. The problem was not the judges' eyes.

"Every slow-motion replay is a surgery: cut right, cut wrong, but never cut in haste" — I still tell this to my students, but surgery only means something when every doctor uses the same anatomy textbook. And on Vietnamese martial arts mats, that textbook is missing.

Over more than forty years observing the industry, I have seen Vietnamese martial arts run at least four competition systems in parallel, each carrying its own scoring philosophy. Traditional martial arts (vo co truyen) score on "beautiful strikes, dangerous strikes, strikes with soul" — a scale tilted towards aesthetics and cultural continuity. Vovinam scores on technical effectiveness blended with tradition. Sanda scores on effective contact and knockdowns, close to kickboxing. And grassroots MMA cards score on the 10-9 system, prioritising positional control and actual damage.

Four systems, four languages. A fighter stepping from a traditional mat onto a Sanda mat is bewildered because beautiful strikes no longer earn points — only damaging ones are recorded. Vice versa, a Sanda fighter entering a traditional mat is easily docked for crude technique. What stands out: those transitions have no written guidance, and most judges are trained inside one system, then reassigned to another without a single refresher course.

"The 2026 V.League refereeing error table was not a starting point, but a mirror reflecting an entire system." I bring that way of reading into martial arts. When three judges raise three scores, people usually scold the judges. But if three people watching the same replay frame produce three outcomes, then the fault is not in three pairs of eyes — the fault is in a rulebook too unclear for three people to read out a single meaning.

I took a sample from grassroots and youth martial arts events I follow continuously. The method is simple: sit down with the footage after each round and separate two groups of situations — the "clear" group (everyone scores the same) and the "boundary" group (judges diverge). The result: most disputes cluster in the boundary group. Within it, two situations dominate: strikes that land without visible damage, and moments where both fighters throw simultaneously. For these two, current rules usually say "effective strike" without defining what "effective" is measured by — contact sound, body reaction, or contact point. Three definitions, three scores.

From football I learned that controversy does not create itself; it is created where the rules leave a gap. "The 2026 World Cup gave me one question: if the human eye is not enough, why not trust the machine?" On a martial arts mat, the "machine" does not yet need to be complex technology. Step one is a scoring scale that can be drawn visually: strike A is worth this much, strike B is worth that much, plus a bank of sample situations for every judge to train on together before the season. Step two is separating the scoring roles — the way VAR separates the on-field referee from the VAR team — so a boundary situation gets reviewed collectively instead of depending on one person's instant perception.

But here is where I want to be counter-intuitive. Many people propose bringing technology into martial arts scoring immediately, even using force sensors to determine an "effective strike". I think that can be a trap. In football, VAR only works when the offside rule and the handball rule have been defined down to the centimetre. If the rule remains vague, technology only sharpens the argument rather than removing it.

"I never say a referee is wrong. I only say their angle lacks enough light." In martial arts, the thing needing more light first is the definition, not yet the camera. A sensor can measure impact force, but it cannot measure "effectiveness" in the spirit of traditional martial arts — where a timely controlling strike can be worth more than a heavy kick. The machine gives us a number; it does not give us a standard.

The second blind spot: we tend to assume judges favour the home fighter. Checking the footage again, most divergence falls squarely into the boundary group I described — systematic bias, not personal bias. A biased judge is consistently biased; a vague judge is chaotically vague. These are two different things with two different fixes. To fight bias, make the numbers transparent; to fight vagueness, standardise the definitions first.

"The empty stadiums of 2026 did not lighten the referee's load — they stripped every judgement bare before the silence." I repeat that line because it holds for martial arts in another way: with no crowd noise to shield them, every judges' decision stands alone before the footage. A martial arts arena is louder than a football pitch, so that noise more easily conceals the gaps in the rules.

From here, I see three scenarios for Vietnamese martial arts over the coming years. Scenario one: the status quo holds, disputes repeat on a seasonal cycle, and audience trust erodes. Scenario two: technology is rushed in while rules stay vague, turning each bout into a debate about equipment rather than people. Scenario three — the one I choose: rescore from the ground up, write a rulebook with a bank of sample situations, train judges together before the season, and only then speak of technology as the final layer of insurance.

None of those three scenarios depends on who is better than whom. They depend on one simple question: when three judges raise three scores, does the organiser want to explain it as "different human eyes", or as "our rules were not bright enough"? I know which answer I choose.