By Jim Dower: Jesus Soto-Karass (27-8-3, 17 KO’s) showed his class tonight in beating the hard hitting Selcuk Aydin 23-2, 17 KO’s) by a 1- round majority decision at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. This was the first fight for Aydin with his new trainer Adam Booth and it really showed.

Aydin looked confused in trying to box the taller Soto-Karass from the outside instead of plodding forward and slugging it out with his old style of fighting. The judges scored the fight 97-93, 97-93 and 95-95. In hindsight, Aydin would have been much better off had he fought using his old style of fighting where he would slug it out.

That’s how Marcos Maidana beat Soto-Karass last year, and it’s surprising that Aydin didn’t try and copy Maidana’s blue print to attempt to beat him. What Maidana had working for him in his win over Soto-Karass was his ability to throw combinations.

Aydin didn’t do that tonight. Instead, he was looking to KO Soto-Karass with single shots and that just wasn’t going to work. Soto-Karass’ chin was too good for Aydin to knock him out with his big shots.

An important factor in Soto-Karass winning the fight tonight was his body punching. Early in the 1st round, Soto-Karass started working over Aydin’s body with hard shots. Aydin backed off and you could see that those shots negatively affected him much more than anything that Soto-Karass was landing to the head.

Most of the guys that fight Aydin look to head hunt, and he’s really good at taking shots to the head. But Soto-Karass used a different strategy by throwing lots of body shots and this caused Aydin to back off and spent most of the fight on the outside to prevent Soto-Karass from landing his hard body shots. Aydin looked like he wasn’t used to fighting guys that throw to the body as much as Soto-Karass.