I thought this would be a shoot, but it appeared to be a work where nothing really happened. Both men basically danced all night looking for an opening. Finally, Kurahashi caught Gono's kick against his head and took him down, but Gono countered with a heel hold for the win. Boring match.

7:07 (5:30 shown)

Christopher Haseman vs. Minoru Tanaka

This was the style the younger guys in RINGS were moving toward at this time. It was believable enough to be a shoot, particularly the high kick Haseman put Tanaka down with, except the technique was faster and more glamorous than you see in the real thing. In essence, the idea was to keep it exciting, but at the same time make sure it held water. This style won't always produce the best matches, but is the best style for working a shoot today because (match quality wise) the fake aspects are only there to spike the entertainment value. This was not the best example in practice because Tanaka isn't really a shooter and had never been in the ring with Haseman before, but what they did worked well enough. Haseman was the better of the two, mainly because this is his style. I'm sure he'd would have won a shoot, but since it was a work against a guy that wasn't a big name and was going to appear on RINGS shows sparingly at best (he never fought for them again), there was no question that the leader of RINGS Australia was going over. They had a pretty good match before Haseman caught Tanaka in the udehishigigyakujujigatame for the submission.

12:01 (5:31 shown)

Within reason, you can have a great match at any length if you have the right performers. That said, a worked shoot going to a 30:00 draw, unless it's Tamura vs. Kosaka since they are tops and their stuff isn't spot oriented like Han's, doesn't have nearly the allure as a pro style 30:00 draw because the shoot has to be more narrowly defined. If you want to have a credible worked shoot, which they did, there are only so many things you can do. Over 30:00, unless you are exceptionally talented and creative, which they aren't, you are not only going to totally exhaust those things, but are going to have to really stretch things out. Of course, this was still better than the 30:00 stallfest from Fully Loaded '98, but it wasn't very interesting because it moved so slowly and appeared to contain several minutes of "looking for openings." In that respect, it was much closer to what Pancrase shoots look like when both guys are even. The fans were somewhat into this match, probably more due to cult hero Otsuka being in a "shoot" than anything else. In any case, it wasn't all that interesting during the 8 minutes that were shown, so for once I have to say that they definitely did us a favor by chopping so much out. As Otsuka is one of the top stars in Battlarts and Sakata is a young jobber, Battlarts was able to get a cheap 2-0 win on lost points for their guy.

30:00 (8:17)

Ittensohn is a friend of Haseman's from Australia with a Jiu Jitsu background. Naruse's strikes were good, but the match was quite slow when they were on the ground. Ittensohn didn't seem to have any offense at all. I mean, it looked like a shoot when he was on offense simply because it's hard to believe he would just sit there and do nothing in a worked match that he was jobbing in. Naruse applied a facelock out of nowhere for the win. This match was decent because of Naruse, but Ittensohn couldn't come close to holding up his end like Haseman does against Naruse and most everyone else.

8:22

Sousserov has appeared in RINGS now and then over the years, but never really picked up on how to work like the Russians that became regulars. This was never more apparent than today, as this match was well below Tamura's high standards because Sousserov was not the least bit impressive. One major problem was that Sousserov doesn't have much offense. This made it very hard for Tamura to really put him over before taking him out. Tamura always finds ways to make the other guy look good without making himself look bad, but that didn't really happen today. Tamura's offense was excellent as always, but when he's going over he doesn't flash too much offense so as to not show his opposition up. That was the case again today, but Sousserov was still shown up because even though he had plenty of chances, he pretty much failed to come up with the offense to balance things off. Tamura made him submit to an akiresukengatame. It was a pretty good match, but only because it practically takes a monster with incompetence H.P. Lovecraft can't describe to have a worse worked match with Tamura.

9:27