Gurowake

It's not very common for all top 4 Juryo rikishi to be promoted to Makuuchi, as is likely to happen on the next banzuke. There's 18 total in the database, and 11 of those are in the 6-basho era. However, it last happened after Kyushu last year, and when I saw the results of the query I failed to recognize that at first, thinking that a recent Kyushu basho was going to be the most recent because of last basho, when it really isn't because the next banzuke isn't out yet. http://sumodb.sumogames.de/Query.aspx?show_form=0&group_by=basho&having=4&form1_rank=J1-J2&form2_rank=m

I meant that they don't just first create an ordered list and then divide it up into divisions, which is what they apparently do when the divisions change size.

Given that we know that's not how they do banzuke normally, it's odd that they would do this when they're renumbering ranks, especially since they normally have set promotions from each division to the next. I do grant that the one think that's consistent about their approaches in unusual situations is that it's inconsistent.

I'd like to point out that at least part of this came to pass - Kotozakura was in a match on the last day where the winner would take the yusho. Too bad more of the prediction didn't hold once that was confirmed.

That's certainly very close to implying that it's one of the six major tournaments, yes. It seems to do everything but outright state it, and you'd definitely have to know otherwise to think to the contrary.

Is there anyone actually claiming that the tournament will have an effect on the rankings, or that it is equivalent to the 6-per-year tournaments in Japan? There's plenty of wiggle room with what exactly "official" means. It's being hosted directly by the Kyokai - seems official to me. Is it a tournament? Certainly. Only if they are saying specifically the things mentioned in my first sentence is there any issue. I'm not particularly familiar with truth in advertising laws in the UK, but generally in the US a degree of "puffery" is allowed - see just about every business who says they're the best in the area - as long as you don't say something that can't exactly be taken as an exaggeration, would have an effect on the choice of the targets, and is demonstrably wrong but not obviously so.

I was prompted by YBF's comment on how rare Komusubi Yusho were to search up all of them. It turns out that in the 6-basho era, every single Komusubi Yusho winner had it as their either 1st or 2nd basho in an Ozeki run. Just before the 6-basho era, in 1957, there was one failure, Annenyama (later known as Haguroyama). If you remove all the date restrictions there was another failure in 1932, but he might have made it eventually if he hadn't passed away a couple basho later (Okitsuumi). There were only two other Komusubi Yusho, so the pre-6-basho era had 2 failures and 2 successes, not much of a pattern compared to the 6-basho era ones. Also of note is that Musashiyama was promoted to Ozeki directly from Komusubi after the next tournament, and that wasn't even the last time that happened with the more recent one being even more ludicrous by today's standards with only 1 sanyaku basho, so clearly the rules were different when there were less basho per year.

Yoshikaze's is notable in that his low rank was not due to having failed to compete in previous tournaments. It's not all that strange that Goeido and WTK could manage it given they didn't get to M14e by bad performances on the dohyo, while that was why Yoshikaze was that low. I particularly remember his 5-10 the previous basho really stinging me in my games performance then. The 8-7 the basho before that was reasonable when returning from injury at a lower rank, but that 5-10 seemed so out of character; I can only imagine he was still suffering what whatever caused the withdraw a couple basho before, and then starting the next basho was back to full strength.

Reonito answered the question, but I'll address the struggling a way to compare the different results of bouts. In general, they are not comparable directly. That they seem to be doing so for the last few years when it comes to Juryo promotions is very strange. It's almost as if they wanted for there to not be any question of whether someone deserved a promotion compared to the available demotee and they picked a way that's easy for middle-school educated people to calculate that's not all too far off from what they have been doing in the past, though it's obviously a bit stingier than we're used to. Generally the results of the 7 match schedule result in a larger movement than the win - losses number suggests for sekitori, and the size of this rank expansion gets slowly larger as you go further down the banzuke. There's no real way to have any good idea where someone will end up without collecting data for where people similarly situated ended up. The task is somewhat simplified by there being fairly rigid requirements for promotion to Sandanme and Makushita from the division below, but that doesn't help too much for demotions, nor what exactly they will do at the top of Makushita.

More explanation of exactly what a koen is and how it differs from a jungyo might be helpful.

I'm going to be boring. Onosato Y Hoshoryu O Kotonowaka That's it. Aonishiki and Takerufuji will make it in mid-2026

The idea isn't hard. It's just time consuming to collect and organize all the data.

