Ednilson Santos vs Akbar Abdullaev Preview & Prediction — Dana White's Contender Series: Season 10, Week 6

Week 6 of Dana White's Contender Series pairs two finishers with opposite paths to the octagon. Ednilson Santos brings a regional resume and one-week notice off a camp built for a different opponent. Akbar Abdullaev brings a run through legitimate names and a counter-striking, top-control game built for exactly the position Santos keeps getting caught in. The desk is logging this as a read, not a bet, but the side it lands on is Abdullaev.

Ednilson Santos

Santos is a forward-moving finisher out of the regional LFA scene, comfortable pressing the pace and hunting a finish rather than pointing his way through three rounds. The tape shows a real weakness underneath that aggression. Both of his losses that ended before the final horn were standing punch knockouts, and both came from the same shape of exchange: Aliev in 2018 intercepted his forward entry with a right hand, and Mantello in 2025 caught him exposed at the fence. That is a pattern, not a one-off. His wrestling offers little cover for it either. Against Santana he landed a single-leg that stalled into fence control rather than a finish or a clean top position, and there is no sample of him defending from the bottom under pressure. Layer on the fact that he took this fight on roughly a week's notice, off a camp built for a different opponent entirely, and his best route to a clean, paced three rounds looks compromised before the walkout.

Akbar Abdullaev

Abdullaev is the sharper puzzle piece here. His game is built around countering a forward entry with a short right hand or hook and following it to top position and ground-and-pound, which lines up directly with the hole in Santos's tape. He has done it against a level a tier above LFA regional competition: a fifth-round TKO over a sitting ONE champion in Tang Kai built on repeated double-legs and sustained top control, a knockout over a previously unbeaten Halil Amir, and a third-round TKO over Dauev. He is not without exposure of his own. He has been caught in the pocket on forward entries before, tagged by Simonov and by Treskin, and briefly put down by Zholdoshbekov. Those moments matter, but his finishing instincts once wrestling engagements start are the more consistent thread, shown again against Aminov and Toktoali, where he converted clinch and takedown exchanges straight into top control.

How the fight plays out

The fight turns on one phase: Santos coming forward, and Abdullaev meeting him there. Santos's counter-right entry is real and documented, but so is the fact that it has already failed him twice against opponents who intercepted him the same way Abdullaev is built to. Abdullaev has absorbed shots in that exact pocket before against Simonov and Treskin, and been briefly dropped by Zholdoshbekov, so this is not a clean bill of health for him either. The difference is what each fighter does after contact. Santos has no answer once a wrestling exchange starts, stalling into fence control at best and showing no sampled bottom defense at worst. Abdullaev has repeatedly turned exactly that kind of engagement into top position and a finish. Add the one-week notice pulling Santos off his intended camp, and the fight tilts further toward the side built to counter the phase Santos has to live in to win. The pick here is Abdullaev.

The verdict

The pick is Abdullaev. His counter-right-into-top-control game answers the specific way Santos has been finished twice before, and Santos's compressed camp removes his best path to avoiding that exchange for three rounds.