A Sumo Matchup Centuries in the Making | Hacker News Reader

A Sumo Matchup Centuries in the Making

fivethirtyeight.com

47 pointsluu24 comments

It's interesting to see this analysis a year later. The article posits that possibly "Hakuho sees his skills slipping and is resorting to dirty tactics in a last-ditch effort to stay on top of a sport" and since then Hakuho has been reprimanded for other actions in the ring, faced serious injury, and gone into the longest losing streak since becoming a Yokozuna. If this turns out to be the end of Hakuho's career, it's interesting that this article picked out a possible beginning of the fall

Indeed. I think the most recent tournament was very telling about Hakuho's future: he was clearly invested in winning, but he's just not as dominant as he used to be. His loss on day 15 really underscored that.

I found it odd that a long article from a statistics website like 538 didn't mention the statistical anomalies that suggested match fixing in sumo wrestling. I learned about that from the Freakonomics book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match-fixing_in_professional_s...

Sure, you can write that story too, but this author seems more interested in across-the-eras comparison stories, like the one he linked comparing Peyton Manning to other great quarterbacks.

I think OP's point was that you should be accounting for match fixing when comparing across the eras.

If there is incentive in modern times to have some results and the incentive wasn't there before then it should be accounted for.

I have no clue about american football, but presumably this would be like accounting for differences in ball materials, regulations etc.

Why is that move "beneath the dignity" of a wrestler? Seems like a great counter to me.

It is a great counter, but sumo is a sport where acceptable behavior, inside and outside of the ring, is bound by strict rules.

Because one of the great viscerally satisfying part of watching a sumo wrestling match is the strong initial clash. Side-stepping the charge can be a thing that makes you more likely to win the match, but it makes the sport of sumo wrestling less fun to watch and less prestigious/important/etc.

Basically, it's defecting in an iterated prisoner's dilemma. "Considered beneath the dignity" is just shorthand for "there are social enforcement mechanisms aimed at preventing this behavior".

For the hockey fans in the room, this feels similar to the New Jersey Devils' infamous 'offside trap' strategy that made them so successful in the 90s and early 2000s. It's been called everything from 'boring' to 'a crime against the sport,' but it was effective.

The move is not described very well in the article. It's not really a countermove per se (because the time to impact is maybe 2 or 3/10ths of a second), but something that the wrestler decided to do before the match began. Before the initial charge, the two are crouched a few feet apart from each other, and instead of charging forward, one wrestler jumps to the side rather than engage the opponent.

I can't immediately think of any corollaries in other sports, but it'd be a bit like a baseball batter jumping into the middle of the plate in order to get hit so that he can 'win' against the pitcher.

The cricket equivalent would definitely be the "Infamous Underarm" incident[1]

[1]https://youtu.be/d2qpj-yBkwY?t=4m21s

I think a better comparison would be to point to the grandstands, signaling a home run, but then bunting.

That is a better comparison, yes. Thanks!

Jumping into the plate to get hit would not work since the batter must attempt to avoid the pitch.

Another commenter has mentioned bunting after pointing at the fence. I would instead propose bunting to break up a no-hitter. It's completely legal, often the best strategy (e.g. it's a 1-0 game and you really need to get someone on base), and there's not even deception involved. But it's against the unwritten codes of baseball.

See http://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2014/9/16/6231827/bunting-to-bre... for an example.

Regreyably, Chiyonofuji - the dominate Yokozuna of the 1990's decade (a lightwieght, strong, judo-esque wrestler and a sublime Japanese gentleman) is not included in the article.

No! I have an extremely negative association with 538 (not their fault). I don't want to see that logo for at least another year.

Care to elaborate?

Their model of the 2016 US Presidential election reflected the same polling error that all the other models showed. They gave Trump a 30% chance of winning, along with some commentary about ways that systemic error could easily swing things in his direction. Trump then won the election with results well-within their error margins, but that wasn't enough for some people.

It's hard for some members of our society to acknowledge that 30%-chance events happen on occasion, so 538 takes the fall.

Their election night coverage was one of better ones, but in the lead up to the election, Nate Silver got a lot wrong about Trump. He even had to write a mea culpa about it. Perhaps that is what OP is talking about?

>but in the lead up to the election, Nate Silver got a lot wrong about Trump. He even had to write a mea culpa about it.

That was for the Republican primary.

It's not even clear if there were systemic polling errors: there were two last-minute changes that affected the election. There was the unexpected last-minute letter from Comey on October 28, and 538 did in fact report Clinton's chances to be in freefall from then until days before the election. There was also the unexpected competence of Kushner's data-science work right at the end to "micro-target" specific undecided voters and likely Hillary voters (unexpected in part because Trump had expressed skepticism at those strategies, and that organization was underfunded). It certainly seems possible that 538 had the data exactly right all along.

I suppose it's neither here nor there now but I strongly suspect that both candidates' internal polling showed much closer numbers than the nationally published polls.

In the last week of the campaign, Hillary was still visiting states that should have been in the bag for her and Trump was still visiting states that he should have written off as lost.

Maybe they were just tactical anomalies but I think it makes more sense if they both knew that the race was closer than everyone else thought.

> It's hard for some members of our society to acknowledge that 30%-chance events happen on occasion, so 538 takes the fall.

indeed, with a well-calibrated predictor, they should happen 30% of the time.

I simply don't get this. Do you view fivethirtyeight as a kind of pagan god, who gives you what you want? On the contrary, to the best of my knowledge the crew over there try to describe reality. Sometimes that reality is good and sometimes it's bad, but it's real.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com