The basho,
made playable.

Most championships

Hakuhō — 45 yūshō. Nobody else has 33. Likely the safest record in sports.

Most career wins

Hakuhō — 1,187

Longest win streak

Futabayama — 69 straight (1936–39), a number spoken with reverence

The untouchable ratio

Edo legend Raiden: 254–10 lifetime — a .962 career, before weight rooms existed

The 60s dynasty

Taihō — 32 yūshō, the record for half a century

The Wolf

Chiyonofuji — 31 titles and 1,045 wins at barely 120 kg

First foreign yokozuna

Akebono (Hawaii, USA), promoted 1993

Heaviest sekitori ever

Konishiki, around 285 kg at peak

Total yokozuna in history

75 — Hōshōryū is No. 74, Ōnosato No. 75

Greatest comeback

Terunofuji — knees ruined, fell from ōzeki to the fifth division, climbed all the way back to yokozuna

Below the line, in makushita and down, a wrestler is technically an apprentice. He gets an allowance rather than a salary, sleeps in a shared room, serves the sekitori, does the cooking and the cleaning, and fights seven bouts a tournament.

Above it, everything changes at once:

• A salary — a real one, paid monthly by the Association.
• Attendants (tsukebito) — lower-ranked men assigned to him.
• His own room in the heya, and permission to marry and live out.
• A keshō-mawashi and a place in the ring-entering ceremony.
• The ōichō — the ginkgo-leaf topknot, worn only by sekitori.
• Fifteen bouts a tournament instead of seven.
• A share of the kenshō envelopes carried into the ring.

This is why promotion to jūryō is the moment a sumo career actually begins, and why men who spend a decade in makushita and never cross the line are spoken of with real sympathy. One rank is the difference between serving tea and being served it.

They are usually built from stock elements a stable favours, so a shikona tells you where a man trained. Ryū 竜 (dragon) runs through Tatsunami-beya. Kotō 琴 belongs to Sadogatake. Take 武 to Takadagawa. Others take a syllable from their master's own fighting name, or from a mountain, a river or a province near where they were born.

A shikona can change mid-career — on promotion, on a stablemaster's word, or to carry forward a famous name the heya wants kept alive. A man may fight as one name in makushita and another entirely as an ōzeki. Every wrestler's profile on this site lists the names he has fought under and the tournament each one changed at, because the change is often the story.

Foreign-born wrestlers get one too, and the good ones are small acts of translation — Ukrainian-born Aonishiki's name carries the blue of his home flag.

Gyōji 行司 — the referee. In court dress five hundred years out of date, carrying a gunbai war fan. He must point the fan at a winner immediately — even when he cannot possibly know — and the five judges at ringside may then overrule him. Gyōji are ranked exactly as wrestlers are, promoted slowly up a ladder of their own, and the top two inherit the names Kimura Shōnosuke and Shikimori Inosuke from their predecessors. The most senior carry a dagger, historically a pledge to resign by their own hand if they call a bout wrong.

Yobidashi 呼出 — the callers. They sing the wrestlers' names up in a high carrying voice, sweep the ring between bouts, carry the sponsor banners, beat the drum that opens and closes the day — and build the dohyō itself, by hand, from clay, before every tournament.

Tokoyama 床山 — the hairdressers. They dress every wrestler's chonmage daily, and tie the ōichō — the ginkgo-leaf fan that only sekitori may wear — for tournament days. It is a full apprenticed profession with its own ranks, and a wrestler's last act on retirement is to have that knot cut off in front of an audience.

A yokozuna does his own, alone, after the rest — the only ceremony in sumo built for one man. He wears the white rope (tsuna) around his waist and is flanked by two attendants: a tachimochi carrying a sword, and a tsuyuharai, the dew-sweeper, clearing his path.

There are two styles, and a yokozuna picks one on promotion and keeps it:

• Unryū 雲龍 — one arm extended, the rope tied with a single loop at the back. Defensive in character.
• Shiranui 不知火 — both arms thrown wide, a double loop behind. More dramatic, and superstitiously unlucky: the yokozuna who choose it are said to have shorter reigns.

The mawashi he actually fights in is a different object entirely — plain silk for sekitori, cotton below, and nothing decorative about it.

The bouts are exhibitions and nobody's record moves, which is exactly what makes them worth attending. Wrestlers who would never speak during a tournament pose for photographs, sign, and let children push them around the ring. There are demonstrations of the techniques, comic bouts, and a jinku — sumo folk singing — which is not a thing you would guess existed from watching a honbasho.

For most of Japan this is the only sumo that ever comes to town, and for the wrestlers it is the part of the job that pays the stable's bills between tournaments. It is also where injuries are nursed and where a man quietly finds out whether his body will hold for another basho.

A wrestler does not sell his own. Originals are given — to patrons, to his fan club (kōenkai), to people the stable wants to thank. Selling them himself runs against Association norms. So an original is a gift, and its value to the person holding it is mostly that it was given.

