Jetlag

And Grey is out. He climbed 30 spots and made 40 ballots. I guess that's worthy of a celebration. Still, a Top 100 without the greatest british babyface ever doesn't feel right.

Larry Z did extremely well for a guy who was mostly associated with stalling for a while.

What are the good Hogan in WWF matches exactly?

Chigusa's the one joshi wrestler I do not care for at all. Glad she's out, altough joshi fans who know better than me probably think otherwise. Her beating Jaguar is bad enough.

I didn't have Sting on my list but Sting is a ballsy wrestler who has some great matches with Vader, Regal and Foley where he was far from being carried. In fact he may be my favourite Vader opponent. I wouldn't have a problem at all if he made the Top 100.

Another tournament finale between Hamada and Yoshida. This is just a super match. Like god damn these two smoke any other junior in the world. The matwork is super, with Yoshida again fighting like an animal and catching everything Hamada tries. Aside from the crazy submissions you get Yoshida throwing punches and Hamada firing back with some really sharp and well timed offense of her own. Yoshida briefly works over Hamada's stomach a bit and while it wasn't the focus of the match, Hamada sold very well, same for Yoshida with her bandaged arm. Surprised this went only 11 minutes as it felt like a much bigger match.

This went only 7 minutes, but damn what a world class match. Yoshida was just dominating Hamada on the ground here. Absolutely nothing Hamada tried looked easy to get in on Yoshida. Her moments of catching Yoshida looked like something else. Some of the wrestling they did here looked on another level. Also, because Hamada had won the previous tournament match with a flash rollup, all of her rollups here were great nearfalls. Great intro to the tricky Arsion style mix, with Yoshida utilizing shoot submissions and Hamada using her lucha.

Almost half of my ballot is gone now. Starting to wonder who the fuck is gonna be in the Top 100.

What are the best Tommy Rich matches? He's the one guy I didn't check out. All the talk about his great matches not being on tape threw me off.

19 guys have dropped from my list. Feels like it's going to be eviscerated in the next couple days with guys like Navarro and Fuerza that I had very high falling.

There is something very puzzling about a guy like Scott Hall, who people seemed extremely lukewarm on in his thread doing so well and finishing above a lot of guys who had people raving.

It's just that the list right now doesn't make a lick of sense. Osamu Nishimura beats Tomohiro Ishii and Ibushi beats Nishimura and then Pat O'Connor beats them all. And then Sekimoto and... the Big Show? WTF? Right now it's like you tossed a bunch of names into a bag and drew them at random, with some names being twice in the bag. Which is pretty much what happened. I can't imagine a wrestling fan who would agree with all the placements. Maybe I'm just bummed cause Nishimura shoulda made the Top 200. Nish rules. I think I had him higher than the Destroyer.

I love Lizmark. His stuff strikes just the right balance between graceful and forceful. Many wrestlers with graceful stuff come across a little pretty at times, while Lizmark looks like he is really graceful at throwing people very very hard. I guess a wrestler who's main selling points are great neck bridges + great throws + being great in his role is hard to sell, but he's just what I want from a wrestler. I do remember him botching stuff in some matches, so I can see your point. Still, match with La Parka blew my mind when I first saw it, and at that point I had already been exposed to a lot of high end lucha.

BattlARTS has some great southern style tags and junior wrestling aswell as plain shootstyle.

Right now there are about 180 wrestlers listed where I'd gladly sacrifice every single bit of footage they have on tape if it means I could watch more Takeshi Ono matches. By any metric the guy kicks the shit out of anyone else listed. Except maybe Lizmark. Lizmark rules. The challenge I posted in his thread still stands: name a wrestler with a better Top 10 matches. Average vote of 70 for Rick Steiner is nuts. I mean, placing him at 99 when you really need to fill out your ballot, that's fine, but the time spent on this project could have been used to find better talent.

Katsumi Usuda - 35th best wrestler ever. I want to hug the person who did that. I think I'd have him in my Top 5 japanese juniors. Yamada is depressing. Really talented girl, but deserved a better career. Great picture though. Lizmark not cracking the Top 300 is annoying too, altough I've conditioned myself to see the rankings so far as a random assembly of names and not as a legitimate ranking. I know I cut out one really popular name from my list cause Lizmark was better. Great masked technico.

That moment when you were the biggest advocate for a guy, even compiling a big match list, and then you are the low vote on him. Should have been a little more confident placing Greco so he could have atleast beaten Sabre. It makes me really happy that 6 other people voted for him. Great worker. Re Quack, I really think him as #6 isn't outlandish if you are really into him. Considering he has been around extremely long aswell. And, his fake lucha/WoS/M-Pro style is better and more original than the fake fighting spirit style other indy guys do.

I don't mind Quack. Better than a lot of spotty guys, and he has carved out a niche for himself. Much of these low placings have been a mess, so I'm not taking them very seriously.

