Sometimes, wrestling isn’t enough. After all, the best wrestling cards are variety shows, little bit of technical mat grappling here, a little bit of hardcore spotfest here, a sprinkly of high-flying, a spoonful of two hosses clubbing the red nightmares out of each other, a comedy match featuring two invisible wrestlers, main event, rinse repeat.
Familiarity breeds contempt and over the years bookers have tried to freshen up stale feuds, artificially heighten drama, and spike ticket sales with increasingly elaborate, high concept, and bonkers stipulations.
oh this isn’t just any match this an Elimination Chamber match, a falls count anywhere match a… stairs match, ooh stairs, hardcore stairs.
Some stips are great but loads have been handicap hogpens of tedious bollocks. Hell, the stairs match didn’t even make this list. These are all worse than a STAIRS match. Pray for us all.
I’m Adam hailing from partsFUNknown and here are the 10 Worst Wrestling Stipulations Ever.
10. Hard Ten Match
I mean I couldn’t not. Number ten. Hard ten. You get it. So, IMPACT Wrestling used to be known as TNA, and you’re going to hear those three letters A LOT.
Desperately trying to mark themselves as different to WWE, TNA threw eight cows worth of convoluted, nonsensical s**t at a wall and very little of it stuck, for example, the Hard Ten match from TNA’s early years, which they brought in for one tournament and never used again.
It was so bad that TNA only used it once, that’s saying something. The premise of the stipulation is: hey you know what hardcore matches need? Maths. A Hard Ten match meant it was hardcore rules except the only way to win is to get 10 points.
You get one point for a ‘direct hit’ with an object, five points for putting someone through a table and you also have to win by at least two points in order to win. What’s a direct hit, can you just jab someone with a pencil 10 times?
Why the two-point lead rule? Is this tennis? It’s Sandman vs. New Jack, I don’t think it’s tennis. Why do you have board game catch-up mechanics in a deathmatch? They’re deathmatches, it’s like putting a chocolate cake in front of someone and saying have a slice, but only if it’s exactly two-fourteenths of the whole cake.
9. Shark Cage Match
No, not the ones with someone suspended above the ring in a shark cage, those are a bit bad but fundamentally ok at least when they don’t feature Enzo slithering out of one like a gecko in a strip club.
I mean the old type of shark cage match that the territories once booked, ie. two dudes battering each other inside a shark cage, inside the ring. It’s like that scene in Jaws but there’s two James Dreyfusses and they’re both pissed up on dark fruits and battering each other for a dropped quid on a bathroom floor.
There’s one on youtube featuring Chief Jay Strongbow vs. Bulldog Don Kent and it’s so weird!
Two men just hit each other over and over with the aim being to be the first to escape the shark cage, but their roughhousing keeps opening the door, and they have to struggle to make sure they don’t accidentally win with the ref having to actually hold the door shut in places.
It’s hilarious for a bit but then it just gets so boring, because they can’t do anything because they’re in a f**king shark cage.
8. Blindfold Match
And speaking of boring, oh man. Two wrestlers wearing bags on their heads, very slowly walking around a ring, gesturing like clowns and not fighting each other. Now some of you historians will point to the most famous blindfold match, Jake Roberts vs. Rick Martel at Mania 7 as being good.
You’re wrong about that, it’s the same thing over and over again, Roberts points around the ring as the crowd shout to help him find martel, they miss each other, or have a very brief scuffle then they do it again, and again, and again and it’s maddening, whilst also making one of the coolest characters in WWE history, the super composed Jake Roberts scramble around on the match like a dog.
I was saying Boo-urns. TNA had a famously terrible one at Lockdown 2007 featuring James Storm and Chris Harris where the bags kept falling off their heads.
This was a blood feud between former tag partners, can you imagine Johnny Gargano and Tomasso Ciampa main eventing Takeover New Orleans with fucking bags on their heads, falling down and going whoopsy. Dreadful.
7. Eye for an Eye Match
[Laughs] It’s a ping pong ball. I mean, I don’t know what I wanted from a finish for this match, wasn’t this though. So, much like TNA doing mad things to compete with the big dub, during 2020 WWE did a whole bunch of mad things to compete with the crushing reality that no-fans wrestling is bollocks.
Cue this turd, the highest stupidest concept in years, to win one wrestler must extract the eyeball of their opponent. Are you ok, WWE? Talk about booking your talent into a corner.
You have a match so conceptually horrific that you know that they can’t actually do the thing they’re promising so you spend the entire match completely disengaged from the good work Seth Rollins and Rey Mysterio were doing, waiting for the disconcerting smoke and mirrors to kick in, watching two very good wrestlers doing their best to come close but not actually do the thing that the company advertised because that would not be very sports entertaining of them.
6. Fight for the Right
Hi TNA, good to see you again. You can just imagine the writer’s meeting that went into this one. What match do we do? Battle Royal? There’s been a lot of those. Reverse battle royal? What’s a reverse battle royal… everyone has to… GET IN the ring? Cool, that’s lunch.
It… it just doesn’t work, the fight for the right concept is this you have a load of wrestlers outside the ring, they fight to try and get in the ring, once about half the wrestlers are in the ring, everyone who didn’t make it is eliminated, THEN they do a battle royal, until there are two people, when they do a match, got it, good.
Except the order people are eliminated in the not-reverse part of the battle royal determines the seeding for a single-elimination tournament, the winner of which faces the winner of the singles match within the battle royal.
LOOK IT’S VERY SIMPLE, let’s start from the top, Vince Russo was born THE END.
