Azamat Murzakanov vs Dominick Reyes Preview & Prediction — UFC 333: Volkanovski vs. Evloev

This one reads as a stylistic puzzle before it reads as a pick. Dominick Reyes brings length, timing and a kicking game that is built to pick apart aggressive forward movers. Azamat Murzakanov brings exactly the kind of compact, one-shot power that has put Reyes on the canvas before. The desk is logging this as a no-play read, but the lean is clear: Murzakanov.

Azamat Murzakanov

Murzakanov's path to winning fights is simple and has worked more often than not: close distance, land single clean shots, and finish when the opening appears. He has two recent first-round UFC knockouts and averages 0.8 knockdowns per fight, which tells the story of a fighter who does not need volume to hurt people. The flip side is that his game has a documented seam. He has shown a tendency to walk into kicks, both to the body and the legs, without adjusting, and when a fight drags into sustained exchanges he has faded, something the tape against Nchukwi corroborates. That same combination, unchecked kicks plus a straight-line retreat when hurt, is what let Costa land the head kick that knocked him out in the third round. Against a fighter with real length and a kicking arsenal, that seam is the obvious thing to attack.

Dominick Reyes

Reyes is the longer fighter here by a notable reach margin, and his game is built around using that length: body and head kicks to control range, with a straight-left counter waiting behind it. On paper, that is a near-perfect style matchup against a fighter who struggles to check kicks and tends to retreat in a straight line. The problem is what happens when Reyes does not get to dictate range. Four of his five professional losses have come by standing knockout or TKO, including a first-round finish by Ulberg in 2025. The tape pattern behind those losses is consistent: Reyes freezes on feints, steps down the center line instead of off it, and backs straight to the fence when pressured, which is the same retreat line that lets a power puncher time him. That is a real, repeated hole, not a one-off.

How the fight plays out

The read here is less about who has the better tools on paper and more about which fighter's flaw is more load-bearing. Murzakanov's weakness traces back to a single loss, and while the Nchukwi tape backs up the fade, it is still a thinner sample than what Reyes has shown. Reyes's hole is a pattern across four knockout losses, with the same freeze-and-retreat sequence showing up each time. Murzakanov's one-shot power profile, 0.8 knockdowns per fight with two recent first-round finishes, is precisely the kind of threat that has ended Reyes before.

There is a real caveat worth naming: all four of those knockout losses came against orthodox fighters, and Murzakanov is a southpaw like Reyes, which is a different look and lowers how heavily this overlay should weigh. But a thinner counter-pattern does not erase a repeated one. If Reyes falls into the same center-line, straight-retreat habit under pressure, Murzakanov's style of fight, forward, compact, and finishing-minded, is built to catch it.

The verdict

The lean is Murzakanov. Reyes has been knocked out standing four times by fighters who could find him on the retreat, and Murzakanov's compact power and finishing instincts are the clearest test yet of whether that habit is fixed. The southpaw-versus-southpaw wrinkle tempers the overlay, but a four-fight pattern carries more weight than Murzakanov's single, thinner hole.