How we rate players and call matches

The records

Player ratings

• Every ball is valued by how much it changed the batting side's expected total, given the score, the over and the wickets down. That value is shared between the batter and the bowler.
• A batter is measured against par for the moment: an average batter in the same over, with the same wickets down, at the same point of their own innings. An opener gets no credit just for batting in the powerplay, and a No. 9 who walks in at 150 for 7 isn't marked down for it.
• Batting is split into runs and dismissals, and bowling into runs conceded, extras and wickets. Each part has its own memory. Scoring rate settles within a couple of seasons, while wickets swing so much from match to match that they need several years of evidence.
• A player with a short record starts close to average and moves away from it as the balls build up.
• The opposition counts. