TOP DOG 43 is scheduled for Saturday 26 September 2026 at the CSKA Arena in Moscow, with an 18:00 Moscow-time start. It is an eight-bout bare-knuckle card carrying two championship fights, and the main event is a rematch sixteen months in the making: welterweight champion Nabi "Hannibal" Gadzhiev (Наби «Ганнибал» Гаджиев) against former champion Denis Pogodin (Денис Погодин), the last man to challenge him for the belt.
Top Dog Fighting Championship announced the card in early August 2026. Almost all of the reporting on it exists only in Russian, and the details below are drawn from the promotion's own website, from Sport-Express and from AllBoxing, with fighter records taken from Top Dog's official fighter pages. Where sources disagree, and on division naming they do, that is flagged rather than smoothed over.
TOP DOG 43 Full Card
Eight bouts have been announced, inclusive of the main event. Top Dog frequently adds fights close to an event date, so the list below reflects the card as announced in August 2026. Bout order has not been published: the numbering is the order in which the promotion and the Russian press listed the fights, not a running order.
| # | Bout | Division | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nabi "Hannibal" Gadzhiev vs Denis Pogodin | Welterweight (77kg) | Title fight, rematch |
| 2 | Kantemir "Liquidator" Kalazhokov vs Yuri "Konung" Bukharov | Lightweight (70kg) | Title fight |
| 3 | Vitaly "Ancient" Starykh vs Sergey "Kratos" Kalinin | Not announced | |
| 4 | Nikolay "Chibis" Chibisov vs Danila "Gatti" Chizhov | Not announced | |
| 5 | Andrey "Belyy" Akimov vs Artem "Tungus" Tungusov | Not announced | |
| 6 | Alexander Khalzov vs Azamat "Kaskyr" Yespay | Not announced | |
| 7 | Pavel "Berserk" Shelest vs Abdulkadyr "Avarets" Gadzhiev | Not announced | |
| 8 | Valery "Valera" Zabotin vs Yuri "Assiriets" Ryaboi | Not announced |
Names on this card are transliterated inconsistently across Russian outlets, and the surnames vary as much as the nicknames. Chibisov turns up as Чибисов and Чбисов; Tungusov appears elsewhere as Tungusnov and Tungulov; «Аварец» is rendered Avarets and Avarez. The Cyrillic originals are the reliable identifiers, and a name that does not match here is usually the same fighter under a different romanisation.
Weight limits for the six undercard bouts have not been published. Top Dog operates six divisions, and the two title fights are the only bouts on this card with a confirmed division.
The Main Event: Why Gadzhiev vs Pogodin II Matters
The first fight, at TOP DOG 36 on 10 May 2025 in St Petersburg, was the best argument for making a second one.
Pogodin, a boxer from Kaluga listed by Top Dog as 36 years old and 185cm, dropped Gadzhiev twice in the opening round. He had the champion hurt, in a five-round championship format that gives a fighter very little time to recover — Top Dog title bouts run five rounds of two minutes, so a bad first round is a fifth of the fight gone. Gadzhiev survived it. From the third round the fight turned, and it ended in the fourth when Gadzhiev's pressure produced another knockdown sequence and Pogodin's corner intervened. The official result is a fourth-round technical knockout, and it was a successful defence of the 77kg belt.
That last point is worth spelling out, because English write-ups get it wrong. Gadzhiev did not take the title from Pogodin. He won the vacant 77kg belt at TOP DOG 31 on 27 September 2024 at the G-Drive Arena in Omsk, stopping Alexander "Pitbull" Tatarsky in the first round. Pogodin had held the division before that and came back to the promotion as a challenger after a spell away, which is why Russian previews of TOP DOG 36 billed him as the returning former champion rather than the reigning one.
Gadzhiev is from Makhachkala, in Dagestan, fights out of a Muay Thai base and is listed by Top Dog at 186cm with a 190cm reach. The promotion's own fighter page carries him at 10-3 in Top Dog competition. Pogodin is listed at 7-1, a record that counts only his Top Dog bouts, and independent Russian fight databases give him different figures again. Record numbers for bare-knuckle fighters in Russia are inconsistent between sources; Top Dog's own are used here.
