Getty Opponents Dustin Poirier and Dan Hooker face off.
The UFC heads back to the octagon on Saturday for UFC Fight Night in Las Vegas as Dustin Poirier takes on Dan Hooker in a matchup of ferocious strikers.
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The prelims (6 p.m. ET start time) and the main card (8 p.m. ET) will both be televised on ESPN, but if you don’t have cable, anyone in the United States can watch every fight via ESPN+ :
Once signed up, you can then watch Poirier vs Hooker and all the fights on your computer via ESPN.com, or you can watch on your phone (Android and iPhone compatible), tablet, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, or other compatible streaming device via the ESPN app.
For all of those options, you’ll need to sign in with your ESPN+ account to watch.
UFC Fight Night: Poirier vs Hooker Preview
The UFC will wrap up a busy month from Las Vegas as Poirier and Hooker face off in a five-round tilt on Saturday with title fight implications.
Poirier is fighting for the first time since last September, when Khabib Nurmagomedov beat him by rear-naked choke for the lightweight title.
A win — especially a convincing one — against Hooker would put Poirier back in the title shot conversation and it could reunite him with an old friend in Justin Gaethje. Poirier was the last man to best Gaethje, who is now the interim champ, having won four fights in a row, including a convincing beat down of Tony Ferguson last month. Gaethje is expected to face Nurmagomedov in a title-unification fight later this year, and Poirier would be eager for a rematch with “The Highlight” if he pulls it out.
“I’m always open to it. It was ‘Fight of the Year,’ I thought, and I’m sure it would be again. I love watching him fight and like I always say, anybody, I’m a fan of watching fights, I would love to fight them because I know we’ll put some craziness on in there,” Poirier said.
Meanwhile, Hooker respects the UFC’s best — and Poirier — but approaches it with a unique perspective having grown up in New Zealand.
“The only reason I come from a very small place in a tiny corner of the world and I’m now here in the most stacked division in the sport with the best fighters in the world is because I don’t put them on a pedestal,” Hooker told CBS Sports’ State of Combat podcast. “I don’t look at these guys as larger than life. I know I’m human and that if I get cut, I bleed. I know that if you grab my head and squeeze hard enough, I will go to sleep. Even though they are huge names in this sport, they are human like me and nothing separates us. All of these guys can be beat.”
Hookers’ last fight was a five-round war in front of a home crowd in New Zealand, which he took in a split decision against Paul Felder. It’ll be a little bit different for Hooker this time around fighting in a mostly empty UFC Apex facility.
“Just going the full five rounds, being under the pressure of a sold-out arena in your hometown — I gained a lot of experience going through that,” Hooker told ESPN. “It’s something that you can mentally prepare for, but in terms of actually going through it, being in that kind of fight, being in a back-and-forth war for the full 25 minutes, I was glad I got to experience that in such a setting.”
Here’s the full card and odds for the fights:
- Dustin Poirier (-220) vs. Dan Hooker (+180)
- Mike Perry (-340) vs. Mickey Gall (+270)
- Brendan Allen (-300) vs. Kyle Daukaus (+240)
- Maurice Greene (-220) vs. Gian Villante (+180)
- Luis Pena (-260) vs. Khama Worthy (+210)