MPL 2016 Auction will be the biggest auction yet, in MPL history. With 6 teams and at least 70 players still left in the auction pool, the MPL Auction and Awards night promises to be an exciting night.

MPL Auction Awards Night Schedule:

1.  MPL 2015 Awards Night
2.  Dinner break
3. Team Name Auction
4. MPL 2016 Schedule, and Tournament format walk-through/discussion
5.  Mohit pick’s his team if he’d like to. Team loses $9 in the process – Mohit’s avg. price from last year
6.  General Auction starts.

1.  A team name will be picked randomly by the Auctioneer. Captains can bid for the team name (starting at $1).
2.  If the team name does not attract any bid, it will be called again after the other teams have been called once.

1.  Team with the most balance left at the end of the team name auction will start the auction by nominating an available player.
2.  Once a player is nominated, the Auctioneer, will enable the bidding on the player.
3.  At this point, all the captains can bid on the player via the app.  The captains can either pass on the player or bid for the player by entering an amount. (This is silent/hidden from other captains)
   1.  The bid amount must be equal to or greater than the average stock price for the player.
   2.   If all the captains pass on the player then he will be held from the auction till all the other players have been nominated at least once.  The passed player’s average price would also be halved each time they are passed (min $1).
4.  We will have a visual queue on the auction page (as soon as a captain bids).
5.  Once all the 6 bids are in, the auctioneer will reveal the individual bids.
   1.  The captain with the highest bid will get the player.
   2.   In case of a tie, when 2 or more captains have bid the same amount, the captain who bid the quickest will get that bid amount and other captains who were tied will then get to raise the bids in an open auction. Only the tied captains will get an opportunity to bid for the player in the open auction.
6.  The captain that wins the player, will then get the chance to nominate the next player.
7.  All teams need to have a minimum of 14 players in the squad.
8.  All the players need to be bought at a min. price of $1.  This means that if a team has 7 players in the squad and $20 left in its pool, then the maximum it can bid for the 8th player is [$20 – (min players – current players + 1) => 20 – (14 – 7) + 1 => $14].

(85)

2016 will see MPL have 6 brand new captains for the first time with no retained players. To help the captains, MPL will have it first ever VIRTUAL AUCTION for Vice-Captain/Mentor/Guru.

Here are the rules for the Virtual Auction:

1. Based on the FB poll results for Vice Captains, a Vice Captain Player pool will be created consisiting of all players that receive more than a single vote in the poll.
2. Players from the Vice Captain pool  will be presented one by one (most popular first) for auction for a period of 24 hrs (Starting Monday, 5/9/2016 7PM ). Every 24 hours a new player will be presented till all the teams have acquired a player.
3. Each captain can only acquire a single player in this virtual auction. Once a captain has acquired a player he is out of bidding for the remaining players.
4.  The cost of the player will be deducted from the Captain purse. Each captain will start with a purse of $101 to compose a squad. The average stock price of the captain WILL BE deducted from this purse. (Raghuvir will post the actual balance available to each captain)
5. Bidding Rules:

a)  A captain bids on the player by adding a new comment to the post. (All bids are binding)

b) If a captain is not interested in a player, he can pass on the player by either explicitly commenting or not commenting at all.

c) If a player is passed by all the captains, he is taken out of the Vice Captain Pool.

d) Bidding for the player starts at $1

e) Captain with the highest bid at the end of the 24 hrs will get the player.

e) Kunal (Auctioneer-in-chief) rulings are final.

f) Once 5 out of the 6 captains have acquired their players, the last captain will be able to select any player still available in the Vice Captain pool for a cost of the average stock price of the player. (Raghuvir – will provide the average stock prices of all players in the Vice Captain pool by Monday 5 PM).

(46)

Well, ever since we have started calculating rankings of players on every single performance, we have received a great deal of feedback. Most of the feedback has been extremely positive and encouraging. This ranking system is a brainchild of the one and only Raghuvir, who has worked tirelessly to get this perfect and if all this MPL is any indication, he has got it quite right.

One of the most common questions about this ranking system has been, how do you calculate points? This blog is an attempt to answer and demystify the process. Before I begin, let me explain that all ranking systems are based on data that one can has access to. While this makes the ranking system objective, you lose some of the subjective information. For example, Yashwanth’s last ball 6 to win the game is the same as the 6 in the 3rd over. Subjectively, we know which was more important, but we don’t have that data available to award/rank them differently. With this said, let me explain the data that we do have:

• Team Innings Score (Batting First and Second)
• Fall of Wickets information
• Batting Scorecard
• Bowling Scorecard

With the above data, lets dig into the ranking system for Batsman:

