ONE Championship and judging as a design choice
A mixed martial arts organisation added kickboxing and published a judging philosophy that deliberately rewards fight-ending damage over accumulated points.
ONE Championship built its kickboxing division from 2018 as part of a striking programme running alongside its mixed martial arts business. The ruleset sits close to K-1's, so the interesting difference is not in the techniques but in how bouts are judged.
ONE publishes explicit criteria directing judges to weigh near-terminal impact first and to assess a bout as a whole rather than round by round. In practice a fighter comfortably ahead on volume can lose to one clean, damaging shot. That rewards finishing intent and penalises coasting on a lead, and coaches treat it as a genuinely different strategic problem from GLORY.
The consequences are visible in the results. Superbon knocking out Giorgio Petrosyan — a fighter who had gone the better part of a decade without being finished — and then Chingiz Allazov knocking out Superbon, is a sequence that reads very differently under damage-first judging than it would under volume scoring.
ONE also runs kickboxing and Muay Thai on the same cards with many of the same athletes, which offers something no other promotion does: the same fighter, weeks apart, with and without elbows and the full clinch. It is the cleanest available demonstration of what those two rules actually change.