Why watch independent wrestling? TrillerTV won’t pixelate the blood, for one thing. That’s a joke, but only kind of. Indie promotions can take risks that larger televised companies can’t. They’re the closest thing wrestling still has to the territory days. Regional scenes develop their own ecosystems with unique crowds, personalities, and ways of doing wrestling. Indie promotions have more freedom to take risks and fewer people telling them no.
That might mean building an entire promotion around unusual characters like JCW’s cocaine-addicted zombies, a niche style like Horror Slam’s collision of horror and deathmatch wrestling, a specific audience like Hoodslam’s fiercely loyal Oakland crowd, or an alternate universe where the local government is actually a wrestling faction and bureaucratic disputes can sometimes be solved with a moonsault.
Indie wrestling can collapse the distance between fame and fan. Danhausen is known to work national television one month and a no-ring show in a glorified backyard the next. The joy isn’t only finding tomorrow’s stars, though that's where they come from. It’s also seeing what wrestling looks like before anyone has standardized it.
I love the indies. If you don’t already, I think you will. Streaming options make it easier than ever to catch wild shows from all over the world. Plus, supporting independent artists is cool. Everyone’s doing it.
Favorites and B-Sides
Many watch guides eventually settle into a comfort zone, featuring a dozen or so of the easiest promotions to stream, find, and recommend. I love the kind of serialized storylines that require cult-like devotion, but I also love new gems, and you should too. September is a good time to break out of your comfort zone and check out a company you’ve maybe never even heard of.
Dirt Sheet Radio’s monthly how-to-watch can never cover everything happening in independent wrestling around the world. Instead, this month's guide focuses on promotions we haven't spent much time with before, from a three-night trios tournament in Philadelphia and a Toronto lucha program to a Newcastle company wrestling inside a brewery and one of Pittsburgh's best indies preparing to close for good.
And then there's our featured promotion, Hoodslam. The Oakland promotion gets this month's featured spot with a deeper look at the strange world the Dark Sheik has built around wrestling, performance art, nightlife, and Northern California counterculture in general.
Best Bets
Best wrestling weekend: Power Pro Lucha’s Attack on Trios, Sept. 4-6
Show with the most emotional stakes: Enjoy Wrestling’s Five Years, Sept. 5
Best deathmatch event: CZW Tournament of Death XXIII, Sept. 5-6
Best look at the next wave of indie talent: ETU Wrestling’s All I Want 4, Sept. 19
Best Canadian discovery: Demand Lucha’s Masked by Midnight, Sept. 17
Best international discovery: NORTH Wrestling’s Thunder Road, Sept. 19
Deep cut: Horror Slam’s Masters of HorrorCore, Sept. 4
Power Pro Lucha
Attack on Trios
When: Friday through Sunday, Sept. 4-6
Night One: Friday at 8 p.m. ET
Night Two: Saturday at 6 p.m. ET
Night Three: Sunday at 6 p.m. ET
Where: Arlen Specter US Squash Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Where to Watch: Live on IWTV
Cost: IWTV lists each night as a PPV available through a subscription or 1,000 tokens
Why Watch
Power Pro Lucha’s three-day event is an easy recommendation. This is a great promotion for anyone who misses wrestling with elaborate teams, masks, over-the-top characters, and complete earnestness. Over three nights, Attack on Trios, Triple Tech Tournament brings together 16 wildly diverse teams for a battle of “titanic proportions.” The enormous bracket pulls from lucha libre, joshi, and several generations and styles of American independent wrestling.
The structure is cool and fairly unique. Instead of assembling a card around a few big names and recognizable singles matches, Power Pro Lucha invites fans to follow teams across the entire weekend. This is a good pick for fans who like wrestling to feel like opening a comic book halfway through and making up the rest of the mythology as you go.
Can’t commit to the whole weekend? No problem. Each card has enough happening that viewers can drop in for one night and still get a full show. For example, Night 2 includes the six-person Ace of the Skies ladder match, which gives the tournament a break without abandoning the promotion's maximalist instincts.