• Duck Penalty: If a batsman gets out for a duck, he gets  -3 points
• Base Points: For every run a batsman scores, he gets 1 point
• Landmark Bonus: For ever 10, 20, 30 … etc landmark reached, a batsman gets 7 points bonus. So if a batsman scores 21 runs, he gets 21 base points + 14 bonus points.
• Contribution Bonus: A batsman gets a contribution bonus for the % of runs scored out in an inning (Max is 100). For example a batsman scoring 20 runs out of a team total of 80 would get a contribution bonus of 25 points.
• Partnership Bonus: Apart of scoring runs, its important to just stay if your partner is doing all the hitting. A partnership bonus is given as the % of runs scored by your team while you were at the batting crease (Max of 10 points). For example, if a batsman opens and scores 10 and gets out when his team’s total is 30 and the team goes on to score 60 runs, then his  batting points will be : 10 base points + 7 points +  (10/60)*100 + (30/60)*10 = 10 + 7 + 16.67 + 5 (partnership bonus).
• Scoring Rate Points (these can be negative): The Scoring rate points depend on the run rate of entire team and depends on the whether the team is batting first or chasing. A required rate is calculated and based on that every batsman’s rate is evaluated. The required rate for a team batting first is: (84/InningsTotal) [84 = 14overs * 6] and for a team batting second is: (84/TeamBattingFirstTotal). This rate is used to calculate how many a balls a batsman should have ideally taken to score the runs he did. For example: If a batsman scores 12 (20) when his team batting first scores 84 runs, then required rate = (84/84) = 1.00 and the batsman should have ideally scored 12 runs in 12 * required_rate = 12 deliveries. So the Scoring Rate points are calculated as (ideal_deliveries_taken – actual_deliveries) * 0.5. So according to our example above, the batsman would have received (12 – 20) * 0.5  = -4 points.

The sum of all the above contributions leads to a single batting score. Lets give a complete example for a real innings – In this match, Suresh scored 24 (26) out of a team total of 74. He opened the innings and got out when the team’s score was 56.  His ratings points were  78.62  calculated as:

• Base Points: 24 points
• Landmark Bonus: 10,20 = 2 x 7 = 14 points
• Contribution Bonus: 24/74 * 100 = 32.43 points
• Partnership Bonus: 56/74 * 10 = 7.1 points
• Scoring Rate:  {[(84/74)*24] – [26]}* 0.5 = {27.24 – 26}*0.5 = 0.62 points

• Base Points:  3 * 15 = 45 points
• Landmark Bonus:  (3-1) * 2 = 10 points
• Economy Bonus: [74/14 – 8/3] * 3 * 5 = [5.28 – 2.67]* 15 = 39.23 points

Unfortunately for fielders and keepers we have a simple 5 points per dismissal rate, even though a direct hit might be more valuable than a throw to keeper.

Well, I hope this demystifies the ranking system and I look forward to a heated debate on its merits.

(321)

When this blog goes live, the basic stats page on mplbuzz would have gone live as well. This blog is an attempt to analyze the performances for the first half of the MPL. This time, instead of just using the raw stats (for number of runs, wickets and catches), Raghu (with minimal input from yours truly) has come up with a comprehensive scheme to rank each batting, bowling and fielding performance using some of the contextual information from the match.

The overall results are live on the stats page, but in this article we will try to validate the ranking measures by applying them over each MPL game. So here goes:

1) Match 1: Incredibles vs Avengers – A match dominated by Shreenath’s innings. The top 5 ranked performances in this game where:

Surprisingly, the best performance is Dipesh’s 4/11 from 3 over Shreenath’s 33 albeit by a whisker. This is understandable as the ranking system awards points based on the fact that Dipesh’s 4 wickets came at fantastic economy rate (much less than the required rate for the opposition).

2) Match 2: Justice League Vs Xmen – Last ball six to win the game! Need I say more!

As expected, Yashwanth’s performance with the bat is clearly ahead of all other performances. Yashwanth’s scoring rate helps him with the ranking system and is far ahead of the second best batting performance (Srikanth) in the match. Koundi 3-10 is the best bowling performance of the match.

3) Match 3: Avengers vs Xmen – A match full of a number of small vital contributions.

Ganesh K’s duck costs him the best performance in this match.  Ganesh K’s  2/6 and Satish’s 2/9 were clearly the standout performances in the match. Sreeram’s 19 and Amol’s 15 were the best batting performances in the game.

4) Match 4: Incredibles vs Justice League – A comfortable victory for the Incredibles following a good innings by Nachiket.

Even though Nachiket had the highest inning, his ranking score of score of 58.81 is not in the top 5, where strong bowling and all-round performances dominated. Aravind’s 3/11 and last minute hitting (14 of 13 balls) takes him to the top.  Rahul’s 12 of 10 and 3/7 in 2 overs was another great performance. Arun’s 2/6 in 3 overs ranks at around the same level to  Ganesh’s 4/14 in 3 overs (as a better economy rate is rewarded highly).

5) Match 5: Avengers vs Justice League– Another victory to the Justice League on the back of a strong performance by the Justice League bowlers.

Kaushik’s brilliant performace of 3/8 in 3 overs while defending 69 gets him the maximum points. Priyank had a brilliant all-round game, but lost on batting points due to his scoring rate which was below the required rate. Same for Phani, who had the best batting performance for his 21.

6) Match 6: Xmen vs Avengers – A great fight by the Avengers, but the low score of 56 wasn’t enough.

Amol’s all-round performance wasn’t enough to help Avengers get their first victory. Ganesh K’s calm innings and a strong bowling performance gets him top ranking for the Xmen.

7) Match 7: Incredibles vs Xmen –  A great batting performance by the Incredibles helped them to another victory.

Chirag with an all-round performance of 15 of 16 balls and 2/4 in 2 overs  leads the ranking.  Shreenath with 29 of 25 balls leads the batting performance.

8) Match 8: Incredibles vs Justice League – A great match, well contested up to the last over, where the Incredibles just pulled it out.

Dipesh’s fantastic performance with the bat and ball leads him to the top. Suresh’s 5 wicket haul gets him the highest rated bowling performance so far.

(605)