What Makes a Komosubi
We continue our journey through the Sanyaku and finally reach our end point examining how to determine who will be Komosubi or not, having covered the same for Yokozuna, Ozeki, and Sekiwake. I’ll give some of the conclusions up front here: this turned out to be perhaps the hardest to predict in certain ways, and the easiest in others.
As for why it’s easy, check out the below numbers:
So you can see that almost 9 times out of 10 you’ll simply have 2 Komosubi. I’ll also include the numbers from the other week so you can see how this is even more uniform than Sekiwake:
Perhaps because of this lower number of cases, it’s much more difficult to generalize the requirements for opening up a new Komosubi slot compared to Sekiwake. Still, we had 17 instances where the number of Komosubi increased (i.e. went from 2 to 3 or 3 or 4) and I looked at all of them and tried to convert those individual instances into rules that can be implemented in code. After all, in large part that’s our goal for this exercise: let’s learn the structures of sumo and try test if our understanding is correct or not. Ikimashou (いきましょう/let’s go)!
Starting off with an opportunity to flex how I’m getting comfortable with SumoDB querying, I actually looked at 10+ wins from various Maegashira spots and how often they were at Komosubi (or higher) the next tournament.
So I think at this point it’s safe to say that 10 or more wins from Maegashira 1 ought to guarantee a Komosubi slot. However, 10 or more wins from Maegashira 2 or 3 only makes it highly likely (but not guaranteed) to be at Komosubi. Furthermore, with Maegashira 2 and 3 there are both recent precedents for having 10 wins or more and not getting a Komosubi slot.
Interestingly, there was a fairly long period between July 2000 and September 2019 where there was only one tournament with more than 2 Komosubi (2006 November, there were 4!).
Now onto those 17 instances a new slot opened up a lot of them are similar to July 1991 to September 1991:
Akinoshima retained his slot and Takahanada was promoted to Sekiwake. Akebono filled Takahanada’s slot and Kotofuji got promoted from 14-1 at Maegashira 13 all the way to Komosubi.
What I’m getting at here is with Komosubi when they opened up new slots it’s much more art than science unlike the others, at least in my opinion. If there were more instances I’d feel better trying to calibrate opening up new slots but with a smaller number and those being odder cases when it comes to applying this to the Banzuke algorithm I’ll probably do the following:
Apply the algorithm and get the expected order
If anyone got 10 wins or more at Maegashira 1 and is not at Komosubi: open a new slot
If there are 2 Komosubi do the same check from step 2 but for Maegashira 2
Same as step 3 but for Maegashira 3 and 11 or mor wins
This one is personal preference as I’d like them to earn that Komosubi slot.
Anyways, a little bit of a shorter article but hopefully you enjoyed and it makes our Banzuke prediction better!