Matches and Teams to Watch
The field includes Modern Age Violence (Jonathan Gresham, Dominic Garrini and Kevin Ku); Team Lodestone (Janai Kai, Amira and Gabby Forza); Spectral Envoy (UltraMantis Black, Hallowicked and Frightmare); GummiBurger (Cheeseburger, Boar and Erica Leigh); Team ChocoPro (Emi Sakura, Baliyan Akki and Mei Suruga); Mala Fama (Skayde, Toxin and Látigo); The Colony (Ultimo Ant, Electro Ant and Thief Ant); F.I.S.T. (Travis Huckabee, Ryan Mooney and Myung-Jae Lee); High-Flying Star Machines (Bojack, Diego Hill and BK Westbrook); The Delinquents (Josh Fuller, Saul Esparza and Mikey Banker); Wilde LLC (Dr. Ethan Wilde, Dylan Mesh and Journey Burke, Esq.); The Very Good State Champs (Avery Good Professional Wrestler, David Moses and Sal Mistretta); BIG League Chew (BIG CALLUX, Shea McCoy and Weber Hatfield); Thicc & Thin Party (Andy Brown, Billy Avery and Unicorn Party); The Tetrominoes (Z Block, T Block and O Block); and Hands of Fate (Nemesis, Moros and Eris).
Enjoy Wrestling
Five Years
When: Saturday, Sept. 5, at 7 p.m. ET
Where: Mr. Smalls Theatre, Millvale, Pennsylvania
Where to watch: No live stream has been announced. Enjoy has made most of its previous events available for free on YouTube, so watch the promotion’s official channels for an eventual release.
Why Watch
Enjoy Wrestling announced on August 26th that it will close after three final events. Five Years is the second of those events and the promotion's final show at Mr. Smalls Theatre, its long-term home base. The final farewell follows on October 4th at Tacomania.
Enjoy began during the pandemic, initially filming on a closed set. It grew into one of Pittsburgh's most distinctive independent promotions. By the time Enjoy closes its doors for good, it will have hosted 36 events, most of them available for free on YouTube. The company became particularly notable for consistently booking LGBTQ wrestlers and cultivating an explicitly welcoming audience. At Enjoy, inclusion never felt like a promotional gimmick. Five Years is weightier than a traditional anniversary card since Enjoy has already announced there will not be a Sixth.
Independent wrestling companies disappear all the time, sometimes without even getting the chance to say goodbye, and Enjoy is getting one last night in the building most closely associated with it. That alone makes it worth finding when the video becomes available.
Scheduled to Appear
Lee Moriarty, the Amazing Red, The Butcher and The Blade, and Dark Sheik are among the wrestlers scheduled to appear, but expect additional Enjoy Wrestling regulars and guests to be added to the card.
COMBAT ZONE WRESTLING
Tournament of Death XXIII
When: Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 5-6
· Event begins: 2 p.m. ET
· IWTV stream: Currently listed for 4 p.m. ET
Where: Townsend, Delaware
Where to watch: Live on IWTV
Cost: IWTV lists each night as a PPV available through subscription access or 1,000 tokens
Why Watch
Combat Zone Wrestling has been associated with ultraviolent wrestling for over a quarter century, and Tournament of Death, now in its 23rd “installment,” is the most distilled version of that. There’s no point pretending this is a recommendation for everyone. Tournament of Death centers on death matches: weapons, blood, and escalating violence. But in wrestling, as in all things, not for everyone doesn’t mean not for anyone. This is a great promotion with a pretty stacked card. The draw is getting to see some of the best deathmatch wrestlers pushed through multiple rounds over a weekend, rather than watching one hardcore match dropped into an otherwise conventional card.
IWTV has both nights listed live, with Night 2 carrying the survivors through the rest of the tournament. CZW has always been more varied than its deathmatch reputation suggests, but the balance has shifted considerably over 27 years. The promotion that once became synonymous with ultraviolence now runs a broader mix of conventional indie wrestling, younger talent, and occasional showcases of the extreme style that made its name.
