Herouth has been keeping fantastic stats on kensho-kin. I wanted to make use of that data and present it in a more visual fashion and see if we could define any interesting metrics. The most straight-forward is to count the number of envelopes won. Takakeisho won that contest handily. As Herouth mentioned on senshuraku below, Takakeisho walked away with 44 envelopes in that one victory over Asanoyama. That one bout provided nearly a fifth of his total haul.
Aki 2020, Day 15 – Kensho
— ヘルット (@SumoFollower) September 27, 2020
Check out how much Takakeisho won in the unimportant match vs. Asanoyama…https://t.co/neZznK2BhK
On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have Asanoyama who lost more envelopes than any other wrestler; 121 envelopes were handed to his opponents from his five losses. He overtook Terutsuyoshi on senshuraku by losing that stack to T-Rex. Overall, it wasn’t a terrible tournament for Asanoyama, though. His ten wins provided 144 envelopes. He won’t even need to spend any on tissues to cry into since they hand them out like business cards. Click the link below to see the visualizations. I don’t want them to bog down your machines if you just scroll and don’t want to see them. But I am interested in which visuals y’all find most interesting.
The final weekend were the two biggest days for envelopes, but interestingly the Saturday of the middle weekend featured the most bouts with bounties up-for-grabs. I was quite surprised by that. It wasn’t even nakabi, but the day before. Day 5 (Thursday) and Day 11 (Wednesday) tied for the days with the fewest pledged bouts. For “pledged bouts” I’m including bouts which ended up being forfeits since the envelopes were originally pledged to a bout, though not awarded due to fusen.
Wakamotoharu, Kotoyuki, and Kotonowaka made best of their few chances at kensho bounties by winning each time. Shodai won almost 90% of the envelopes up for grabs. If you click on his name in the bar chart, the line chart will update to show the number of envelopes up for grabs in each of his bouts. You will see that his third day and fourth day bouts against Endo and Terunofuji (which he lost) offered nice rewards but even those were less than the final weekend with the yusho on the line.
If you click on either Takakeisho or Asanoyama, you’ll see how the bounties available zig-zag as they alternated musubi-no-ichiban. Clicking on Endo and you see that he gets a pretty steady pledge but those bouts with the Ozeki offer eye-watering prizes. With his promotion, Shodai won’t have any more single-envelope stacks on nakabi, that’s for sure. Please comment below if you like any of these metrics and would like to dive in more.
How in the world were there more kensho envelopes at stake in Terutsuyoshi’s bouts than in Shodai’s bouts?
I have three theories that I think would contribute to it: 1) Shodai has been the Rodney Dangerfield of the sumo world. 2) Terutsuyoshi had a few big first time bouts facing a lot of big names, Endo, Takakeisho, Takayasu. 3) Isegahama beya support > Tokitsukaze beya support? For that last one, I’ll try to roll up the stats to the stable and see what happens. Kotoeko and Kotoshoho rolled up with Giku, for example, as Sadogatake support seems strong. Takarafuji gets fairly strong support in Isegahama, too.
These are cool. In terms of other views:
1/ How about a stacked bar graph that shows by rikishi total $/Yen available, shaded to show how much won (Like the scatter and mekko, but might be easier to see total volume and win %).
2/ A variant to above could be 100% stacked bar with showing what % won, with absolute / total available along the top
I believe both would alternatively show who had the highest / lowest $ / win rate, along with who won the most $ in total…
Again these views you have are super….and are distracting me from work.