Wrestlemania is just around the corner, but it isn’t the only wrestling game in town. This past Wednesday saw a slew of fun matches at the CZW Dojo, including two title defenses.

This week was crazy, having not one, but two bonus matches. The extra matches really help with the flow of the evening, meaning the main event doesn’t have to be a crazy multi man elimination match to fill time, so I hope they consider doing it more often. That’s just $0.71 a match, where else are you gonna get that? With two title matches even! Most episodes of Smackdown don’t even have seven matches. On the down side, apparently ring announcer Emil J was MIA, so we got Larry from The Three Stooges instead, hence why some matches have no belltime. And now, on to the action.

This week was the shortest and most straight forward edition of Dojo Wars yet, probably to make up for last time’s excessive run time. It worked out well, as there’s no insane long multi-person matches, just straight up action, without a lot of fluff. There were two title defenses though, and “Alphabet Guy” finally debuted with a steady name, which kind of bums me out, as we were just hitting the complicated letters. I wanted to know what “V” would have been! My Guess? Vivacious Victor. Followed by Wistful William, Xtreme Xavier, Youthful Yancy, and Zesty Zach. But alas, those were not to be.

This week was a mixed bag at the old Dojo Wars with a lot of strange goings on. The ref split his pants almost immediately in the first match, there was a 40 minute 10 person elimination match in which no eliminations happened for a half hour (during which my camera battery died), and oddest of all was a Scepter on a Pole match fought over a trenchcoat. You can’t make this stuff up.

So I’m a little wrestled out this week, this being the 4th wrestling event I’ve attended in person in 5 days, including a Ring of Honor TV taping, a Chikara show, and the Royal Rumble. As such, I’ll be keeping this kind of light. So what if the Rock wasn’t there, and there were no Young Bucks, it was still a fun night of wrestling to be had, including a Lucha de Apuesta, which is certainly not anything I ever thought I’d see at a Dojo Wars.

Dojo Wars makes its triumphant return this week. I missed the last two, what with being sick for one, and then not being able to get out of work early on New Years’s Eve for an EARLY afternoon scheduled show for the other. But it’s OK, I didn’t miss much, besides the first matches from George Gatton and Penelope Ford. This week a ton of wrestlers were there, so there were a lot of large tag matches. Even though there was a title defense of the Wired Championship, the match of the night definitely belonged to Andrew Wolf.

There were a ton of people who came out this week for Dojo Wars. Unfortunately they were all other wrestlers. That’s because this week was the first week of the new Dojo Wars format. Now it is an actual Dojo War, where students from two different wrestling schools face off throughout the night. I like the new format, as it lends itself to more unpredictability and an influx of new talent we haven’t seen before, plus less repetition in matchmaking, so hopefully no more best-of-9 match series. This week, the home team lead by trainer Drew Gulak faced off against the students from Biff Busick’s training academy.

I missed the last few CZW events becasue I was on the opposite coast at Comikaze. Looks like they did a good job at those shows promoting tonight’s event, as the crowd was almost entirely new faces and only about 3 regulars, coming out to witness the finale of the Tournament of Valor. This lead to a somewhat quiet crowd that didn’t really react or know when to get involved, but the show was still good. Any show that ends in a locker room clearing brawl is always good, right? So let’s hop right to it!