The Five Most Common Kimarite
There are eighty-two official winning techniques. You do not need eighty-two. Two of them decide half of all bouts, and five cover more than two thirds — and unlike most claims about sumo, this one comes with published numbers.
The Japan Sumo Association publishes a ranking of how often each kimarite is actually used. The figures below are taken from it, covering 190,450 bouts from January 2013 to July 2026.
The five
What each one is
1. 押し出し (oshidashi) — 25.2%. Pushed out, with the hands, bodies apart. See oshidashi and yorikiri.
2. 寄り切り (yorikiri) — 24.9%. Forced out while holding the mawashi, chest to chest.
3. 叩き込み (hatakikomi) — 8.2%. Slapped down as he comes forward. See hatakikomi.
4. 突き落とし (tsukiotoshi) — 5.4%. Thrust down sideways, usually with one hand at the side of the body.
5. 寄り倒し (yoritaoshi) — 4.8%. The same drive as yorikiri, except the man goes down rather than merely out.
They are the natural endings of the two ways of fighting described in oshi and yotsu. Push at arm's length and you end with oshidashi; take the belt and you end with yorikiri. Between them they cover both halves of the sport, which is why they cover half of all bouts.
The trap for new viewers
A long list of eighty-two techniques makes sumo look like a memory test. The numbers say otherwise. Learn these five and you will recognise the result of roughly seven bouts in ten from the first day. The other seventy-seven are what makes the remaining three interesting.
Two more worth knowing
Just outside the five sit the throws, and they settle a question people often ask.
上手投げ (uwatenage) accounts for 4.6% of bouts and 下手投げ (shitatenage) for 2.3% — so the outer-grip throw is used about twice as often as the inner-grip one. The article on the two throws explains why they feel so different to watch.
What the tail looks like
The published ranking runs all the way down, and the bottom of it is worth a glance.
Across those 190,450 bouts, several officially recognised techniques were recorded once, and five were recorded not at all. They remain on the list, named and defined, waiting.
That is the other half of what the numbers show: sumo keeps its full vocabulary even for the words it almost never needs.
What to watch for
Watch a full day and keep a tally of just these five.
You should end up marking something close to two thirds of the card, and the bouts you cannot mark will be the ones people talk about afterwards. That is a useful way to find the interesting bouts without knowing any of the names.
The top two on this list, and the one detail that separates them.
Source: Japan Sumo Association, 決まり手八十二手 (kimarite ranking), retrieved 8 September 2026. Figures cover 190,450 bouts, January 2013 to July 2026.