What you can buy is a printed replica, and there is nothing shady about that: the Kokugikan gift shops sell them cheaply, and specialist dealers and auction sites carry them too. Telling the two apart is the skill:

• An original has texture — the ink sits on the paper where a hand pressed it, and the brushwork varies.
• A replica is flat printed, evenly coloured, and costs a small fraction of the price.

Provenance is worth caring about, because fakes exist and because "authentic" is used loosely by sellers who cannot say where a piece came from. If a listing will not tell you who was given it and when, treat the price accordingly.

You will not find tegata reproduced on this site. Not because the replicas are improper — they plainly are not — but because a tegata is a handprint and a signature, and a signature is the one thing about a living wrestler that is not sports data. Names, ranks and records are facts anyone may publish. A man's own mark is his. The same reasoning keeps faces off the cards and keshō-mawashi photographs — which carry sponsors' trademarks — out of the site entirely.

Kenshō 懸賞 are the banners carried around the ring before a bout — one per sponsor, paraded by the yobidashi. Each one is real money, and the winner takes the envelopes handed to him by the gyōji on the fan. A marquee bout between two popular men can carry dozens, which is why you sometimes see a wrestler walk off with a fistful of them.

banzuke

the official ranking sheet, rewritten after every tournament

basho

tournament; honbasho = the six that count

dohyō

the raised clay ring, rebuilt by hand for every basho

gyōji

the referee in ceremonial silk

heya

the stable where wrestlers live and train

kachi-koshi

winning record (8+ of 15) — promotion

make-koshi

losing record — demotion

kimarite

the official winning technique of a bout

kinboshi

"gold star" — a maegashira defeating a yokozuna

mawashi

the silk belt; the only equipment in sumo

mono-ii

judges' conference over a close call

rikishi

a professional sumo wrestler

sekitori

salaried wrestler — jūryō division and above

shikona

a wrestler's ring name

shiko

the ceremonial leg stomp

tachiai

the initial charge — where bouts are won

torikumi

the daily bout schedule

yūshō

the tournament championship

zabuton

the seat cushions famously thrown after huge upsets

1. Call today's bouts. Under Play → Pick'em there is a card of real matchups (or a keiko training card between tournaments). Pick who wins each one and lock them in. Every correct call pays a pinch of salt.
2. Open a pack. You start with 18 塩 — three keiko packs, or one kokugikan if you would rather have the odds than the cards. Cards are real wrestlers, with stats built from their real rank and record.
3. Fight with them. Under Play → The bout, pick three of your cards and take on a team drawn from the banzuke.

After that it runs itself: four challenges a day, a bit of salt for turning up, and cards that get stronger as the wrestlers on them win. If you know nothing about sumo, Sumo 101 further up this page assumes exactly that.

Every way salt is earned:

• 1 塩 for each pick'em bout you call correctly
• 5 塩 for winning a bout, 8 塩 for a ranked one against another player's team — and 10 塩 more for a kinboshi upset. Three bouts a day carry stakes; a loss costs 2 or 3.
• Daily challenges — four a day, each paying 1–6 塩
• Signing in — 1 塩 a day, 2 on every third, 5 on every seventh, 8 at fourteen, 15 at thirty
• Achievements — twenty-four of them, each paying once, ever
• Basho calls — up to 15 塩 for naming who lifts the Emperor's Cup

Everything on that list except pack-opening and battles is paid by the server, not your browser, so it is worth the same to everyone and cannot be talked into paying twice.

Every pack's odds, published in full:

The dearer pack has better odds, but every pack is bought with salt you earned — no pack, and no salt, has ever been purchasable with money. Duplicates are never wasted either — see My duplicate cards below. Packs cost 6, 9 and 18 塩, and you start with 18.

So yes: your cards move with the sport. When the real wrestler wins, the card you are holding gets better. A foil is worth +2 to all three, and every level adds +1 more, which is how a beloved lower-division common ends up outfighting somebody's ōzeki.

A ranked bout is the same thing against a real player from the leaderboard — the game picks their three strongest cards to defend with, so you are fighting their best, not a team they arranged.

Which discipline each round compares is not simply luck any more — that is what the chaya cards are for. See below.

• Win — 5 塩 against the banzuke, 8 塩 in a ranked bout
• Lose — 2 塩 against the banzuke, 3 塩 ranked
• Kinboshi 金星 — +10 塩 on top, for beating a team meaningfully stronger than yours
• XP either way. Turning up and fighting is the thing worth rewarding, so a loss still moves you up the rank ladder

Four things keep that from being punishing:

• Salt can never fall below zero. If you have 1 塩 and lose a 3 塩 bout, you lose 1.
• Nothing under level 5. While you are still working out which three to field, wins pay in full and losses cost nothing.
• Only three bouts a day carry stakes. After that you can fight as much as you like — it still pays XP and still tires your cards — but no more salt changes hands.
• No card is ever destroyed, and no card ever loses a level. Duplicates are still never wasted.