Not only is that complicated to the point of having no stakes but just the act of people battling to get in a ring, it doesn’t work, don’t fight each other just rush into the ring and see what happens, stop wandering around outside looking for people to punch just get IN THE RING F**K. Doesn’t work. Doesn’t work so hard.
5. King of the Mountain Match
Hey, you’ve heard of a reverse battle royal, how about a reverse ladder match, it’s different it’s TNA. So what you think a reverse ladder match is, you’re right, climbing a ladder to hang a belt over the ring. Simple? You’re right, it’s too simple!
Five wrestlers start and before they can climb the ladder they have to become ‘eligible’ to climb it by pinning or submitting someone else, with the person they beat having to spend two minutes in a fucking shark cage to think about all the career choices that led them to this point.
Hey cool a shark cage, does that mean we can get two minutes of formless ugly brawling if two dudes get locked in at the same time, sure does fill your boots!
Then once you’re eligible you’ve got to get the belt from the ref, but once it’s got other people can steal it, unless you drop it in which it has to go back to the ref, sort of, most of the time? It’s madness.
Like I sort of understand why TNA stuck with the concept for ten pissing years, five dudes in a ladder match is more often than not going to have a few decent moments, but then just do a five-way ladder match.
There’s rethinking the wheel and then there’s adding four more wheels to a wheel so that the wheel doesn’t turn properly.
4. …On A Pole Match
Eric Bischoff has Elimination Chamber, Chris Jericho has the Money in the Bank match, this is Vince Russo’s legacy. He didn’t invent them of course, but he sure did bring us the worst iterations of dudes fighting for a bit then scampering to grab a thing on a pole like a cat trying to catch a feather.
Stop making your wrestlers look uncool. Stop it. There’ve been loads of things suspended from polls over the years, contracts, kendo sticks, biker chains, viagra (wrestling just f**king tops isn’t it) a mum, a mum on a pole, a forklift technically, but fits the brief, TNA’s feast of fired match when there are four briefcases, on poles some have title shots, but one has a pink slip and then you’d be fired.
But if you lose the match you’re not fired, so why would you try and win? Finally, worst of all the San Francisco 49ers match where there were four boxes on poles, one had the WCW championship in it, with the other boxes containing a coal miners glove, a blowup doll, a picture of recently fired Scott Hall, rib-tickling stuff and then the final box fell apart with the belt falling to the floor on the outside. A legacy of tedious wank.
3. Punjabi Prison Match
Oh man, I hate the Punjabi Prison match, more than most people, it’s just so boring. So trying to work out what makes a wrestling stipulation match bad, one of the key questions you have to ask is, how much pointless f**king admin does it add to the match.
Last Match Standing matches grinding to a halt every two minutes for a slow ref count, Casket matches dissolving into squabbling over a f**king lid, and then there’s this, WWE managing to crowbar boring faff into a double cage match.
Here’s how it works, audible sigh. You start off inside the small cage, you do a bit of fighting, then call for one of the small doors in that cage to be opened, if it is you’ve got one minute to get through it or it’s locked. So you got the whole faffing around the door bit that WWE insists on putting in their cage matches, but four of them.
Then if you’re still locked in you have to climb out of the cage, then you get to the outside cage, which you then need to climb out of to win.
And all the while you can’t f**king see anything because instead of chainlink fence they’ve put two separate layers of thick bamboo between the audience and the wrestlers. Some stipulations are boring, it’s a special feat to be boring and literally unwatchable.
2. Brawl For All
Oh Jesus. Talk about a concept that failed at every single thing it was trying to accomplish.
The brainchild of Vince Russo, WWE created a shootfight division within its own roster and had them compete in a tournament of Brawl for All matches, which were basically boxing matches between a bunch of men who didn’t know how to box.
It was designed to get over Steve Williams, whoops it immediately injured him, it was designed to get over its roster a super tough bar fighting sumbitches, whoops, it just made its competitors look much less coordinated than the guys who were doing actual, y know, wrestling.
It was designed to promote its new MMA signings, whoops Ken Shamrock wasn’t in it, Steve Blackman got injured, and Dan Severn did one match, then pulled out because he was just so embarrassed and annoyed by it all.
The tournament final between Bradshaw and Bart Gunn looked like two drunks trying to fight on the deck of a ship in a perfect storm.
Dangerous, massively exposing of how fake actual wrestling is, and then Butterbean killed the winner so no one got over. You know the Simpsons bit where Bart and Lisa walk towards each other punching and kicking, that’s brawl for all, and if you watch it then it’s your own fault.
1. Kennel From Hell Match
A Punjabi Prison match with the added bonus of putting innocent dogs in harm’s way. I do not have a sense of humor when it comes to animals being frightened by wrestling matches. Don’t scare animals on purpose.
So it’s a tale as old as time, Bossman kills Al Snow’s dog and feeds it to him, which is literally the most Shakespearean that WWE has ever been, which was blown off in a match that brought together the holy trinity of Hell in a Cell match, Cage match and doggos.
Wrestlers start in the cage, have to escape to the hell in a cell part, then get out the door, with the big twist being that the cell is being patrolled by ravenous bloodthirsty dogs.
Or at least they wanted bloodthirsty dogs, instead, they got a procession of good boys who, overstimulated by the crowd, just decided to focus on what we all do when we get overwhelmed, sex and pooping.
The dogs completely ignored the wrestlers, humped each other, and generally just lived their best lives, hashtag hot pup summer. Widely heralded as one of the worst WWE matches of all time, I mean, yeah. Yeah fair enough.
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