Tournament of Death is a direct line back to the brutal identity that made the promotion internationally recognizable. For deathmatch-curious viewers or those looking for the style beyond GCW and the handful of names that dominate social media clips, this is a must-have historical rabbit hole.
First-Round Matches
Bear Bronson vs. Alex Colon
Nathan Mowery vs. SLADE
Nino Extremo vs. Joe Dred
Dimitri Alexandrov vs. Tim Strange
Jamesen Shook vs. Eric Dillinger
Eric Ryan vs. Toby Kline
SHLAK vs. Aeroboy for the CZW Ultraviolent Championship
CZW World Championship: Eran Ashe (c) vs. AKIRA, Exploding Barbed Wire Deathmatch
Horror Slam Pro Wrestling
Masters of HorrorCore
When: Friday, Sept. 4, at 7:30 p.m. ET
Where: Special Taste Hall, Livonia, Michigan
Where to watch: No live stream is advertised. Jobber Radio reports that matches are scheduled to appear later through Hardcam Frio’s channel.
Why Watch
Horror Slam is what happens when a Michigan regional wrestling promotion decides Halloween and underground horror shouldn't be confined to October. And I happen to agree.
The company has a devoted Livonia audience and shows built around cards that shift between conventional wrestling, hardcore matches, and genuinely gory deathmatches. Earlier shows have included everything from conventional title bouts to light tubes and weapons, as well as its annual Murder City Deathmatch Cup, which attracts wrestlers on the national deathmatch circuit.
Masters of HorrorCore is very accessible by Horror Slam standards. It’s also exactly the kind of promotion this guide is useful for. Horror Slam is not difficult to understand, but it is difficult to stumble across until somebody tells you about it.
Matches
Dean Hendrix vs. Matt Cross for the Horror Slam Heavyweight Championship
Terminate on Sight vs. Triple Platinum for the Horror Slam Tag Team Championship
The Pillars vs. Mickie Knuckles & Tara Zep
Dr. Redacted vs. Robert Katchem
Mad Man Pondo vs. Anakin Murphy
Breyer Wellington vs. TJK
DEMAND LUCHA
When: Thursday, Sept. 17; hype-up party at 7 p.m. ET, wrestling at 8 p.m. ET
Where: Parkdale Hall, Toronto, Ontario
Where to watch: Demand Lucha has an extensive archive on IWTV, but a live IWTV listing for the Sept. 17 event has not been confirmed as of Aug. 28.
Why Watch
Toronto has its own increasingly crowded indie ecosystem. Demand Lucha is a user-friendly entry point to the parts of that ecosystem shaped by lucha. The promotion runs regularly from Parkdale Hall and has built its cards around masked wrestlers, Canadian indie talent and visiting luchadores rather than simply trying to reproduce an American televised product.
The main attraction announced for Masked by Midnight is Gringo Loco against Shotzi Blackheart for the Lucha Premier Championship. Both were advertised as featured guests before Demand Lucha confirmed the title match. Demand also has a sizable backlog on IWTV, including the 2025 edition of Masked by Midnight, which makes this a particularly easy promotion to sample while waiting for the September show release.
Marcus Mathers Presents All I Want 4
When: Saturday, Sept. 19, at 7 p.m. ET
Where: The Mecca, Ridgefield Park, New Jersey
Where to watch: Live on IWTV
Why Watch
ETU stands for Expect The Unexpected, but the promotion says it wants to build its own version of traditional Tri-State professional wrestling. All I Want 4 is presented with Marcus Mathers, and the card is essentially a snapshot of wrestlers moving between the regional independents, GCW, AEW, ROH, WWE’s ID system, and other larger platforms.
The appeal here is timing. Indie wrestling is full of periods when several wrestlers seem to be moving upward simultaneously, and ETU has assembled a card featuring a lot of people currently living in that space.
