Sokkenaiyama

Not a fan of screams, for all the psychological release they offer, they will wreck your vocal chords. Maybe they were just gathering material for the blooper reel?

I sometimes get nostalgic about the time I was in the thick of it, but I don't really miss it. There's more to life than sumo gaming. That said, you were/are one of the really good ones. A shame, at that.

I thought it was a nice touch. Them Japanese sure do care a lot about their identity, innit. The text on it (barely visible here) was appropriate, too: 神風必勝, which means, more or less, "divine wind, certain victory".

Good catch.

I first noticed it this year, but it's definitely been going on since at least mid-late 2023. Kobayashi had his first dominant season in 2018, so this may well be older, but I'm not entirely sure it has to do with him specifically, because I definitely remember seeing the gunbai at others' jumps.

English commentators didn't even bother mentioning it, at least not as long as I was listening to them. Most don't even know it has any special significance, I suppose.

Not to be one-upped by Oscar, I searched for the pipe guy on my own. Apparently, bashing religion has been a thing for far longer than I had previously thought. In any case, good work as usual, YBF.

Wakakaraage? Yeah, I can see it.

It wasn't the most respectful, but it's the expected level of ignorance from the unwashed masses. And, to be fair, Wakatakakage is a mouthful, even when you actually know Japanese.

That's an interesting take, and it would be an actual good idea if they weren't all in on it (or at least condoning violence as a necessary evil for development).

There's only one problem - other foreigners HAVE acted this way in the past, and HAVE paid the price for it. And as for Hokuseiho being perceived as a foreigner or not, just ask any Japanese and you might be surprised to get a resounding yes (same goes for Hakuho, for whatever that's worth). That said, the violence we see exposed is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

Maybe at some point. I won't make any promises, but I'm not ruling it out, either.

Didn't mean to be either negative or offensive - it's just my style most of the time. The question remains, by the way, and it's not only addressed to you as the game's creator, but also to the sumo gamers who happen to read this thread.

Too much depends on random chance. Why should any already burned-out sumo gaming stalwart bother with this game when there's Toto and SG already?

Must've had you confused with some other eloquent German on the forum - probably Randomitsuki.

There's definitely some (not a lot of) luck involved, but pretty hard to measure. You'd probably have to compare your pick with all the others with the same number of points in your division, and then rank it and add/subtract "luck" depending on whether you win or lose that day's bout, or perhaps apply some fancy statistical function to each daily difference. It's doable, but probably not relevant, because it evens out in the end - I'd guess there's hardly anyone over 55% winning percentage with more than 100 tiebreaks played. My favourite pastime when I was still serious about it was putting Kaio at the top when facing certain other Ozeki or even some Yokozuna. Got burned a few times, but it was worth it when it paid off - I can only imagine the spate of curses coming out of the other guy's mouth. Incidentally, speaking of tiebreaker strategy, I think it was @Asashosakari who had a particularly interesting one. IIRC, he would analyse his past success with the involved rikishi and place the more "predictable" ones higher up on top. No idea how successful it was, since I don't know his SG shikona (or indeed whether he's still playing or not - would guess not).

Used to be quite the kimarite fiend back in the day, but now I'm living off memories. I also used to be quite a stickler for calling the precise ending technique, but with time I've relaxed that view a bit, since sumo is generally a continuous series of techniques and it's sometimes hard to tell what was the actual decisive move. For example, let's assume Kaio is facing Miyabiyama, and they're locked in the middle of the dohyo, hidari-yotsu. Kaio breaks his right hand mawashi grip and locks Fatman's left arm, then he twists left and back to deploy the dreadful kotenage throw. It doesn't fell Miyabiyama down to the ground, but rather sends the guy completely off balance to the edge, where he's tip-toeing for half a second before Kaio flicks him over the tawara. Are you gonna call it okuridashi? Or are you gonna call it kotenage? Another example, and you see this one quite a lot. One guy is clearly winning the pushing game, inching the other guy towards the edge. The other guy slips an arm under the attacker's pit, swinging him down towards the floor. He finishes the job with a palm on the guy's back, but it's not clear whether the guy would have fallen down on his own or the final push was the one that did it. Sukuinage or tsukiotoshi? And since we're on the subject of ambiguity, oosakate and utchari are hard to distinguish sometimes, because a "pure" oosakate requires monstrous shoulder and arm strength without help from the other side. Case in point, if you were to ask me what the kimarite in the Kotonowaka pic above was, I'd answer utchari almost without thinking. But that doesn't mean it wasn't MOSTLY an oosakate, i. e. that most of the momentum was caused by the reverse arm throw. That said, I get the distinct feeling that sometimes kimarite calls are just boneheaded, as if the guy in charge is half asleep or something.

By luck I believe most SG players understand your win-loss record not being represented accurately by your results in comparison to your cohort average - e. g. getting the ginosho and a 4-11 record, or scoring bottom of the division and getting 9 wins. To some extent, the same logic could, in theory, apply to breakers, but that's harder to measure.

Guy is too injury-prone to even consider the big Y. He'll be lucky to get back to Ozeki.

Luck is a factor, for sure, but it evens out over the years (except for @Oskanohana, he seems to have made a deal with El Diablo). Seriously, though, there's no recipe to get better at SG, in order to do well you need to get better at understanding sumo. Success in SG (and pretty much every other sumo game out there) will follow.

Necroposting, but I've only just seen this. I believe the tennis-sumo analogy in this case is flawed, for the very simple reason that sumo tournaments are as evenly spaced as possible within the year, whereas tennis majors are not (RG, WB and USO are quite tightly packed inside some 3-odd months, from late May to late August/early September). This makes the calendar year "grand slam" as likely as a non-calendar year one in sumo (ignoring other shite, like end-of-year celebrations and such), but not so likely in tennis (case in point, Djokovic made his non-calendar year slam starting at Wimbledon, and nobody made a calendar year slam in something like 45 years now, and, with the exception of stamina-fiend Djokovic, nobody even came close).

This guy is supposed to be 19?

Or I'm just a stick-in-the-mud.

This is impressive stuff.

Where's the satisfaction in this? It's just random chance, may as well roll dice or something.