Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB), the Virat Kohli-led franchise, who have been the perennial underperformers in the Indian Premier League (IPL) since the inception of the cash-rich league in 2008, having not won the trophy even once, have finally got their hands on that elusive silverware.

COMMERCIAL BREAK
SCROLL TO CONTINUE READING

Not actually though, but an RCB fan and a user on Reddit, Adish Jain, has made that possible and fulfilled the dreams of thousands of fans of the Bangalore franchise like him.

RCB was one of the top-performing sides in the 2021 edition continuing o their upsurge from the last season when they qualified for the playoffs after a gap of four years. The men in red and gold had won five out of the seven games they had played before the tournament was suspended indefinitely due to a rise in the COVID-19 cases in the bio-bubble.

However, Adish couldn't wait for the actual resumption of the tournament and decided to run a simulation process to deduce the winner of the 14th edition. The simulation takes into consideration, the ball-by-ball games and other factors such as different kinds of pitches, match-ups, recent form and records of teams and the players.

“I made a Python program to simulate an entire season of the IPL (excluding the playoffs) using past data, predictive analysis, and randomization techniques. I mainly wanted to share this because there are some really interesting scenarios in the scorecards or some epic batting collapses, also I think RCB fans will like this one,” he wrote on Reddit. 

“I extracted each player’s past five years’ data for batsmen and bowlers. What kind of runs a batsman scored – singles, doubles, fours or sixes – what kind of runs the bowlers leaked, against what bowling did a batsman thrive, when they scored their runs – powerplay, middle overs or death – what mode of dismissal bowlers dismissed batsmen the most with and vice-versa how batsmen got out. This includes detailed data such as frequency of wides or no balls or the average catches taken by a player in a game,” Jain was quoted as saying in a Wisden report. 

According to the Python simulation, RCB won the IPL after beating the Delhi Capitals, who once again lost in at the final hurdle.

Here is the points table and the results of the playoffs.

The Playoffs:

Qualifier 1 – DC v RCB (RCB won)

Eliminator – CSK v PBKS (PBKS won)

Qualifier 2 – PBKS v DC (DC won)

Final – DC v RCB (RCB won)