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Why aren't 3-way and 4-way matches a bigger deal?


rzombie1988

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Multi-man matches were always a pretty cool idea to me but let's face it - they are usually treated as unimportant, filler, skippable matches.

 

I think multi-man matches have a lot of benefits to them:

 

- You can do the usual 1v1 storyline/match, but you can layers on top of it

 

- You can form new partners or new feuds

 

- You can stir shit up by having partners/teammates in these

 

- You can tease a match or even have the guys interact a bit, but still keep them away

 

- You can add more fun to the mix if you put titles on the line, especially in situations where the champ doesn't need to get pinned

 

- You can protect people

 

With all of that being said, why can't promotions make 3-ways and 4-ways a thing? It seems easy enough, and the matches should be tons of fun with lots of mayhem going on, but yet no promotion seems to know how to do it right.

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Has anyone ever figured out an effective way to keep everyone involved at all times? That doesn't mean being busy for the sake of it, but it does mean not purposely lying on the outside for several minutes and doing a turn taking match.

 

The only way I can imagine that makes sense is working it like a handicap match - two heels on a face or two faces on a monster heel - and then doing dissension between the pair and a finishing sequence. Otherwise it ends up clumsy and contrived with lots of lying around as you said or overly choreographed planned three-way spots.

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I feel like ROH did a good job trying to keep the 3-4 man matches meaningful but, not all the time certainly. There are plenty of mid card throwaways.

 

Good match examples that come to mind are London vs Low Ki vs AJ from One Year Anniversary & Punk vs Joe vs James Gibson vs Christopher Daniels from Redemption in 2005...There's probably more as I remember Nigel having a 4 way elimination match or two for the belt.

 

I am a fan of multi man matches so, I hope people have other examples of standouts.

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Has anyone ever figured out an effective way to keep everyone involved at all times? That doesn't mean being busy for the sake of it, but it does mean not purposely lying on the outside for several minutes and doing a turn taking match.

 

I think the four corner elimination style with tags is the way to go. Chikara does the four corner tags really well as you get a point per elimination so a team can earn a title shot from that match alone if they eliminate the three other teams.

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I think the answer to the question posed in the thread might be "Because the late 90s/early 00s happened."

 

There was a time when the 3-way or 4-way match was really novel, but then it became a monthly happening on Nitro and RAW and often occurred without a single storyline purpose beyond "let's get more guys in this 24-hour Hardcore Title match because lord knows nobody wants to see Viscera or Pete Gas in a singles match."

 

Oddly, I do think the WWE has done a pretty decent job over the past few years in bringing some "specialness" back to the stipulation. Over just the past few years, I had the matches below at 3.5-4 stars:

 

- Banks vs. Charlotte vs. Bayley vs. Lynch (NXT Takeover: Rival)

- Orton vs. Ambrose vs. Reigns vs. Rollins (Payback 2015, I think?)

- Banks vs. Charlotte vs. Lynch (WrestleMania 32) (only good match on the show, IIRC)

- Zayn vs. Owens vs. Miz vs. Cesaro (Extreme Rules 2016)

 

And I rated Rollins/Cena/Lesnar from Royal Rumble 2015 a very strong 4.5. (And I'm gonna be a bit unapologetic there as Austin called it "the best 3-way he'd ever seen" on his podcast the day after too - so, y'know, even if hindsight that rating is a bit hyperbolic, at the time, I loved it and others did too)

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There have been a smorgasbord of great 3 and 4 way matches on TV over the years, if you're looking for good matches. The pace and bodies and opportunities for spots mean that it's pretty hard to have one that's less than fun at a minimum.

 

On promotion, I think that has been explained, they're usually used to shoehorn as many guys in a match as they can instead of logically building to one, so they become throwaway. Also in the end, it's hard to deny the stronger appeal of the one on one match.

 

But sure they should be used better. So should 6 man tags. So should handicap matches. So should battle royals. So should a lot of things.

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Wanted to chime in with some of the responses.

 

Cena/Rollins/Lesnar was really good. Also enjoyed the Daniels/Ki/Styles one on the very first ROH show. Dragon Gate probably did them the best though and they'd do trios matches with 4 teams which were always tons of fun. I hate to bring up the Barely Legal 3 way, but I remembered enjoying it.

 

>people standing around/laying around

 

The laying around is lazy and lame for sure, but if the guys put effort into purposely going into the corner to get a 2nd wind and stuff, and the announcers actually pushed it, I don't think it would be a problem.

 

>Multi-man matches as filler

 

Definitely one of the problems. Getting guys on the card is no different than wrestlers who "need to get their shit in".

 

>So should battle royals. So should a lot of things.

 

Battle royales are such a great tool that I'm shocked they aren't used more. Toryumon probably did these the best with their "Dragon Scrambles" as they'd do pins and submissions and actually work a match along with the battle royale portion. You can just do so many different storylines and create all kinds of fresh matches out of them. They can be boring for sure, but the potential tools you can work with in those are really great.

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The Scenic City Invitational finals have also been really good four-man matches, albeit with only two guys in the ring at once.

 

Speaking to the unfortunate cliches of a lot of triple threats, I loathe contrived three-man spots. Please no more three-man submissions or superplexes. They almost always look terrible.

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>So should battle royals. So should a lot of things.

