Abstract
In match-play sports, the best players seem to be both versatile and unpredictable in their use of techniques during play. Our analysis extends empirical work on player versatility and unpredictability to the Japanese sport of sumo wrestling. While earlier studies of tennis serves and football penalty kicks were motivated by game-theoretic analysis of choices made by players to start a match, our study is motivated by labor market theories that tie the success of workers to their portfolio of skills and its application to particular situations. We analyze panel data on tournament records of top sumo wrestlers participating in Japan’s grand sumo tournaments over the 1995–2004 time period to test whether players with better physical attributes and a balanced, unpredictable portfolio of winning techniques are more likely to win matches. Our econometric results show that better physical attributes, a diverse portfolio of techniques to finish a match, and unpredictable use of techniques are all associated with more wins per tournament.
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Notes
- 1.
A penalty kick is essentially a single-play, match-play game inside the overall football game, as it matches one offensive player, the kicker, against one defensive player, the goalie, for a single play.
- 2.
In a two-person zero-sum game (such as a tennis point or a penalty kick in soccer or a sumo match), a minimax strategy is a mixed strategy in which each player acts to minimize the maximum payoff to the other player. Put another way, it involves the unpredictable use of multiple strategies.
- 3.
The JSA provides a guide to all heya at http://www.sumo.or.jp/en/sumo_data/sumo_beya/list. Accessed October 1, 2013.
- 4.
This rule ensures that wrestles from the same stable only compete against each other in a playoff to decide the tournament champion.
- 5.
Training for match play usually involves coaches, trainers, and training facilities. In sumo, the stable organizes the training and provides the additional facilities. Player motivation also determines number of wins in a tournament; we leave analysis of this factor for future research.
- 6.
In a tennis match, there are always some situations in which one particular shot, when well executed, is the potentially winning shot, and another will not suffice. An overhead smash of a lightly hit ball just over the player’s head is one such example.
- 7.
In a sumo tournament, one player plays a second player only once, but not all players play each other due to the separation of players into East and West Groups and the large number of players (70) in the two top divisions.
- 8.
Since \( v_{it}^{2}\,=\,{{[ {{\phi }_{it}}\,-\,\frac{({{\phi}_{it}}\,+\,{{\phi }_{it-1}})}{2} ]}^{2}}\,+\,{{[\,{{\phi}_{it-1}}\,-\,\frac{({{\phi }_{it}}\,+\,{{\phi }_{it-1}})}{2}]}^{2}}. \).
- 9.
It would also be useful to know which techniques each wrestler used to start the match and which techniques were used during the match but the JSA does not collect this information.
- 10.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimarite. Accessed October 1, 2013.
- 11.
These are summarized in a pie chart on each player’s JSA web page. For an example, see http://www.sumo.or.jp/en/sumo_data/rikishi/profile?id = 2769. Accessed March 28, 2014.
- 12.
Our data set, which was provided by the Japan Sumo Association, contains a single measure of weight for each player. It is unknown when the weight was measured. Information on a player’s weight for each tournament would be preferable, as player weight can vary over the course of a career. Since players tend to gain weight more rapidly early in their career, some of this change may be captured by the experience variable. Injury can also affect a player’s success. Unfortunately our data set does not contain a measure of player injuries.
- 13.
The average height, weight, and BMI for Hawaiian players are 193 cm, 229 kg, and 61.5, respectively, while those for Mongolian players are 185 cm, 143 kg, and 41.6, respectively.
- 14.
Players who win by pushing often lose to an opponent who uses pushing as his winning technique. The correlation coefficients for each tournament are all positive, averaging 0.31.
- 15.
The z-value of the Wilcoxon sign-rank test is − 10.29, which is statistically significant at the 1 % level.
- 16.
Thus, for these players, strength in a certain skill might be conditionally dependent over time. The insight these wrestlers provide is that the process of skill use may exhibit serial correlation in the process or the persistence of volatility ( volatility clustering), in which there are periods that display a wide swing for an extended time period. That is, for any given t, the random shocks of belief on strength in skills are conditionally independent but not identically distributed across players.
- 17.
Substituting losing rates for winning rates would produce identical estimated coefficients with opposite signs.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Inna Cintina, Tim Halliday, Katya Sherstyuk, and Muhamet Yildiz for comments. James Lee and Brian Kim provided excellent research assistance.
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Lee, SH., La Croix, S. (2015). Does Versatility Matter in Match-Play Sports?. In: Lee, Y., Fort, R. (eds) The Sports Business in The Pacific Rim. Sports Economics, Management and Policy, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10037-1_15
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