geomblog/ipl

This project estimates each IPL 2026 cricket team's chance of making the playoffs. It is a single page web app built from two files: an HTML page with embedded JavaScript that runs the simulation in the browser, and a small Python script that pulls the latest match results from cricbuzz and updates the data inside that HTML file. To use it, you run the Python script once to refresh the results, then open the HTML file in any browser. No server or installation is needed beyond Python's standard library. The page shows, for each team, their current standings alongside two probabilities: the chance of finishing in the top two spots, which grants a bonus in the tournament format, and the chance of finishing in the top four, which means qualifying for playoffs. These numbers come from running fifty thousand simulated versions of the remaining season. There are two ways to simulate the remaining matches. The simple mode treats every game as a coin flip. The other mode looks at each team's recent record over a configurable number of past games, and uses that to weight who is more likely to win each upcoming match, so a team on a winning streak gets treated as stronger going forward. Alongside the probability estimates, the tool also runs a separate mathematical check, based on network flow techniques borrowed from sports scheduling theory, to certify with complete certainty whether a team has already locked in a playoff spot or has been eliminated, rather than relying on simulation alone. The page saves its results in the browser's local storage so that reopening it without refreshing shows the same numbers instantly, and it also shows whether each team's qualification chances went up, down, or stayed about the same compared to the last time you checked. This is a personal project for tracking one cricket tournament's playoff picture, useful mainly for cricket fans who want a data-driven view of who is likely to advance.