The three-a-day cap is there for a plain reason: without it, a strong collection is an unlimited salt machine, and everything you can buy stops meaning anything.

It heals completely at midnight in Japan — the same clock the daily challenges and the basho lock run on. A tired wrestler is bruised, not ruined: fatigue stacks to a limit, never touches the card's level, and is gone by the next morning. The point is that losing costs you something today without costing you anything permanently, so you are never afraid to field your best three.

Two chaya cards deal with it directly — Kyūjō 休場 takes no fatigue from a loss at all, and Chanko-nabe ちゃんこ鍋 clears it from your three whenever you win.

On top of that there are four daily challenges, drawn fresh at midnight in Japan. Everyone in the world gets the same four on the same day, so nobody can reroll for easier ones. Either way, there is salt to earn every single day.

Each level costs a little more than the last, so Sekitori arrives quickly, Ōzeki takes about a year of turning up, and Yokozuna is meant to be a long haul. It is a record of attendance and judgement, not something that can be rushed — and none of it is purchasable.

Levels cap at 25, and on the way a card passes through three grades that change how it looks:

• Polished 磨 at level 5
• Radiant 輝 at level 10
• Peerless 無双 at level 18

Clay is the answer to the oldest complaint in card games — I keep pulling men I already have. Take it to the Forge and press the exact rikishi you want instead of hoping: 18 土 for a common, 30 uncommon, 54 rare, 90 epic, 165 for a legend — and a duplicate crumbles into 6 土, or 18 once the card has nothing left to gain. It is slow on purpose. The point is that a bad run of luck still gets you somewhere.

They do four kinds of thing:

• Steer the contest. Normally each round compares a discipline at random and you cannot plan for it. The tachiai makes the first round always a test of power; Nokotta! makes every round play to whichever discipline your card is best at.
• Add to a discipline in every round — the plain, useful ones.
• Change how a close round is judged — the gunbai wins anything decided by two points or less; mono-ii fights your first lost round again.
• Soften a loss — no fatigue, or half the salt.

They are bought at the Forge with clay, not with salt and never from a pack, so they cost you nothing you would have spent on wrestlers and they do not change any pack's odds. And none of them depicts a person — they are teahouse objects and ring furniture, drawn by us.

The most a loadout can do is buy back two rounds, which is a bout. It cannot make a weak three unbeatable — it can make a clever three beat a stronger one, which is the whole idea.

They are soulbound by design: a Legend on your shelf means you did the thing, not that you got lucky or turned up early. They are also the only cards on the site that are entirely ours — no real wrestler is involved.

Any card, any level: a LV 4 card trades as a LV 4 card, and its level and foil travel with it to the new owner. The only cards that can never change hands are the ten Legends.

A wishlist (up to 40 rikishi) says who you are hunting, so offers that feed it float to the top of the trading post and the Forge highlights them. Other players only ever see how many people want a wrestler — never who. There are deliberately no prices, no rates and no market: the wishlist is for finding the right trade, not for valuing anybody.

They lock the moment the first bout is fought — enforced on the server, not in your browser, so there is no waiting to see how week one goes. They settle against the official results after day 15.

One deliberate kindness: a rikishi who sits the whole tournament out is scored as no contest, not as a miss. Calling a man kachi-koshi and watching him withdraw injured is bad luck, not a bad call.

That is deliberate and it is not going to change. The moment money buys anything on the dohyō, "salt is never sold" stops being true and this stops being a game where turning up and reading the basho well is the only thing that counts. The shop pays for the domain and the coffee; it buys nothing here.

The artwork on it is all original — the Legends and the DOHYŌ mark. No real wrestler's likeness is on anything, for sale or otherwise.

The basho board (under Play) resets every tournament and counts only things the server decided — bouts it scored and calls it settled. Pack and battle salt do not count towards it. That makes it the harder of the two to move and the only one where arriving on day one buys you nothing.

Every result, ranking and record comes from Sumo-API, a free community-run project that the whole site depends on — if you get anything out of DOHYŌ, support them before you support us. The card designs, the tier figures and the Legends are original work; the wrestlers' names and statistics are factual sports data.

It is free, has no ads, and always will. If it ever costs you money, something has gone very wrong.

Signed in, your cards, salt and clay are kept on the server and merged rather than overwritten, so opening the site on a second device adds to what you have rather than replacing it. Cards are never deleted by us, never expire, and cannot be lost in a bout. The only way a card leaves your collection is if you trade it away.

Signing in keeps your collection on the server so it follows you between devices, and it is required for anything involving other people: trading, the leaderboards, and the daily challenges, streak and achievements that the server pays for.

One thing to know about signing in: we email you a link rather than asking for a password, and that link has to be opened on the same device you want to be signed in on. Requesting it on your laptop and tapping it on your phone signs the phone in, not the laptop.