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Last weekend’s AEW All Out 2020 pay-per-view included a Casino Battle Royal, which is like a regular Battle Royal but with staggered entries into the match. It was clear from watching the match that Will Hobbs lasted a long time, and that stood out because Hobbs is rarely featured on Dynamite. Therefore I wanted to figure out the survival times for all 21 competitors in the Battle Royal, to see where Hobbs ranked.
I did not start the clock for any specific wrestler until he entered the ring. That affected a few folks like Chuck Taylor and Shawn Spears, who were either brawling outside the ring or yakking on commentary, before entering the ring. The exact moments that Ortiz and Spears entered the ring were not caught on camera, so I took my best guess in those cases.
With those caveats out of the way, here is the full list of sorted survival times for this match:
- 16m 08s: Will Hobbs
- 12m 51s: Brian Cage
- 11m 54s: Trent?
- 11m 49s: Eddie Kingston
- 11m 12s: Lance Archer
- 10m 54s: Jake Hager
- 10m 44s: Frankie Kazarian
- 10m 19s: The Butcher
- 9m 36s: Darby Allin
- 8m 20s: Ricky Starks
- 8m 19s: Matt Sydal
- 7m 20s: Rey Fenix
- 7m 10s: Penta El Zero M
- 6m 44s: Ortiz
- 6m 30s: Santana
- 4m 52s: Shawn Spears
- 4m 44s: Christopher Daniels
- 4m 41s: The Blade
- 0m 44s: Sonny Kiss
- 0m 37s: Billy
- 0m 25s: Chuck Taylor
Check that out - Hobbs didn’t just have the longest survival time, there was nobody else within three minutes of his time!
So, where does he go from here? Hobbs competed on AEW Dark this week, rather than Dynamite, so he’s not being rushed into a major push all of a sudden due to his performance in the Casino Battle Royal.
But I don’t think something like this happens by accident. I don’t know if AEW really planned for Hobbs to survive longer than all 20 other wrestlers, but at the very least they wanted to give him a big spotlight on pay-per-view. That’s not happenstance; they must have something interesting planned for Hobbs.
What do you think it is?