Pogodin earned the rematch the hard way. He beat Muzarin Mizaushev at TOP DOG 40 in December 2025, then took a unanimous decision over Pavel "Berserk" Shelest at TOP DOG 42 on 6 June 2026 at the SKA Arena in St Petersburg — three rounds in which he controlled distance rather than chasing the finish, a noticeably different approach to the one that nearly won him the title in 2025 and then lost him the fight.
02 / Up next / Co-Main: Kalazhokov Defends an Unbeaten Record
That is the tactical question the rematch asks. Pogodin has proved he can hurt Gadzhiev early; he has also, since, shown he can win a measured three-round fight on the cards. A five-round title bout requires both, and requires him to solve the problem that beat him last time, which was Gadzhiev's ability to keep coming forward after being badly hurt.
Co-Main: Kalazhokov Defends an Unbeaten Record
Kantemir "Liquidator" Kalazhokov (Кантемир «Ликвидатор» Калажоков) carries the strongest record of any current Top Dog champion. The promotion's own fighter page lists him at 15-0 in Top Dog competition, in the 70kg lightweight division. He is 29, 183cm, and comes from a boxing background.
He has held the lightweight belt since December 2022. His most recent defence came at TOP DOG 42 on 6 June 2026 at the SKA Arena in St Petersburg, where he knocked out Alexander Khalzov, the same Khalzov who reappears on the TOP DOG 43 undercard. Before that, at TOP DOG 41 on 7 February 2026 at the Siberia Arena in Novosibirsk, he beat Ivan "Mastak" Nushkin by unanimous decision (50-45, 49-46, 50-45) in a title rematch, two years after beating the same man at TOP DOG 27 in February 2024.
Yuri "Konung" Bukharov (Юрий «Конунг» Бухаров) is a very different proposition. He is 25, 173cm, fights from a sambo base, and Top Dog lists him at 4-3. He beat Azamat "Kaskyr" Yespay by second-round technical knockout at TOP DOG 40 in December 2025, and Yespay is also on the TOP DOG 43 card, against Khalzov. On the promotion's own numbers this is a champion in a different tier to his challenger, though Kalazhokov's last two defences went one each way, a decision over Nushkin and a knockout of Khalzov, so the format is not a reliable guide to how it ends.
Undercard Continuity
Top Dog's matchmaking rewards regular viewers, and several TOP DOG 43 bouts carry direct threads from June's card in St Petersburg.
Pavel "Berserk" Shelest, beaten on points by Pogodin at TOP DOG 42, returns against Abdulkadyr "Avarets" Gadzhiev, who lost a unanimous decision to Andrey "Belyy" Akimov on that same TOP DOG 42 card. Akimov, in turn, fights Artem "Tungus" Tungusov here. Shelest is also one of the few men to have beaten Nabi Gadzhiev, having done so at TOP DOG 18, which gives the promotion an obvious storyline to pull on if the main event goes the champion's way.
Valery "Valera" Zabotin, matched with Yuri "Assiriets" Ryaboi, has the longest institutional memory on the card: he was Pogodin's first Top Dog opponent, back at TDFC 12.
The Format: What You Are Actually Watching
Anyone coming to Top Dog from BKFC or gloved boxing should understand that the rule set is not the same, and neither is the equipment.
- Completely bare hands. No gloves, no wraps, no tape. BKFC permits taping of the wrist, thumb and mid-hand; Top Dog permits nothing.
- Three rounds of two minutes for regular bouts; five rounds of two minutes for championship bouts. Regular bouts can be drawn. Title fights must produce a winner.
- Punches only, standing only. Closed-fist and open-palm strikes are legal, including from the clinch, along with shoulder strikes. Kicks, elbows, ground fighting and spinning strikes such as the backfist are banned. A fighter who goes down is stood back up rather than followed to the floor.
- A ten-second knockdown count, as in conventional boxing.
- Jeans or sweatpants and trainers, not trunks and boxing boots. It is a branding rule rather than a safety one.
- A circular hay bale ring five metres across, rather than ropes or a cage, so there are no corners to cut a fighter off in.
The full breakdown is on our Top Dog FC rules page, and the broader division landscape is covered in our underground fighting weight classes guide.
