Ryan Garcia refuses to pay Arman Tsarukyan $40,000, says he was set up on stream

Ryan Garcia says he will never pay Arman Tsarukyan the $40,000 the UFC lightweight contender claims he is owed from a bet made during an April Kick livestream, insisting the challenge was rigged against him from the start.

The dispute originated when Garcia appeared on a stream with Tsarukyan and accepted a wager that he could not drop one of Tsarukyan’s teammates with a body shot. Garcia attempted the challenge twice and failed, but he argues the terms were quietly altered in Tsarukyan’s favour before he even threw a punch.

“There’s no way I will ever pay him,” Garcia told Complex. “[Tsarukyan] told me himself — because I was going to hit him — he told me, these were his words: ‘No, brother, it’s unfair, because if you hit me, I’m a fighter, I know how to take it, so it’s not fair.’ So I was like, ‘OK, cool, cool, cool, that makes sense.’ And then this random dude that I thought was a security guard comes up.”

Garcia’s core objection is that Tsarukyan presented a trained fighter rather than an untrained individual, which he believes violated the spirit of the original bet. He also says he was restricted to a specific target area and was only permitted two attempts instead of the agreed three. “I only hit him twice, I was supposed to hit him three times. I was like, ‘No, this is not right. I don’t like how this is going,’” he said.

Despite initially telling Tsarukyan he would hand over the money, Garcia says that offer was never genuine. He followed up by sparring Tsarukyan’s teammate — a man he described as a real fighter carrying roughly 40 pounds more than Garcia’s 160-pound frame — to demonstrate he was not backing down from the physical side of the challenge.

“I was like, ‘Bro, I’m right here. You drop me. You’re a real fighter. Let’s go,’” Garcia said. “I feel like I got played. You come try to take the money from me. Come get it.”

Tsarukyan has since escalated his counter-offers, proposing $100,000 if Garcia completes eight rounds of boxing with him, and $1 million if Garcia can survive a single round of MMA. Garcia has not accepted either proposal. As for the original debt, his answer is unambiguous: “It’s in my pocket.”