If the goal of an indie watch guide is partly to introduce wrestlers before everybody already knows who they are, this is exactly the kind of show it should include. I may talk ad nauseam about storylines, but every wrestling fan should appreciate a great match between up-and-comers.
Matches and Scheduled Appearances
Marcus Mathers vs. Tyler Breeze
Aaron Rourke vs. Billie Starkz
Dustin Waller vs. Gravity
Joey Janela vs. Avery Styles
Janai Kai
Cappuccino Jones
Additional matches to be announced.
NORTH WRESTLING
NCL.71: Thunder Road
When: Saturday, Sept. 19; doors at noon ET, first bell approximately 1:30 p.m. ET
Where: Anarchy Brew Co, Newcastle upon Tyne, England
Where to watch: NORTH releases complete events after they happen through Patreon, TrillerTV+ and YouTube. No live broadcast has been announced for Thunder Road.
Why Watch
British wrestling doesn’t begin and end with the promotions that regularly appear on American streaming schedules.
NORTH Wrestling has operated out of Newcastle for a decade. Its DIY identity centers on small-room crowds, a punk-rock atmosphere, and a willingness to put wildly different kinds of wrestling on the same card. Past NORTH events have mixed British technical wrestling, comedy, lucha libre, character-heavy storytelling and harder-edged matches, including an Ultraviolent Championship.
Its commentary team includes Veda Scott and Cultaholic’s Tom Campbell. A documentary about the promotion, Watch the Lights, won a Royal Television Society North East & Borders award in 2025.
Thunder Road returns NORTH to Anarchy Brew Co, a working brewery that regularly hosts the promotion’s rowdier Newcastle events. The full September card is still being assembled, but NORTH makes most of its shows available after the fact through multiple platforms.
If EVE, RevPro and PROGRESS are already familiar, NORTH is a good next stop for exploring the current British independent scene.
ALSO WORTH CHECKING
880 Wrestling’s Thursday Night Fights streams free every Thursday at 8 p.m. ET through IndyWrestling.US. The Pittsburgh promotion is especially easy to sample because it requires no subscription or PPV decision.
Returning Favorites in September
Juggalo Championship Wrestling: JCW Lunacy continues free throughout September on the Psychopathic Records YouTube channel. Catch up on anything you missed at BloodyMania 19.
Game Changer Wrestling: GCW has three September shows currently scheduled for TrillerTV+: Mind Your Business on Sept. 11, No Signal in the Hills 5 on Sept. 12 and Rock Bottom on Sept. 25.
TNA Wrestling: Thursday Night iMPACT! continues on AMC and AMC+ in the U.S. and TNA+ internationally, including a live Sept. 24 episode from San Antonio.
Primos Premier Pro Wrestling: Denver’s Primos returns to the Roxy Theatre Sept. 26-27 for Slave to the Deathmatch XVII; the promotion has streamed previous events through TrillerTV+, although a stream for this year’s tournament has not yet been announced. Read more about Primos Premier Pro Wrestling.
Lucha Libre AAA: AAA continues its September programming, including TripleManía 34 events Sept. 11 and 13; check the promotion and WWE closer to bell time for final U.S. streaming information.
CMLL: CMLL continues its regular Arena México schedule in September, highlighted by the 93rd Anniversary Show on Sept. 18, with programming available through its official YouTube channel.
Major League Wrestling: MLW returns Sept. 12 with Fightland, while Fusion continues streaming free through YouTube and VEEPS.
Have a show you think should be listed?
Send SHOW NAME, HQ POSTER, FULL CARD, LINK TO EVENT to DSRHowToWatch@gmail.com
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For more promotions and ways to stream local, regional, and international independent wrestling, check out the August Guide.
Jenny Catlin is a writer from the Square States, covering racing, pop culture, professional wrestling, country and western, and glam metal music, obsession, sex, pornography, the real working class, indie press, and other obsessions. An award-winning essayist, she is a contributing writer at The Athletic and Denver-based Denverse Magazine. Find her on Substack and Instagram.