Once again, a huge thank you to Herouth for putting together and tracking the Kensho data from Aki Basho. As someone who is intimately familiar with data entry and data collection processes, I must say, it’s a huge effort. In my little rail world, some of our data collections are nice and automated but others remain a challenge. For one of my favorite data collection projects, I was the guy receiving forms for railroad retro-reflectorization. (People sometimes drive into the side of trains at night because they don’t see them, so railcar owners were required to put reflective tape on the railcars and then submit a form indicating the railcar mark and tallying their fleets.) THANK YOU!
Thankfully, that 10-year implementation period is over so the data collection period has ended. As with that, I am very interested in automation so I would love to see if the Kyokai would be willing to set up an API or share their data in a machine-readable format, rather than the current one, below.
Aki Kensho Performance Summary
Overall, this tournament offered slightly more kensho money to wrestlers than Hatsu. It looks like sponsorship money is finally coming out of the Covid downturn! I expect to see a dip in Kyushu before another peak in January. Hopefully the Pokemon will make their presence known again. There were more bouts with kensho pledged this past January, but Aki had thicker envelopes, on average.
Tamawashi, our yusho winner, had quite the tournament. The biggest prize will be the yusho and all of the nice gifts that come along with it, like the macarons, the beef, rice, gas, beer, etc. He also picked up a special prize, the Outstanding Performance Prize, which comes with its own financial award.
In addition to all of that, Tamawashi’s 13 wins earned him a pretty good chunk of kensho-kin, including the big one over Terunofuji (20 envelopes) which also earned him a kinboshi — yet another monetary prize. Interestingly, more money was pledged on Tamawashi’s bouts in March (when he was ranked slightly higher at M2W) but he actually won three times more money at this tournament by nearly doubling his win total from 7 to 13. In the spring, he had lost some pretty lucrative bouts to Takakeisho (14), Mitakeumi (22) and Endo (14). His big win in that tournament was again over Terunofuji (another 20) — whom he is mining this year for gold stars with four.
This brings up a little tweak I will make to my data model as I try to merge this data set with my others. Right now, I don’t have kinboshi tallied in either so I’m working to include it. That won’t be a challenge since it’s a pretty simple rule: if someone ranked among the Maegashira beats someone ranked Yokozuna, they get a gold star (kinboshi).
When we look at overall winners for Aki, Takakensho takes the top prize with more than 200 envelopes. See what I did there? I make myself crack up sometimes. He lost more than 100, though, especially after his losses to Ichinojo and Wakatakakage. Beating Shodai on senshuraku almost made up for it, though, with 57 envelopes up for grabs in that bout, alone. Terunofuji (139) limped away in second place after withdrawing early, followed by Wakatakakage (95), Shodai (94), and Takayasu (89).
The biggest kensho losers were the three Ozeki: Mitakeumi (-181), Shodai (-171), and Takakeisho (-109). They were followed by Terunofuji (-86) and Nishikigi (-85). Please play around with the visualization above and see how your favorite wrestler did. Has he been on an upward trend, like Kiribayama and Hoshoryu?
Tune in this November when we turn our eyes to Kyushu. If Terunofuji is kyujo, expect an even bigger dip in sponsorship money than what we’ve been seeing from tournaments outside Tokyo. If he’s out, the remaining Ozeki will enjoy taking turns with the musubi-no-ichiban since the prize money usually peaks on the last bout of the day. Will that be enough to motivate Shodai to pick up 8 wins? We shall see!
