Better Gabe Sapolsky Promotion

[The Bearded One]

In late 2008 Gabe Sapolsky parted ways with the company he had been the long-time booker of, Ring of Honor. In the time since, Sapolsky has began booking two new upstart promotions in America. The first one is Dragon Gate USA. This promotion uses many stars from the Dragon Gate company in Japan along with the top American independent workers. DGUSA has high-paced, energetic and chaotic matches that can leave the viewer exhausted just from watching them. Earlier this year, Sapolsky's other promotion, Evolve Wrestling, held it's inaugural show. This promotion is a more realistic approach focusing on sportsmanship and athleticism in the ring. It also features major independent stars as well as Japanese wrestlers, such as Kota Ibushi.

My question to you is, which one of Gabe Sapolsky's promotions are better? I know this is only an opinion and there is no right or wrong answer, but I think it would be interesting to see which promotion people find better and why they feel that way.

To me, although both promotions feature many of the same domestic wrestlers, I like Evolve Wrestling more. Even though I've only seen the first couple of shows, I have enjoyed the shows more than the DGUSA shows. I also like the sportsmanship aspect and how wins and losses factor into the equation. It seems to me this helps creates storylines more naturally than in DGUSA, where the storylines just seem forced at best. After the first few shows of DGUSA, everything has just fallen flat to me. Granted, I haven't seen Mercury Rising yet, and I've heard great things about the 6 man tag. But to me, Evolve Wrestling is the more enjoyable product.

What do you think?

 

[X]

You know if you had asked me this question six months ago I would have said Dragon Gate USA without much hesitation. They put on just a phenomenal string of PPV events over the course of their first 6+ months of existence, events that had me begging for more than just the two hours every 3 months we get. However, since EVOLVE debuted in January, they've been putting on consistently better shows than DGUSA have in my eyes. DGUSA is still great, and it's always refreshing to see the Dragon Gate crew do their thing every few months after so much WWE and TNA TV, but EVOLVE just seems like the more focused promotion. DGUSA doesn't really have any angles or storylines working aside from continuing over the stable wars that are happening over in the homebase of Dragon Gate in Japan, but EVOLVE has been consistently building angles with guys like Chuck Taylor, Chris Hero and Bobby Fish among many others (keep your eyes on Fish, his stock is only going to go up on the indy scene). Not to mention they've simply been offering more consistently excellent wrestling over the last 6 months or so (see: Chris Hero vs. Ikuto Hidaka, Chuck Taylor vs. Claudio Castagnoli, etc) than DGUSA has.

Can't wait to see Bryan Danielson's contributions to both promotions when they release their next shows though, that should be great. Damn shame about Davey Richards not being able to have as big of a role in EVOLVE or DGUSA as Gabe had intended, but of course ROH has to be a dick to Gabe.

I follow both promotions very closely though and look forward to each and every show they produce, so you really can't go wrong with watching either company.