Pre-tournament predictions for World Cup 2015

The Cricket ODI World Cup 2015 is about to begin in a couple of days. For the first time, we are generating the pre-tournament prediction of all the league matches of the World Cup (see the predictions page). This is not something you will find on any other Cricket or Sports website, but we have enough confidence in our methodology to put this up even before a single match starts.

Last year, we had generated pre-match predictions for all the matches in the World T20 tournament. We were able to get correct predictions for 15 out of the 23 total matches played in the tournament. In other words, we got our predictions right for two-thirds of the matches.

For World Cup 2015, we are using the same approach for predicting the match outcomes. Briefly speaking, our method assigns a score to each player of the team based on their past performances. For a given match, we sum up the total score of the top eleven players in each team, and the resulting win probability of a team is proportional to its total score. At present, we are using the data from all the ODIs played 2014 onwards, except for those played in the sub-continent (India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh). The reason for excluding those matches is to more accurately reflect the player performance in playing conditions similar to that of the World Cup.

As the tournament progresses, we will be updating the prediction of each match right up till the day before that match is to be played, so keep checking out the predictions page regularly. Eventually, we will switch over to using only the data from the World Cup to generate predictions, as it generally results in more accurate predictions than using the data from the matches played before the tournament.

You can also find the previews of all the matches of the tournament on the respective match homepage (see for example, the preview of the first match between New Zealand and Sri Lanka). If you disagree with our predictions (or even otherwise!), you can also vote for the team that you think is most likely to win a match. If we get sufficient votes for each match, we will also show the crowd-sourced predictions together with Cricmetric’s predictions on the prediction page.

Just to give a quick primer on where the teams stand right now before the tournament starts, here is the current ranking of the teams in the two pools based on our player ratings:

Pool A

Pool B