The Trials on Record
The California State Athletic Commission ran the most-cited open-scoring pilot, applied to select non-championship bouts beginning in 2021. Under the format, judges' scores after rounds four and eight of a ten-round fight were announced publicly — to the fighters, their corners, and the arena. California reported no procedural disasters, but commission staff and independent observers noted an inconvenient ambiguity: it was difficult to isolate whether visible scores changed in-ring behavior, and if so, whether that change improved the competitive quality of bouts or simply altered late-round pacing in ways that favored the fighter ahead on the cards.
The Nevada State Athletic Commission has discussed open scoring periodically — Nevada's size and championship-fight concentration give its position outsized weight — but as of the most recent publicly available commission minutes, Nevada has not adopted a pilot. The Association of Boxing Commissions, which coordinates unified standards across North American jurisdictions without holding regulatory authority over any of them, has placed open scoring on working-group agendas without producing a binding recommendation.
At the international level, the International Boxing Association experimented with open scoring in its amateur competition before the IOC's 2023 derecognition of the federation effectively suspended the relevance of its rulebook for Olympic purposes. The IBA's amateur data — where bouts are shorter and the scoring system differs from the 10-point must system used professionally — does not translate cleanly to a professional context.
Why the Standard Has Not Shifted
The argument for open scoring is intuitive: if a fighter knows he is behind, he fights for the finish rather than outpointing a meaningless final round. Opponents counter that disclosed scores can equally encourage a leading fighter to stall, and that they expose corners to real-time pressure that produces tactically poor decisions under time constraints. Neither side has published outcome data strong enough to settle the question.
The structural obstacle is jurisdictional. Because the commission is the regulator wherever a bout is held, there is no central body that could mandate a format shift across all markets simultaneously. A California pilot produces California data. Without a coordinated multi-commission trial generating comparable results, open scoring remains what it has been for two decades: a recurring reform proposal backed by compelling logic and inconclusive empirical support.