2025 Kyushu Banzuke prediction results - I'm not bad at this

The Kyushu rankings are out, let's see how close they were to my predictions.

The banzuke for the 2025 Kyushu basho dropped over the weekend. That means our final grand tournament of the year is almost upon us. It’s been a fantastic year for sumo, so hopefully we end it with a bang.

Last week I predicted how this banzuke would look. This is only the third time I’ve done this. You can check out that article below.

2025 Kyushu banzuke prediction: Aonishiki to sekiwake, Ura returns to the joi

And you know what? I did pretty darn good… again.

Scroll down to see my hits, and few, misses and some discussion on the rankings and possible decision-making behind them.

Bonus gif today is someone whose ranking I picked perfectly. It’s Midorifuji!

Ain’t the size of the dog…

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Below is the actual 2025 Kyushu banzuke. Mine has columns for wrestlers’ records at the aki basho, as well as their net wins and the rank change between now and the aki banzuke.

Green spaces represent where I was exactly right with my prediction. Yellow spaces mean I was half a rank off (M10e instead of M10w, for example). Orange means I was a single rank off. And Red means I was off by more than one rank.

I was exactly right or within a half rank on 26 of 42 predictions. And I was only far off on six guys. I’m very happy with these results, especially since I thought this was an especially tough banzuke to predict.

Below is my full banzuke prediction, for comparison’s sake.

There were some tough choices to make in this banzuke and I was able to guess right on a lot of the ones the Japan Sumo Association ended up taking. There’s one extremely notable instance where I wrong, though.

Let’s get into it.

Yokozuna, Ōzeki and san’yaku

The placement of Ōnosato, Hōshōryū and Kotozakura were obvious. So that was three free green spaces for me.

The demotions of Wakatakakage and Kirishima from sekiwake were also obvious. Aonishiki was the only choice to go to sekiwake 1 east and I correctly guessed that Ōhō would be the man to balance out the sekiwake ranks.

I also guessed that Takayasu would be spared a demotion from the san’yaku, despite his losing record. He instead got the minimal half rank demotion.

Here’s where I was wrong…