 

Battle royales are such a great tool that I'm shocked they aren't used more. Toryumon probably did these the best with their "Dragon Scrambles" as they'd do pins and submissions and actually work a match along with the battle royale portion. You can just do so many different storylines and create all kinds of fresh matches out of them. They can be boring for sure, but the potential tools you can work with in those are really great.

 

I still to this day remember during the Miz/Cena feud from 2009, where Miz was still a midcarder and calling Cena out every week, there was a battle royal on Raw one week. Now Cena wasn't winning it, so Stevie Wonder could have seen that this was the perfect opportunity for Miz to get a little heat on Cena by eliminating him from this battle royal in some sneaky way, just to have something to crow about before he inevitably got beat at the PPV. Like, this was The Miz, he needed all the help he could get. But no, of course he got tossed like a geek, and never laid a single hand on Cena before being beat in 5 minutes at the PPV.

 

It's just an example, like, a battle royal presents these total no brainer opportunities to do something that will build a future match or a wrestler, and so often they just airswing and use them to reinforce the status quo, making them redundant.

 

I think that's why people get so pissy during the Rumble when it's like, hey, this guy was in here for 30 minutes doing all this stuff, and then his elimination is...someone comes in and tosses him like nothing? And then nothing comes of it afterwards. Or the opposite, where a guy who is ALL over TV, and who SHOULD be doing something interesting in the Rumble to set something up...he comes in for 2 minutes and gets tossed by someone irrelevant for no reason. And it's like...huh? It's just, why put all these guys in the same room together if you're not going to do something with it.

 

Anyway, I digress.

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Has anyone ever figured out an effective way to keep everyone involved at all times? That doesn't mean being busy for the sake of it, but it does mean not purposely lying on the outside for several minutes and doing a turn taking match.

 

I think the debut ROH show main event still does the best job of this of any 3-way match I have seen (four ways are inherently different since they usually involve tags). It doesn't look easy. You got to come up with a lot of logical three person spots and transitions .

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Osaka Pro often used to do a great comedy bit on their house shows, kind of lampshading the question of "how do you keep three guys involved at all times."

 

Generally, they would have the other two guys just flat-out ignore Kuishinbou Kamen, leaving the poor guy frustrated and bored to the point where he'd have to get really creative to find someway to occupy his time while the other two guys battled around the ring. Always cracked me up.

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I feel like I've seen a bunch of four-way matches on US indies recently, albeit as undercard fodder. Agreed on the idea that more use of trios matches would make sense, as they have lots of booking flexibility. AJPW-style precursor to main event title matches, WAR-style assembly of fun random dudes, 2013/2014 WWE-style means of continuing storylines without advancing them by just letting good workers go for 20 minutes, keeping a lucha pace, telling two or more stories at once in combining a singles and tag feud, etc.

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The best, on pure interactive work, three-way dance that I've ever seen is the Eddie-Punk-Rey IWA:MS match.

 

I agree with the idea of conscious "divide and conquer" usually being the best formula. From last year, the Ambrose-Lesnar-Reigns & Corbin-Styles-Ziggler matches were put together like this and they were both tremendous.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Watched ROH Final Battle '07 and the 4 man elimination match was a great example of how to do a 4 man match. Guys and finishers were protected and multiple storylines were tackled.

 

In most cases, these type of matches are 'easy night' matches at their roots just like Battle Royals. You can have big name guys or gals in a 'match' without them busting their butts for 20+ minutes and people can saw they saw Joe or Jill Star. Conversely, you can have a those 3-4 people go all out for 10-15 minutes and give the fans something memorable which are the low card dive fests.

 

Its probably much easier for the big names to go into cruise control for 20 so, we only get a handful of great multi man matches a year and even fewer classics :\

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Are the best 4-way matches better than the best 3-way matches generally? And at what point (5-ways, 6-ways, etc.) does it start becoming ridiculous? Just wondering if there are any observable patterns.

 

Yes, I think so. You have the natural pairing off which helps a lot. Also, you tend to see 4 ways with tags in and out (like the Heatwave 96 match), which also improves the flow.

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I don't understand the desire to get so many people on the show. I'd prefer a trios instead of a six-way or something, if you want to go that route.

 

Mentioned above, but SCI is the best multi-man.

I do remember digging the Horsemen vs Rey/Kidman vs Raven/Saturn one in WCW, not sure if it holds up.

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I would like a pay-per-view long Gauntlet Match at some point, especially when it's a theme PPV like Raw vs Smackdown or something. Guys face off in 1:1 matches, then the winner faces someone new, then the winner someone new and so on and so on. So the whole show is a continuous match.

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Lucha kind of does that with cibernetico matches, and they tend to usually be pretty good. Even if there's some guys involved who aren't any good, it's easy to limit them to just a couple of spots where they don't bring things down too much.

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I don't understand the desire to get so many people on the show. I'd prefer a trios instead of a six-way or something, if you want to go that route.

 

Mentioned above, but SCI is the best multi-man.

 

I do remember digging the Horsemen vs Rey/Kidman vs Raven/Saturn one in WCW, not sure if it holds up.

It does. As does Raven/Benoit/DDP. Kidman vs Rey vs Juvi was also a great triple threat. The pinnacle in WWE to me is still probably Benoit/HBK/HHH at WM 20, which seems to have set the template for all WWE triple threats ever since.

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