T20 Match Simulator: under the hood

November 26, 2018 by Guest User in Betting, Methodology, Match Prediction

When I previously wrote about my new T20 match simulator, I concentrated more on what it could do than how it was built. This time, my aim is to ‘lift the hood’ and explain exactly how the engine is constructed and how it runs. Others can then start to judge for themselves whether it can indeed answer the many, varied questions that I claimed it can

I have tried to keep things simple so that anybody interested can understand how the model works. However, there are times when I use some technical language. If you don’t understand something (and you want to understand it), you can probably find the answer on Wikipedia, a Google search, or in a library

Simulating T20 Matches: Pinching

September 30, 2018 by Guest User in Betting, Match Prediction, Team strategy, Caribbean Premier League, Indian Premier League

The debate on whether Sunil Narine should open is one of my favourite in T20 cricket. I stand resolutely on team ‘yes’… but standing on team ‘yes’ does not mean that I don’t still have doubt. It wouldn’t be a debate if I didn’t see merit to arguments on both sides. I have built a simulator that will play out T20 games ball-by-ball, thousands of times, so that we can see the impact of playing in a certain way, or with a certain line-up. This means that we can set up a game between the Kolkata Knight Riders and the Sunrisers Hyderabad (say) and simulate what would happen with Narine at different spots in the line-up

Trialling a T20 Captaincy Metric

August 19, 2018 by Guest User in Methodology, Team strategy, Match Prediction

The importance of captaincy in cricket is greater than in almost any other sport. In football, for just one example, the captain has almost no influence whatsoever over team selection or strategy. This is not true in cricket. Not only are cricket captains involved in most strategic and tactical decision-making, this also comes with more responsibility for the other players in the team, their mindset and their morale. Measuring the value of a good captain is incredibly difficult

One aspect of captaincy that might be measurable is the decisions that they make on the field. Here, the decision-making is observable by an outsider. Obvious, even, in the case of bowling changes. They occur 20 times in an innings and at regular intervals

Captain Typical

August 18, 2018 by Guest User in Methodology, Team strategy, Match Prediction

My current project is a ball-by-ball simulator for T20 matches. This post isn't about that. It is about one tiny component which took way too much time to build considering how little value it contributes to the endeavour of predicting T20 outcomes. I wanted my simulator to have the ability to simulate what bowling changes the captain would make during an innings. And so I built a model to pick the next bowler

Toss decisions: it's complicated

February 18, 2018 by Guest User in Match Prediction

Recently, I wrote about how the toss-decisions made by captains before games were probably sub-optimal. I stand by everything said within that article (which concluded with me claiming that I would have a better record than the average T20 captain were I the one making decisions) but there were complications that I chose not include. This post exists to demonstrate that interpreting even the simplest data is often far from straightforward - and the capacity to confuse cause and effect is always present

Toss decisions: worse than random

February 09, 2018 by Guest User in Match Prediction

Being at home in the IPL gives the team a 1% advantage. Batting second gives the team a 5% advantage. And winning the toss gives the team a 2% advantage. That may all seem to conform to common sense but a closer examination of those figures reveals an inconsistency: how can winning the toss possibly be less advantageous than batting second?