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Dave Meltzer


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11 minutes ago, Michael_3165 said:

Meltzer is Meltzer. He guesses a fair amount, he has some decent contacts but I think the company chop and change so frequently that he probably gets things after they happen. His rating system is now a joke (6 stars?) and his podcasts are hideous ('ya know'....) 

It’s 7 stars now actually. You get one extra star for the Tokyo dome and one extra for pretending to be his friend for PR. 

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The glory of Meltzer isn't in his reviews (in all fairness, I don't see why anyone would put stock in anyone's reviews. Wrestling is a thing of personal taste), it's in his analysis and historical knowledge, where he is super ace. I don't get why people get upset about his reviews, just ignore them, they should mean nothing to you. They mean fuck all to me.

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11 hours ago, PowerButchi said:

The glory of Meltzer isn't in his reviews (in all fairness, I don't see why anyone would put stock in anyone's reviews. Wrestling is a thing of personal taste), it's in his analysis and historical knowledge, where he is super ace. I don't get why people get upset about his reviews, just ignore them, they should mean nothing to you. They mean fuck all to me.

Well, the thing is with his ratings is he used to be a great resource if you wanted to get into things like AJW and old AJPW. his old ratings are still very useful for that stuff

Nowadays he really doesn't appear to be watching that much that isn't WWE or NJPW and has a bizarre insistence that all the world's best matches happened in the last year and a half of NJPW

 

The other side of his journalism is Fine though he gets his stories jumbled up sometimes (good luck finding out why Katsuya Kitamura had to retire earlier this year). Although aside from that, it feels like there is less intriguing backstage antics for him to report these days, but if you want to find out about a scuffle on a bus involving Sin Cara then Dave is still the man I guess

 

Edited by sj5522
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48 minutes ago, sj5522 said:

Well, the thing is with his ratings is he used to be a great resource if you wanted to get into things like AJW and old AJPW. his old ratings are still very useful for that stuff

 

Not if your tastes don't mesh with his.

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21 minutes ago, PowerButchi said:

The glory of Meltzer isn't in his reviews (in all fairness, I don't see why anyone would put stock in anyone's reviews. Wrestling is a thing of personal taste), it's in his analysis and historical knowledge, where he is super ace. I don't get why people get upset about his reviews, just ignore them, they should mean nothing to you. They mean fuck all to me.

Exactly, just because Dave throws a high rating out doesn't mean it's automatically a great match, it's all subjective.

I wonder how many people who have commented in this thread actually read what Dave says/writes, because so much of the stuff posted here is the usual predictable, repetitive, rubbish you see on Twitter (extra star for New Japan nonsense).  For clarification it isn't Dave's star system, something that he readily admits, and he first rated a match at six stars back in the 80's (and no it wasn't Japan!).  In regard to only watching WWE and New Japan, he's a regular live attendee of PWG, clearly watches ROH, Impact and CMLL, often tweets about Revolution Pro and other UK promotions (heck he was even watching WOS during it run), has mentioned numerous times about wanting to see OTT live and it was not too long ago he was raving about an A-Kid match against Zack Sabre Jr from Spain.  How many five stars has Dave given to NXT matches this year?  That's hardly Japan is it?  If someone doesn't like Meltzer or doesn't care for his journalism fair enough, but there has been so many untruths in this thread alone written about him it's laughable.  

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4 hours ago, Pier Six Brawler said:

I don't understand how there can be a rating system that is just an arbitrary number that isn't out of anything. If it's a five star system, the best matches should get five stars and anything else a lesser number of stars. Otherwise it is meaningless 

It has always been meaningless. 

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6 hours ago, Pier Six Brawler said:

I don't understand how there can be a rating system that is just an arbitrary number that isn't out of anything. If it's a five star system, the best matches should get five stars and anything else a lesser number of stars. Otherwise it is meaningless 

But then he can never rate anything 5 in case it is battered in the future?

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He rated one or two matches "five stars plus" in the past, and Cornette has explained how the scale was previously only four stars. So "six stars" isn't some new absurd thing. It's broadly meaningless because he rarely quantifies what constitutes a five star match, or what a four star match could have done differently to gain an additional star, nor does he consider context (he has claimed that some matches he enjoyed live more than on tape, but there doesn't seem to be any consideration of the fact that, for example, a match's position in the card, or as part of an ongoing programme, plays into the content).

Star ratings were useful when they were a means of knowing what you were getting when ordering a compilation VHS, but when all of these matches are more accessible than they've ever been, it's no more than one bloke's opinion - and because we're able to see almost all of the same matches Meltzer does and in context, at the same time he sees them, the impact his own personal tastes have has never been more obvious.

In terms of coverage and journalism - I'm no real fan of Meltzer, but most of his critics seem to be a bit simple, to say the least. A lot of it comes from them not actually listening to him or reading the Observer, but seeing the third-hand repeated version of the headline on another website, and thinking he's reported something as fact when he's most likely just talked around the possibility for ten minutes.

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1 hour ago, Kaz Hayashi said:

At one point an A in your exams was the best, then it became A*, then A** and now it’s changed to a 9, and considering 7, 8 & 9 is the equivalent of an old A to A*, Dave is clearly on to something.

I give this post 3 yellows***

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Mabel probably wasn't in the WWF middle of 1996. I could have seen him coming in, just not as the third man.

ADDED: Didn't Meltzer say that Yokozuna was going to do a slow run-in and destroy both Nash and Hall during that match that they had at whatever WCW PPV so Hogan could get his win back from KOTR 93?

Edited by bAzTNM#1
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