Right, but the idea would be, how well do people promoted with a 7-0 do compared to those promoted with a 6-1, 5-2, etc? If the 7-0s tend to do meaningfully better on average than then the 6-1s the next basho, then either the 7-0s are not being promoted far enough, or the 6-1s too far.

I mentioned in the current Yokozuna speculation thread about how Kakuyru had not managed another run of tournaments that would have gotten him promoted to Ozeki after his actual promotion, at least up to his Yokozuna run. I'm been thinking about this feat in general for those who are career-high Ozeki, and wondered how often they tended to achieve numbers for an Ozeki promotion again. For the purposes of this, I'm going to count a successful run as being 33/3 with a Yusho counting as an additional win, with at least 10 in the last tournament, and all KKs. There have been some promotions slightly more lenient than this, but I need to draw the line somewhere. In terms of counting them, the runs can overlap such that a string of 4 11-4s would count as two successful runs. With that in mind, the 1-2 tournaments just before being promoted to Ozeki run can be combined with the first 1-2 results as Ozeki to add to the completed promotion run count and similarly the 10 win automatic repromotion can count toward a run. If the rikishi was promoted with a run weaker than my standard, I'll subtract one from their successful run count, and if they were to meet my criteria with all three sanyaku basho and weren't promoted, I will add one. I will not be counting the times that an Ozeki was promoted the normal way twice in their career. I'll be starting with Ozeki that were promoted in 1956 or later, slightly before the 6 basho era, as there were still around the same number of tournaments the couple years before they went all the way to 6 per year. Maybe Ouchiyama and Mitsuneyama deserve to be on here too, but I had to pick a date. I also won't bother listing the current Ozeki. Matsunobori - 0 Kotogahama - non-promotion 1957.05 -> 1957.11 +1 1958.01 -> 1958.07 +2 159.03 -> 1959.07 +1 Total = +4 Wakahaguro - weak promotion run -1 1959.07 -> 1959.11 +1 Net = 0 Kitabayama - weak promotion run -1 1963.05 -> 1963.09 +1 1964.03 -> 1964.09 +2 Net = +2 Tochihikari 1962.03 -> 1962.09 +2 1963.03 -> 1963.07 +1 Total = +3 Yutakayama 1963.05 -> 1963.09 +1 1964.05 -> 1964.11 +2 Total = +3 Kiyokuni - weak promotion run -1 1969.03 -> 1969.07 +1 Net = 0 Maenoyama - 0 Daikirin - 0 Takanohana 1974.11 -> 1975.03 +1 1976.11 -> 1977.05 +2 Total = +3 Daiju - 0 Kaiketsu - weak promotion run -1 1974.11 -> 1975.05 +2 Net +1 Asahikuni - 0 Masuiyama - weak promotion run -1 Kotokaze - weak promotion run -1 1981.07 -> 1982.01 +2 1982.09 -> 1984.01 +7 Net = +8 Wakashimazu 1982.09 -> 1983.01 +1 1983.05 -> 1984.03 +4 1984.03 -> 1984.11 +3 Total = +8 Asashio - 1984.11 -> 1985.05 +2 Hokutenyu - 1985.07 -> 1985.11 +1 Konishiki 1987.05 -> 1987.09 +1 1987.09 -> 1988.01 +1 1989.11 -> 1990.07 +3 1991.03 -> 1992.03 +5 1992.03 -> 1992.07 +1http://sumodb.sumogames.de/Rikishi.aspx?r=7 Total = +11 Kirishima 1990.09 -> 1991.01 +1 1991.05 -> 1991.09 +1 Total = +2 Takanonami 1993.11 -> 1994.03 +1 1994.03 -> 1995.01 +4 1995.11 -> 1996.07 +3 1997.07 -> 1998.01 +2 Total = +10 Chiyotaikai 2002.05 -> 2002.09 +1 2003.03 -> 2003.07 +1 2003.11 -> 2004.03 +1 Total = +3 Dejima - 1999.05 -> 1999.11 +2 Musoyama - 0 Miyabiyama - 0 - did have another run that qualified, but that was while not an Ozeki, so isn't counted. Kaio 2000.05 -> 2000.11 +2 2000.11 -> 2001.03 +1 2003.03 -> 2003.07 +1 2003.11 -> 2004.11 +5 Total = +9 Tochizauma 2001.09 -> 2002.05 +3 2005.01 -> 2005.05 +1 Total +4 Kotooshu - 2005.09 -> 2006.01 +1 Kotomitsuki - 2007.05 -> 2007.11 +2 Baruto - non-promotion 2009.09 -> 2010.01 +1 2010.01 -> 2010.05 +1 2011.09 -> 2012.03 +2 Total = +4 Kotoshogiku 2011.07 -> 2011.11 +1 2015.09 -> 2016.01 +1 2016.01 -> 2016.05 +1 Total = +3 Goeido - weak promotion run -1 Tochinoshin - 0 Takakeisho - non-promotion 2018.09 -> 2019.01 +1 2020.07 -> 2020.11 +1 2022.07 -> 2023.01 +2 Total = +4 Still Active but not Ozeki: Takayasu - 2017.11 -> 2018.03 +1 Asanoyama - weak promotion -1 2020.01 -> 2020.09 +2 Net = +1 Shodai - 0 Mitakeumi - 2021.11 -> 2022.03 +1 Kirishima(II) - 2023.09 -> 2024.01 +1 So Goeido at least has some company as an Ozeki who never had a proper Ozeki run, and there are many others that never achieved the feat again, and still others that only did so rarely. However, there are also plenty of Ozeki who did it regularly, including some impressive consecutive runs, Kotokaze's being the longest. In ascending order: Goeido - -1 Masuiyama - -1 Shodai - 0 Tochinoshin - 0 Musoyama - 0 Miyabiyama - 0 Asahikuni - 0 Daiju - 0 Maenoyama - 0 Daikirin - 0 Kiyokuni - 0 Wakahaguro - 0 Matsunobori - 0 Mitakeumi - +1 Kirishima(II) - +1 Asanoyama - +1 Takayasu - +1 Kotooshu - +1 Hokutenyu - +1 Kaiketsu - +1 Kitabayama - +2 Asashio - +2 Kirishima - +2 Dejima - +2 Kotomitsuki - +2 Kotoshogiku - +3 Takanohana - +3 Yutakayama - +3 Tochihikari - +3 Chiyotaikai - +3 Kotogahama - +4 Tochizauma - +4 Takakeisho - +4 Baruto - +4 Wakashimazu - +8 Kotokaze - +8 Kaio - +9 Takanonami - +10 Konishiki - +11 Given the vast gap between the last 5 and the rest, there's good argument that those 5 were simply very unlucky to not string a series of good enough results to become Yokozuna, or in Konishiki's case, had to overcome a harder hurdle than most. It also looks to me like the line between +2 and +3 looks like a good place to cut off "good Ozeki" from "not-so-good Ozeki". Certainly you could go further with this sort of analysis, including Yokozuna by both number of Ozeki promotion runs and number of Yokozuna promotion runs that meet some fixed criteria.