Top Dog's six active divisions run from featherweight, at 64kg, to heavyweight, at over 93kg. A seventh class at 59kg was dropped in May 2026. The two divisions on this card sit in the middle of that structure:
| Division | Limit | Champion |
|---|---|---|
| Welterweight | 77kg | Nabi Gadzhiev |
| Lightweight | 70kg | Kantemir Kalazhokov |
A note on naming, because English-language aggregation gets this wrong repeatedly. Top Dog's own listings and the Russian trade press call the 77kg class полусредний вес, welterweight. Machine translation routinely renders that as "middleweight", which is the label Top Dog actually uses for its separate 84kg division. If a source describes the Gadzhiev-Pogodin fight as a middleweight bout, that is the error you are looking at. Go by the weight limit: 77kg and 70kg.
The Venue: CSKA Arena
The CSKA Arena is the venue Top Dog now uses for its biggest Moscow cards. Founded by Danil "Regbist" Aleyev and Mikhail Zharakhovich, the promotion staged its first tournament in a Moscow-City car park on 27 December 2019 and built its following through 2020 on cheaply filmed cards uploaded to YouTube. The hay bale ring dates from those car-park events and was kept as a visual signature once the promotion moved indoors.
06 / Up next / Watching TOP DOG 43
The arena has hosted Top Dog's biggest nights. TOP DOG 37 on 5 July 2025 was headlined by Aleyev himself against Alex Terrible, the Slaughter to Prevail vocalist, whose real name is Alexander Shikolay; Aleyev won on a unanimous decision. TOP DOG 40 on 27 December 2025 closed the year there with a 20-fight card and a 16:00 start to fit it all in.
Set against TOP DOG 40's twenty fights, TOP DOG 43's eight is a tighter evening: two title bouts and six supporting fights rather than a marathon. For more on the promotion's history in the city, see our guide to underground fighting in Moscow and the wider picture in underground fighting in Russia.
Watching TOP DOG 43
In Russia, the card is due to be broadcast by the UDAR television channel (телеканал «Удар»), a dedicated combat-sports channel. Top Dog also distributes through its own site, its YouTube channel and RUTUBE, though which platforms carry a given event live rather than as a delayed upload varies from card to card.
No international or English-language broadcast arrangement for TOP DOG 43 has been announced. Viewers outside Russia have historically relied on Top Dog's own digital channels, and full events have generally appeared on the promotion's YouTube channel after the fact, with Russian commentary. Our guide to watching Top Dog FC covers the platforms in detail and is the better reference for that question than anything on this page.
Tickets are sold through the promotion's official site. Prices have not been verified here and are not quoted.
What Has Not Been Confirmed
Being explicit about the gaps is more useful than filling them:
- Undercard weight classes. Only the two title bouts have a confirmed division.
- Bout order and any main-card/prelim split. Not published.
- Ticket prices. Not verified.
- Additional bouts. Top Dog routinely adds fights in the weeks before an event. Eight is the announced number, not necessarily the final one.
- Any international broadcast. Nothing has been announced, and no English-language commentary has been confirmed.
- Full records for the undercard fighters. Russian databases disagree with one another and with Top Dog's own pages; only records taken directly from the promotion's fighter profiles are quoted above.
Why This Card Is Worth Attention
Top Dog is the largest bare-knuckle promotion in Eastern Europe, with a YouTube channel of more than 1.7 million subscribers. It still receives almost no English-language coverage, which means that a card carrying two championship fights, a rematch of a title bout that nearly went the other way, and an unbeaten champion defending, passes largely unreported outside Russia.
The main event is the draw. Gadzhiev was two knockdowns into a disastrous opening round in May 2025 and won anyway; Pogodin has spent sixteen months rebuilding a case for a second attempt. Five rounds of two minutes with completely unwrapped hands is an unforgiving format for both of them.
For the wider context, see our Top Dog FC major events history and our ranking of the top 10 Top Dog FC fighters.
Sources: Top Dog FC official site (card, fighter records and profiles); Sport-Express and AllBoxing (TOP DOG 43 announcement, date, venue, broadcaster); Sport24 (Gadzhiev's vacant-title win at TOP DOG 31); Sports.ru (TOP DOG 40, 41 and 42 results); Russian Wikipedia (weight divisions, founders, rule set). This page will be updated when the card is finalised and after the event.
