[mathw]

More or less zero, yeah, because in general aikidoka don't train to fight in the UFC.

This comes up again and again. Aikido's useless in MMA competitions, useless in cage fighting, useless in UFC. So what! If you want to do these things, do them. Find the best path to success in them. Don't expect me to want the same things out of life and my training and my art.

Aikido gives me physical and mental discipline and training. It gives me something deep and rich and fascinating to explore (but based on very, very simple rules with a lot of emergent complexity). It gives me a very solid, very reliable self-defence system if I want it. All these things are taught at my dojo - the latter starting with how not to have a fight in the first place. Conflict de-escalation is a vitally important part of self-defence. Why would I go to a competition where fighting is the purpose if I don't want to fight? That's why we do aikido.

Someone's going to think they're being witty by claiming that we don't want to fight because we can't. I have no illusions on my ability to "deal with" attacks from a skilled boxer, that's going to be fast, accurate, relentless and full of misdirections and feints designed to get an opening against someone else with the same kind of skillset. They're also highly unlikely to be the person who's accosted me in a dark street demanding I hand over my wallet. That scenario I can do something about. Or at least attempt to - who says I'm going to win? But I can give it a really good shot.

So don't judge my aikido against your arbitrary standards. Those standards are not why I'm doing it, and ultimately "successful in the UFC" means nothing in the world I'm interested in. For what I want it for, aikido works.

Background: I'm a 2nd dan in Yoshinkan aikido, taking 3rd dan this July, hopefully. I do a mix of my own training and some teaching.

[stefantheard]

You should take a look at Rokas Leo's journey on youtube. I feel his journey is identical to what any open minded aikidoka will go down eventually. He trained for 13 years before beginning his journey and only recently got to the tail end and made a few important distinctions about why he will keep training aikido and how his teaching techniques will change, similar to a lot of the stuff you have echoed here.

edit: with some exceptions, he no longer believes aikido can help with self defense in any form (including against untrained attackers) at this point but does believe it has great benefits for other reasons.