Match 1 preview: Daredevils (32%) vs Knight Riders (68%)
IPL 6 kicks off this Wednesday with last year's winners Kolkata Knight Riders battling against Delhi Daredevils at the Eden Gardens, the home ground of Kolkata Knight Riders (the inaugural match as well as the final match on the 26th of May are being hosted by Eden Gardens). We, at Cricmetric, have been busy building predictive model for the IPL matches. With the datasets available for 5 IPL seasons, we now have sufficient data to confidently predict the outcomes of the upcoming IPL matches.
Our quantitative analysis predicts that KKR has a win probability of 68.24% whereas Delhi Daredevils have a chance of only 31.76% to win the first encounter. Our predictions are based on individual player performances in historical IPL matches. We use heavy statistics to quantify the bowling and batting strength of each team top 11 players) and assign performance scores to each player. Using the performance metrics, we assign win probability to each team using sophisticated modeling techniques. As the tournament progresses, we shall be updating the performance index to incorporate player form into our model to get better estimates of win probability.
Delhi Daredevils have a tough encounter ahead of them. They would have difficulties in choosing their team losing Kevin Pietersen and Jesse Ryder through injuries and then replacing the attacking New Zealand batsman Ross Taylor with medium pacer Ashish Nehra. We had difficult time ourselves while choosing the top 11 players and had to take average of several team combinations to eliminate some degree of randomness from our predictions. Not having Pieterson has a tremendous impact on the chances of Delhi Daredevils. Our calculations show that the chances of Delhi Daredevils reduces by almost 10% by not having Pieterson in their side. He was the third best player after Sehwag and Mahela Jayawardene.
The following graphic shows the relative performance index of each player that we calculated. Clearly KKR has an aggregate index much higher than Delhi Daredevils. If you hover over the players name, you can see the scores of each player. A higher score implies a higher importance for the player (as you might already have inferred)
We shall be coming up with predictions for each of the 72 matches through the IPL 6 championship and you can also follow the real time win probability on Cricmetric. (We are currently in the process of incorporating innovative visualizations into our scorecard, so please bear with us on that front)
We would love to hear your feedback, as to how we can improve our predictions and user experience. Please also like us on Facebook to hear about our latest updates, or follow us on Twitter.
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