Terrible picks can be more rough than money won or lost sometimes. As someone who also picked Byrd and Hooper, I'm kind of struggling to come to terms with such shit picks.
Eh, don't beat yourself up about Hooper. (Or anyone else who bet him, for that matter)
We saw a jits guy with shaky takedowns and limited striking/defense beat Caceres as easily as spitting on his fingers just 16 months ago. Yes yes, Kron Gracie is much better at BJJ than Hooper, but his GNP is actually worse, and besides, Steven Peterson is worse at BJJ than Kron AND Hooper...and he got Caceres down, took his back, and very nearly locked in the RNC less than a year ago.
Recall that people were happy to play Kron at -300, which also looked great in retrospect, so was Hooper at around -150 really THAT bad?
This isn't even accounting for Hooper having 6 months to improve at an age where fighters become better by leaps and bounds, the major advantage of a smaller cage limiting Caceres' evasion and forcing more clinches, and Caceres' generally awful fight IQ combined with his complete lack of improvement over years and years.
Caceres' strategy was to constantly move and evade, make it difficult for Hooper to even grab him, and disengage from any and all grappling situations like the plague. Amazingly, he stuck to this the whole fight without faltering.
Caceres also showed far more grappling improvements since the Peterson fight 10.5 months ago than he has shown in years before that. Hooper, meanwhile, showed zero grappling improvement.
It's important not to be too results-oriented here.
