Thanks to Herouth, we’ve got some great data on kensho again for the November basho. With the hype around a new Ozeki, I was expecting a bump in the number of fat stacks being handed out. However, overall pledges were down 10% from September’s tournament. This was true from Day 1, not something easily explained by Asanoyama and Shodai’s injury withdrawals.
The middle weekend of the September tournament was a holiday, but the bump in pledges in that tournament may have been because of the Endo/Terunofuji bout. There were also huge pledges made for his Day One bout against Asanoyama and his scheduled Day 12 bout with Takakeisho. Takakeisho’s matches saw slightly fewer envelopes, despite being the only “top dog” for much of the tournament. As we see from the chart above, senshuraku again had the most pledges but the bounties placed on Takakeisho vs Asanoyama was higher than Takakeisho vs Terunofuji.
Terunofuji was the most effective wrestler at winning envelopes. He won 87% of the bounty envelopes from his matches while Takakeisho only won 83%, the difference there being Terunofuji’s big win on senshuraku to force a playoff.
Mitakeumi unfortunately came out of this tournament as the biggest loser, letting 79 envelopes slip from his grasp, while last basho, Asanoyama lost the most “fusen-adjusted” envelopes. (For this metric, I took out the envelopes pledged in fusen matches.) Second place for this dubious distinction goes to Enho (-65) and third goes to Takayasu (-61). Takayasu still won 41% of bounties from his bouts while Mitakeumi only won 35% and Enho won 22%. Endo actually had more pledge money up-for-grabs than anyone but Takakeisho in this last tournament.
As with last tournament, I’ll publish the visualizations for you all to play with but I’m going to take a little more time to make it look nice before publishing it. I already think there may be more interesting views than what I’ve got here, so we’ll see what I can do. Anyway, it will only get more exciting when there’s more data to track performance through time.
Andy, nice analysis. I remember seeing a google doc for one of the previous bashos that had detailed data by rikishi for how many envelopes the received each day. Is it possible to share similar data for this basho?
Herouth compiled great data here: https://twitter.com/SumoFollower/status/1330526568553336832?s=20
That was great data indeed. Thank you both for sharing.
I find the drop off from September to November very interesting. I wonder if this is normal because the traditional site is in Fukuoka rather than Tokyo. Additionally, I would think that the number should increase as a result having more fans this time from the previous tournaments. I have a feeling it’s just another reflection of the current economic reality we face right now.
I agree. If it had been in Kyushu instead of Tokyo, if Kotoshogiku had still been in Makuuchi AND Shodai been healthy…
A year-on-year comparison would be nice so that’s what I hope to build from moving forward.