Data

i went to cricsheet.org to fetch me all the matches ever played in the leagues like IPL,PSL,BBL,CPL, etc. This made me find 82 discrete franchises. I then categorized what player is overseas in what tournament, as each team can only have 4 overseas players, with respect to their own region. I then found all the deliveries ever bowled by all the players and all the balls ever faced by all the players. That was 2421 players.

a batch of overs bowled by Jasprit Bumrah (red are wickets, lighter colors represent boundaries)

a batch of overs played by rohit sharma (red are wickets, lighter colors represent boundaries)

Training

I then made a transformer model to work with this data like an LLM, predict the next delivery given a random context of 4 overs you've bowled consecutively in your entire career. I turned the "W"(wicket) deliveries to 0, "1" to 1, "2" to 2, etc. Then i ran a GRU(Gated Recurrent Unit) which works well on sequential data and did a 80–20 train-test split. I prepared models for all the players, for the balls they've ever bowled, for the balls they've ever played. Half of our work is finished. The game mechanics work like this, both the striker batsman and the bowler predict a ball, based off their largest logit probability, the ball that is actually bowled will be evaluated by whose logit is higher than the other. Like this every delivery will be predicted, and the entire match will be simulated.

a delivery

Player draft

Each team will be of 11 players, and the first player is always the player who has been capped the most times by the franchise, or 2nd most, in the case of Sunil Narine, he has been capped by KKR for 189 matches(#1) and 87 matches for TKR(#1), Sunil Narine will go to KKR. and DJ Bravo gets drafted to TKR, the rest of the players are gone sequentially, no teams get a team full of batsmen, everyone is distributed like uno cards, every team has a list of their 5 best bowlers which will bowl each game(4 overs each)

a playing xi of this iteration of KKR

Match Simulation

Every team played 162 games(one at home, one away). The second column is for the number of wins. We are going to generate 6,442 match reports, and a huge points table, this is going to be a huge task so i left cursor to it, and he did pretty well. Virat Kohli over here also takes the orange cap with 1471 runs and Lewis Gregory picks a whopping 816 wickets. Durham won the first international premier league(IT JUST LOST 1 GAME). By the way it would take 6,442 days, which means this league would finish on August 7, 2043. thank you for reading!