Welcome to Tachiai’s coverage of third-division yusho and promotion races. Three rounds of bouts have been completed, and 15 rikishi made it through unscathed. Here’s the yusho bracket:

Normally, the undefeated men would be paired up in rank order on days 7 and 8. However, the top trio hails from Isegahama beya: Toshinofuji (Seihakuho), Arashifuji (Matsui), and Enho. So they will instead face the next three undefeated rikishi. Arashifuji and Enho are the only rikishi in the extended promotion zone (Ms6-Ms15) who can earn automatic Juryo promotion by going 7-0; a sekitori return has been Enho’s long-standing goal for his comeback. Toshinofuji’s opponent, Mineyaiba, is a near-sekitori-caliber rikishi on his own comeback from injury. Arashifuji gets former sekitori Tochimaru, whose unique style is characterized by rapid-fire tsuppari. Enho will fight Haruyama, a 25-year-old prospect whose progress has been stalled in Makushita for the past couple of years.

I think that covers most of the notable names. Our latest impressive Ms60 tsukedashi debutant, Wakanofuji, will round out the round of sixteen by facing Sd11e Tsurubayashi. Come back on Sunday for the next update on the yusho race.

I just returned from an off-the-grid break and finally got to see the January banzuke. I have to say, the Crystal Ball was clear this time! Of the 42 predicted ranks, 30 were exactly right, with an additional 4 rikishi at the correct rank but on the wrong side. That’s a Guess the Banzuke score of 64, good enough for 3rd place out of over 360 entries. For the second straight basho, the Crystal Ball will be ranked number one overall in banzuke predictions over the past year.

The Crystal Ball got all 8 sanyaku rikishi exactly right, as well as the 3 exchanges between Makuuchi and Juryo. No placement was off by more than a rank and a half, and that was Shodai’s surprisingly lenient demotion from M5w to M8e after his 4-11 record at Kyushu. I thought I was already going out on a limb by only dropping him to M9w in my prediction. This also affected my predictions for Gonoyama and Roga. The other trouble area for the Crystal Ball was M4e-M5e. I thought Daieisho, Atamifuji, and Tamawashi could reasonably be placed in almost any order, and the banzuke committee went with one that was very different from mine. The rest of the differences from the prediction amounted to 3 half-rank swaps.

We have one new Ozeki (Aonishiki) and six rikishi fighting at their career-high ranks—M1e Ichiyamamoto, M1w Yoshinofuji, M7w Fujinokawa, M10e Tokihayate, and the two Makuuchi debutants, M17e Asahakuryu and M17w Hatsuyama. Hakuoho has been renamed Hakunofuji, and Asanoyama is back in the top division. By my count, no fewer than 13 Makuuchi yusho winners will be fighting in the top division in January (plus Takerufuji in juryo). It’s now less than two weeks until the start of the Hatsu basho! Let’s see how everyone fares at their new ranks.

Apologies for the lack of a banzuke preview post. Predicting this one proved extremely challenging, and by the time I got my thoughts organized, the Guess The Banzuke deadline was upon us. Due to the holidays, the banzuke comes out a week earlier than usual, on December 22, three weeks prior to the start of the January tournament. Here is my official prediction. I won’t go through the rationale; suffice it to say, I am confident in only about one-third of the placements, and at least a dozen decisions I made could easily go the other way. Other than the Yokozuna and Ozeki, Churanoumi at M5w seems like just about the only certainty; now watch the banzuke committee put someone else there. Look forward to everyone’s thoughts in the comments.

After the Nagoya basho, I reviewed the performance of the wrestlers who debuted at Ms60 under the Makushita tsukedashi system after it was changed at the end of 2023. We then followed them at Aki. Let’s take a brief look at how our protagonists fared at Kyushu. Of the eleven rikishi in this group, ten started the basho, and nine finished it. Ms49 Gyotoku was absent for the entire tournament after withdrawing in September; apparently he’s been suffering from myocarditis. And fan favorite J3 Mita injured his knee in his day 2 bout against Kagayaki and missed the rest of the tournament. It’s not clear just how severe the injury was and when we might expect to see him again on the dohyo.

All nine full participants posted winning records, and six of them did so while fighting at their career-high rank! M5e Yoshinofuji, the rikishi formerly known as Kusano, went 9-6, posting his 10th winning record in 10 basho and earning his second technique prize. He narrowly missed out on a sanyaku debut by losing his day 15 bout against Takayasu but should be right near the top of the maegashira rankings in January. Word is that he was injured in training prior to the tournament, and his participation was in doubt. He fought much of the basho with a heavily taped calf, which makes me even more eager to see what he can accomplish when fully fit.

J12w Asasuiryu (the brother of Asakoryu; both started their careers under their family name Ishizaki) rebounded from his 7-8 sekitori debut with a 9-6 performance. I expect him to be ranked around J7 for Hatsu. Juryo debutant J13w Fujiryoga (a shikona change from Goshima) did even better, taking the yusho with a 13-2 record. A logjam at the top of Juryo will limit his rise to around J3, but he will have a good shot at earning a Makuuchi debut for Haru with another strong performance. One of his rivals for the Hatsu Juryo crown may well be Ms15w Kazuma, who got injured in his first basho in July 2024, sat out four tournaments, and has dominated since coming back, with the Jonokuchi yusho in May, the Sandanme yusho in September, and now the Makushita yusho in November. His 7-0 record from the last spot in the extended promotion zone will see him make his sekitori debut when the Juryo promotions are announced later today.

Ms11w Matsui went 4-3 and will see a bump in rank to around his Ms8 career high. Ms14w Fukuzaki debuted alongside heya-mate Fujiryoga and kept pace with him until Aki, where he hit the single-digit Makushita wall hard, finishing with a 2-5 record. He came back with a strong 6-1, losing only to the eventual champion Kazuma. This performance should take him to the Ms1-Ms5 promotion zone, with a shot at Juryo for Haru. Ms16e Hanaoka, who debuted in May, went 4-3 to post his fourth-straight kachi-koshi that will see him rise to the extended promotion zone. He’ll be joined there by the most recent debutant, Ms24w Ryusho, who improved on his first two 5-2 basho with a 6-1 performance, losing only to Kazuma in the yusho final. Finally, Jd12 Kakueizan (originally Urayama), who missed July and September with a knee injury, went 7-0 in his first comeback basho, losing the 5th-division playoff to heya-mate Ryuho. He will continue his journey in Sandanme in January, when we should also get some new Ms60TD debutants for the first time since Ryusho started in July.