The evidence certainly seems convincing. We've generally always assumed that they gave more weight to lower-division win-over-loss numbers because they clearly move them more than those numbers when they're in the lower divisions, but it certainly is at least reasonable that they don't do that when comparing them with Juryo rikishi. It would be interesting to see just how strong the other two rules are when they're faced with extreme circumstances. And we're still not sure how a 7-0 in the double digits really compares. The only time promotion was denied was with a TD, which won't again happen, and in that case I might guess if they have to do it again, they'd not promote the 4-3 Ms1w, though there remains the question if there are any records that should get promoted first over a double digit Ms 7-0, and if they might overdemote to make it happen if there's someone that's safe by less than 1 win. So what you seem to be saying, in the most recent 2 cases of 6-1 Ms6 rikishi, where going by the previous straight-number logic they would have been promoted, they weren't simply because there was someone KK in the top 5 ranks that wasn't promoted. Thus in order for someone below Ms5 to be promoted, there would have to be no other KK rikishi in the top 5, even a 4-3 Ms5w, that weren't already being promoted. This ties in with the experience of Enho/Takayoshitoshi being promoted, but is not the case for Ishiura, which appears to be no longer how they would do things now, even if they are more strictly going by numbers for the main decision, simply because they don't want to promote people beyond Ms5 unless absolutely everyone that rank and above is already being promoted under the basic criteria.