2026 Nagoya Banzuke prediction results: My best ever!
The rankings for July are out, let's see how close they were to my predictions.
Hi everyone,
I hope you’re having a lovely weekend and are very excited for the Nagoya basho, which starts this time next week.
Tonight I have my reaction/results to the Nagoya banzuke. You’ll see that down below.
I am still working hard on my Wakatakakage spotlight post. That’s going to come to you far later than I was hoping for. There’s a good reason why, though.
I recently picked up a little side gig as a fact checker on a documentary. Before I got into sports writing I worked in the TV industry. Recently I set up a LinkedIn profile to network and find work as a social worker. But I was surprised to see someone from my TV days get in touch with me and offer me a quick little gig.
That gig has taken time away from my sumo writing, but I now know lots about uniforms from the War of 1812. So, that’s cool. I will have the spotlight post and my basho predictions to you before things kick off next Sunday, though.
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Our bonus gif today is someone whose rank I got exactly right (though, that wasn’t exactly hard to do).
Banzuke Predictions Results
Below is the entire banzuke for the makuuchi and jūryō. I’ve added columns for the records the wrestlers had in May, their net wins and their rank changes.
If the wrestlers’ name has a green highlight, that means I was exactly right with my prediction. A yellow shade means I was off by half a rank (M1e instead M1w, for example). An orange shade means I was off by one rank and red means I was off by more than that.
I got 24 makuuchi predictions exactly right, which beats my record of 20 (which I got back in May). I was half a rank or a single rank off on thirteen wrestlers. And there are just four red spaces on my sheet. This mean I have broken my streak of three tournaments with seven reds.
I did jūryō this time around, too. So I actually got 33 correct predictions in total.
I’m pretty darn happy with that. It’s cool to see that big bank of green at the top of makuuchi, too.
Here is my full banzuke prediction, for comparison’s sake.
And here’s my post where I worked through putting it all together.
Now, let’s jump into some specific sections of the banzuke.
Yokozuna, Ōzeki and san’yaku
This was all pretty obvious. A lot of the rankings for this section were automatic, like Aonishiki coming down from ōzeki and going last in line at sekiwake and Kirishima and Kotozakura swapping spots. We have four sekiwake on the banzuke right now, something we last saw in 2023. That’s because Wakatakakage had to move up from komusubi for his yushō.
Yoshinofuji debuts at komusubi. He sits opposite Ōhō. They were the only possible candidates to take those spots after so many jōi wrestlers under-performed in May (Gōnoyama was the only other jōi boy to have a winning record).
The jōi
I completely nailed the jōi this time around. That’s a first. This section wasn’t that difficult to figure out either, though. Because of all the losing records directly below the jōi there weren’t many bodies who could come up and supplant the wrestlers sitting between ranks M1 and M4. And because of that, we have four guys sitting in their old ranks despite having losing records (Fujinokawa, Takanoshō, Hiradoumi and Daieishō).
I rightly predicted that Churanoumi and Hakunofuji would get slightly friendly promotions to make up the spaces vacated by Yoshinofuji and Ōhō. Again, none of this was that difficult to figure out. It was all rather obvious due to what happened in the middle of the banzuke.
Jūryō exchanges
I was right on who would go down and who would go up this time around. The hardest choice among all that was whether or not Asakōryū would go down to jūryō and be replaced by his brother Asasuiryū. I was right to predict that the Japan Sumo Association sided with Asakōryū, who had an injury hit May tournament. Sometimes, it seems, guys get a little bit of leniency if they have a bad record due to an injury pull out.
I placed Asakōryū and Ōnokatsu in the right spots and was very close to getting Takerufuji’s placement right. He was put one rank lower than I thought he might land.
I was quite wrong on the jūryō champ Kazuma, though. I thought his nine net wins would translate to being promoted up eight places. He ends up with a rathly measely 6.5 rank improvement.
The Middle of the banzuke
This is always the toughest part.
