[sumo] Sumo Dissertation

["Jürgen Buder"]

Hi,

very interesting stuff (of course I only browsed through the dissertation in the minutes after you posted it).

I liked the kimarite by height and weight analyses, and I found the yaocho analyses quite interesting. I was particularly surprised that those rikishi who were accused of yaocho by the Japanese press (on questionable grounds, I presumed) actually show some unusual patterns in their wins.

I am not convinced by some of your general conclusions, but this of course doesn't mean that your work has no merit. I had once made an analysis of "surprising outcomes" and yaocho myself (over at Sumoforum), and so I may say that I found your definition of surprising outcomes slightly surprising (according to your data a wrestler is a surprise winner if he was ranked lower than his opponent on the last three banzuke). You did an additional analysis excluding Juryo rikishi, but that is beside the point. Rikishi who storm into Makuuchi (like Baruto used to), will of course defeat rikishi who have been ranked above them before.

Finally, the overall approach of "sudden weakness" was very interesting. It never occurred to me to conceptualize evidence of yaocho like that. However, the way you define "sudden weakness" does not take torikumi making into account. If rikishi aren't placed in the meatgrinder, they will be facing increasingly tougher opponents the longer a basho lasts, so "sudden weakness" is all but normal.

Anyway, thank you for compiling (and sharing) this work, and I am looking forward to dig myself into it for more detailed insights. 

Randomitsuki

-------- Original-Nachricht --------
Datum: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 16:40:08 +0200
Von: "Martin Von Wyl" <mvonwyl at access.unizh.ch>
An: "sumo" <sumo at webtrek.com>
Betreff: [sumo] Sumo Dissertation

> Hi All
> 
> I just want to share my dissertation on sumo wrestling with anyone who
> might be interested. 
> 
> The table of contents and the PDF document can be found here:
> http://homepage.sunrise.ch/mysunrise/mvonwyl/
> 
> The dissertation is divided into two main sections. The first section
> provides an overview on sumo wrestling. The second part deals with kimarite and
> match fixing from an empirical point of view.
> 
> 
> Martin
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Sumo mailing list
> Sumo at webtrek.com
> http://www.webtrek.com/mailman/listinfo/sumo

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