Once again, thank you, Herouth for providing the data on Kensho for the basho. It provides a very interesting metric which may be a bit of a proxy for commercial (possibly public) interest in particular wrestlers or even the sport as a whole, though these Covid times are not exactly comparable to “The Before Times.” That’s admittedly a rather massive caveat and hopefully normal times resume soon.
As Herouth mentioned prior to the tournament, pledges this basho were way up compared to July. In fact, they were higher than any tournament over the past year, surpassing the tally at Hatsu by 8%. The increased interest was not only for the musubi-no-ichiban, either, as more of the earlier bouts had pledges (233). The amount of envelopes pledged on those bouts was 8.25% higher than in July.
Notably, interest in the new Yokozuna led to a substantial increase in pledges made on the final bout of the day. While the musubi-no-ichiban attracted 192 banners in Nagoya, it more than doubled that tally back in Tokyo (385). Interestingly, that’s not quite as much as the amount pledged last Aki in the drama-filled showdown won by Shodai (415). In that tournament, the musubi cycled through the three Ozeki as they each took turns fighting the final (often the most lucrative) bout of the day.
Terunofuji crushed the field by taking home more than triple the kensho when compared to his closest competitor, Mitakeumi. That fat stack on senshuraku helped but it was really a story of 13 of 15 paydays. Takakeisho, on the other hand, let the most pledges slip through his fingers, followed by Shodai.
Myogiryu, the dark horse of the basho, did quite well, too. His win over Takakeisho provided him with an even fatter stack of kensho than when he beat Terunofuji in May. He also beat Shodai and scored a nice haul there, as well. That’s quite a different story than in November and March when he lost all of those big payday bouts against Ozeki.
I’ve updated the kensho-kin visualization and put it after the “read more” link to keep it from loading every time anyone visits the site. I know you love my data viz but if you’re trying to read more about Hakuho, you probably don’t want this thing rendering every time.
The visualization has four tabs. I’ve defaulted to an individual view which shows the breakdown by wrestler. The dropdown near the top left will allow you to select any wrestler who’s been in a pledged bout over the past year. As you can see, the total from the Terunofuji/Shodai bout surpasses the Takakeisho/Asanoyama bout from last year. If you mouseover the data points, it will give you more information about who the opponent was and the exact number of envelopes pledged.
The other four tabs include a sortable summary table of all of the kensho by wrestler, another set of line graphs that show the total haul for each tournament, and bar-chart comparison of musubi-no-ichiban vs the other bouts. The line graphs in the “Overall Kensho” tab have been set to show Aki 2021 compared to January 2021 but the data from the other tournaments over the past year are there, and you can select or de-select from the dropdown. When I had “All” as default, it looked pretty busy.
I hope you enjoy reviewing the data. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments.
Brilliant! Thanks so much for doing this work!