What to Watch in the First Three Seconds
The problem with a first sumo bout is not that it is complicated. It is that it is fast, and nobody tells you where to point your eyes. There are three places, and they come in order.
Most people watch their first bout by trying to watch everything. Two large men collide, arms move very quickly, one of them ends up outside the ring, and the whole thing registers as a blur with a result attached.
The fix is to stop watching the whole picture. Look at one thing at a time, in the order the bout decides them.
Second zero: who is lower
At the moment of the charge — the tachiai — compare the two men's heights.
One of them will be lower than the other. Getting underneath your opponent lets you drive upwards into him: his body is lifted, he loses the base he was pushing from, and once that happens he can be moved backwards with surprisingly little force. It is a large advantage, and it is decided before anyone has taken a step.
You do not need to judge this precisely. Just ask yourself which head was closer to the clay, and remember the answer.
Second one: grip or no grip
Now look at the hands, and at the belt.
If a wrestler gets a hand onto his opponent's まわし (mawashi) and holds it, the bout has become a grappling contest. If neither of them does, it stays a pushing contest.
Those are the sport's two modes, and you have just watched which one this bout is going to be. It also tells you roughly how it will end: a grip usually leads to the opponent being walked or thrown out; no grip usually leads to him being pushed out.
If you see a hand close on the belt in the first second, expect a longer bout. Grips take time to work with. Bouts with no grip at all tend to finish faster — though not always.
Seconds two and three: the feet
By now one man is going backwards. Keep taking in the two of them if you like — but let part of your attention move down to where the feet are.
Everything now depends on his heels and the straw bales. Does he find one and stop against it, or does he run out of ring? A wrestler who gets his heel onto a bale can suddenly reverse the whole bout; a wrestler who does not is finished.
This is also where the result is judged, so it is where the replay will look. You may as well look there first.
After a few days of this
The three checkpoints stop being separate. You will simply see that one man got under the other, took the belt, and walked him back — and that whole sentence will have arrived in about four seconds, without you deciding to look anywhere.
At that point you are watching sumo rather than watching two men wrestle.
The rules behind the third checkpoint, and the three moments that confuse everyone.