BENGALURU: He is not just the namesake of cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar. He too is associated with cricket, though not on the ground.
The quality of cricket team selections and a skipper’s on-field decisions could rise several notches, thanks to the players’ rating system in cricket developed by Sachin Ramamoorthy, a 16-year-old Bengaluru-based boy,
Sachin has launched his website sachinr.me/cricket with the rating system recently and has seen over 50 visits per day on an average, and now plans to launch an App to make the system more accessible, user-friendly and hands-on for cricket’s on-field and off-field decision-makers.
Giving an example on how his rating system works, he explained to The New Indian Express: “Imagine a scenario – RCB (Royal Challengers Bangalore) is playing against MI (Mumbai Indians), and MI needs six runs to win off the last over, with Hardik Pandya on strike. Virat Kohli would traditionally hand the ball to Umesh Yadav, an experienced death bowler. However, my rating system shows that Yuzvendra Chahal, a spinner (who very rarely bowls in the death overs), is far more effective against Pandya and has a much greater chance of defending those six runs. Chahal’s bowling would drastically increase RCB’s chances of winning the game,” said the class 12 student from Stonehill International School.
Several other sports such as chess or table tennis includes a system called Elo rating, which is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games, and is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor. The rating system involves calculating the difference in ratings between two players which serves as a predictor of the outcome of a match.
“I like to play chess on websites and I noticed that the websites rate players on the basis of Elo ratings. As a huge fan of cricket and the RCB, I was surprised that there is no implementation of a rating system for cricket players. So right after the IPL ended, I decided to try to adapt Elo ratings to cricket players,” Sachin said.
Understanding that it was not possible to pit batsmen against bowlers because they are measured through different metrics, Sachin decided to create the unique rating system that could be used to develop ratings for every player in the IPL, and eventually in entire international cricket as well.
The rating system is based on a concept called Markov chains, a stochastic model – a pattern that may be analysed statistically but may not be predicted precisely – describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event.
“The mathematical model was challenging. Calculating the ratings for all the players was relatively easy. However, it took about a month to actually figure out the model/method of calculation.
I had to relate a lot of probabilistic concepts I hadn’t learnt about yet. I even took a course on Markov chains!” he said.