We measured what the banzuke committee actually did, 1958–2026
Every sumo fan knows the rule of thumb: win more than you lose and you move up, lose more than you win and you move down, roughly one place per bout. We checked it against 9,718 actual cases. The rule is wrong in an interesting way — going up is worth far more than going down costs.
| Record | Places moved | Cases |
|---|---|---|
| 11–4 | +7.4 | 247 |
| 10–5 | +6.3 | 573 |
| 9–6 | +4.8 | 1,386 |
| 8–7 | +3.0 | 2,346 |
| 7–8 | -1.0 | 1,512 |
| 6–9 | -2.9 | 1,520 |
| 5–10 | -4.5 | 1,011 |
| 4–11 | -6.1 | 587 |
| 3–12 | -7.6 | 233 |
Rank-and-file (maegashira) wrestlers only, moving from one rank-and-file position to another, counting east and west as half a place. Plus means promoted. Records with fewer than 100 cases are not shown.
Look at the two middle rows. A wrestler who finishes 7–8 drops about one place. A wrestler who finishes 8–7 climbs about three. One bout separates those two men, and the difference in what it buys them is around four places on the banzuke.
That is why the tensest bout of any tournament is not the one for the championship. It is a 7–7 wrestler on the fifteenth day.
Partly it is an artefact, and we would rather show you the seam than hide it. The men who fall hardest do not appear in the table at all: they drop out of the top division, and there is no rank-and-file position to measure. So the losing side of the table is missing its worst cases.
To check, we ran the same numbers on the middle of the division only (ranks 4 to 12, where almost nobody is promoted out or demoted out) — 6,368 cases. There the answer is +1.70 places for every win above eight and 0.95 places down for every loss below it. The asymmetry shrinks, but it does not vanish.
⚠️Of 11,720 tournaments by rank-and-file wrestlers, 9,718 could be measured this way. Left out: 62 no next record; 1,130 demoted out of the top division; 810 promoted into the titled ranks. And one thing no dataset can tell you: the banzuke is decided by a committee of elders, not by a formula. These are averages of what they have actually done, not a rule they are bound by.
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