Fantasy Sumo Draft

Fantasy Sumo Draft is a fantasy sumo webapp. It has a live draft, scoring, head-to-head fixtures, prizes, and more.

What it is

Every basho, players pick a team of rikishi, then score points based on how their picks perform: wins, kachi-koshi, yusho — that kind of thing. The draft is live, fixtures run head-to-head, and there’s a prize pool at the end of the tournament.

The thinking behind it

Sumo is a sport where the field is small enough that fantasy works beautifully: there are only ~42 rikishi in the top divisions, everyone knows who they are, and the tournament format (15 days, everyone fights) maps cleanly onto scoring and fixtures. It’s also a sport where the fans are underserved by software — most of the existing tools are spreadsheets or forum threads.

I wanted to see whether a niche community like the sumo fandom would take to a proper webapp, and whether the format could sustain head-to-head competition between basho. The live draft is the part that had to be right: with a small community, the draft is the event.

Links

• Fantasy Sumo Draft — the live site.