Man, Matsunaga tied with Murakami over Shelley is a beautiful thing.

3 people voting for FvB is cool. I had him at 97 and that's the highest I could justify it personally, but it's cool regardless. I wonder how many guys would've gotten a significant boost if someone had done a big post + matchlist for them too.

Really? What are those great T1 mat performances? I always thought he was a disappointing matworker,while T2 always looks super talented when it comes to grappling. T1 gets stuck doing the "catch and release" stuff too much, altough his selling is good enough to keep it interesting. Also, Hashi should be higher. Watching some NOAH had me really tempted to vote for him because damn this guy got really exciting, violent exchanges out of guys like Marufuji, even very early in his career. And his 2010 is a truely great year. I'd also replace the recommended match with the Ikeda tag from 2010.

Are all 500 guys who received votes gonna be revealed, or just the Top 100?

You forgot his time in BattlARTS and indies. It was a little underwhelming considering he was such a genius in PWFG but he was pretty fun there crossing his junior style with the quasi shootstyle. He also did a damn good job carrying Minoru Tanaka at one point and had a really fun match with Ishikawa at a Rikidozan Memorial show.

Daisuke Ikeda is the next guy who deserves a big post. The guy's longevity is quite incredible. We're not talking about a guy here who has a long career where he is looking really solid till the end. But rather a guy who has really great matches and MOTYCs in almost every year where he makes tape, up until the very end. The guys versatility is underrated. Sure he is a beast and that's his selling point, but especially during the early BattlARTS months where other guys were still adjusting he was clearly leading and holding things together, along with Ishikawa. He has the epic big matches, the blood feud with Ishikawa aswell as very good sub 10 minute matches to pad out his resume. Daisuke Ikeda of the Year 1993 - I don't think his debut was taped 1994 - Yuki Ishikawa vs. Daisuke Ikeda (M-Pro 15.12.1994) 1995 - Daisuke Ikeda & Katsumi Usuda v. Yuki Ishikawa & Shoichi Funaki (PWFG 5/19/95) 1996 - Ikeda/Ono vs. Ishikawa/Otsuka (BattlARTS 30.10.1996) 1997 - Alexander Otsuka vs. Daisuke Ikeda (BattlARTS 5.11.1997) 1998 - Yuki Ishikawa vs. Daisuke Ikeda (BattlARTS 29.8.1998) 1999 - Yuki Ishikawa v. Daisuke Ikeda (7.29.1999) 2000 - Daisuke Ikeda vs. Mitsuya Nagai (BattlARTS 30.1.2000) 2001 - Daisuke Ikeda vs. Tamon Honda (NOAH 1.9.2001) 2002 - Morishima/Ikeda vs. Takayama/Smith (NOAH 26.7.2002) 2003 - Ikeda/Morishima/Rikio vs. Akiyama/Izumida/Saito (NOAH 16.3.2003) 2004 - Morishima vs. Ikeda (NOAH 1.6.2004) 2005 - Yuki Ishikawa vs. Daisuke Ikeda (Futen 24.4.2005) 2006 - Ikeda/Nagai vs. Ishikari/Miyamoto (Kings Road 9.4.2006) 2007 - Yuki Ishikawa/Alexander Otsuka vs. Hara/Ikeda (BattlARTS 21.7.2007) 2008 - Ishikawa/Otsuka/Sawa vs. Ikeda/Usuda/Super Tiger 2 (BattlARTS 26.7.2008) 2009 - Ikeda/Ono vs. Suruga/Oba (Futen 26.4.2009) 2010 - Ikeda/Oba vs. Hashi/Mashimo (Futen 24.10.2010) 2011 - Yuki Ishikawa vs. Daisuke Ikeda (BattlARTS 5.11.2011) 2012 - Daisuke Ikeda/Takeshi Ono vs. Kengo Mashimo/Hikaru Sato (Futen 22.1.2012) In a 20 year career, there are about 15 real hits there that would tremendously boost any very well respected wrestlers resume, and in many of these years there's lots of extra awesome matches even when they are 2nd best. And that is with the disadvantage of much of his Futen work not being available and BattlARTS stuff often being clipped.

Hase placed #33 in the Smarkschoice list, so the idea that he is some kind of undiscovered great or unfairly dismissed worker is funny. It's just that people have had their share of japanese style heavyweight epics and gotten busy with fresher stuff. That's okay. The idea that this is some kind of "battle" is also funny. You should stop taking every different opinion as a personal attack at you. NWA style matwork vs. lucha/shootstyle/etc is interesting. I don't think there is such a clear difference between them. Some of it is good, some of it not so much. IIRC the NWA matwork is more about building to a transition. When the transition is a letdown you feel cheated because you just sat through a bunch of hammerlocks and headlocks for nothing. When a lucha or shootstyle match ends in a letdown, atleast there is a chance you saw some sweet wrestling before that. For what it's worth, all kind of matwork can be dull and listless.