Cageside Community Star Ratings for WWE Elimination Chamber 2023

After every WWE PPV premium live event, we ask you all to rank each match on the show using the star rating system made famous by Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer.

The results are in from Elimination Chamber, WWE’s last big stop on the Road to WrestleMania 39. Below you’ll see how our little corner of the wrestle web graded what happened in the ring on Feb. 18 from Montreal — and how our subjective grades compare to Meltzer’s.

Many have asked “why Dave?”, which to me is fairly obvious. Love, hate, or don’t care about him, the Observer Star Rating is the proverbial industry standard. No one else’s are tracked by Wikipedia and other web outlets. You can’t place online bets on what grades other pundits will give big matches.

But in order to not make this all about Meltz, we added another fan-voted rating to the mix - this one from Cagematch. That site uses a ten point scale, so we’ve halved their ratings for ease of comparison.

Here’s what that all looks like:

There are rarely huge disagreements between the systems, but this is about as in alignment as they’ve ever been. The biggest difference between our Community and Meltzer is on Bobby Lashley’s disqualification victory over Brock Lesnar, which Dave liked a lot more than we did (Brock hitting Bobby in the nuts did win our “Match of the Night” poll from immediately after the show — but I’m 99.9% sure that was the result of some folks whose lives are so sad they don’t have anything better to do but aggressively troll polls on pro wrestling sites).

Cagematch doesn’t allow ratings on sub-five minute matches, so we don’t know whose side they would have taken on Lesnar/Lashley. We do know their users were much more critical of the Women’s Elimination Chamber match won by Asuka. That was the other biggest delta between Cagesiders and one of the alternative scores.

Our trashing of Bobby & Brock’s outing, and being tough graders of the mixed tag, brought down our average score for this five match show. That left Elimination Chamber 2023 in the middle of the pack when it came to WWE’s PLEs over the past 12 months, despite being the Observer & Cagematch’s highest rated over the same time period:

Do Cageside’s Community Ratings match up with your personal ones? Any final thoughts on Elimination Chamber?