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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
Next weekend's UFC 129 event is already an unprecedented one for the organization, smashing the attendance and gate records for an MMA event in North America with 55,000 tickets sold for a nearly $11 million dollar gate. Now, the UFC is upping the ante and showing every single fight on the card.
The organization announced overnight that all five preliminary card fights will be available live and for free in their Facebook.com stream.
It had already been reported that they were targeting the welterweight bout between Claude Patrick and Daniel Roberts for the Facebook stream, as well as the bantamweight bout between Ivan Menjivar and Charlie Valencia, but now all five fights will be streamed on Facebook, and all 12 fights on the night's card will air in some form on Facebook, Spike TV or pay-per-view.
The main card kicks off at a new time, beginning on pay-per-view at 9PM ET, and is headlined by the Welterweight Championship fight between Georges St. Pierre and Jake Shields. The night's full lineup is below:
Main Pay-Per-View Card
* Georges St-Pierre vs. Jake Shields (Welterweight Championship)
* Jose Aldo vs. Mark Hominick (Featherweight Championship)
* Jason Brilz vs. Vladimir Matyushenko
* Randy Couture vs. Lyoto Machida
* Mark Bocek vs. Ben Henderson
Spike TV Preliminary Card
* Nate Diaz vs. Rory MacDonald
* Jake Ellenberger vs. Sean Pierson
Facebook.com Preliminary Card
* Claude Patrick vs. Daniel Roberts
* Ivan Menjivar vs. Charlie Valencia
* Jason MacDonald vs. Ryan Jensen
* John Makdessi vs. Kyle Watson
* Pablo Garza vs. Yves Jabouin
Penick's Analysis: This is something we discussed on Tuesday's MMATorch Livecast at BlogTalkRadio.com/MMATorch as a possibility, and something they were heading towards with their Facebook streams. With this event especially I felt this would be a great thing for the fans that want to see every fight and will search these out. It will make for a long night of viewing, but with the unique atmosphere of the show with what is sure to be an insane crowd in Toronto, it's a great thing to have as an option to see all these fights before the pay-per-view card. I'm especially glad we'll be guaranteed to see Garza-Jabouin and Makdessi-Watson from the prelims, and if the response is good this is something the UFC is likely to continue doing. There's no downside to making all of these preliminary card fights available, and if the UFC continues to make every fight available in some capacity for future cards it will be a great move.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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Frank Hyden - Rich Hansen
Chris Park - Matt Pelkey
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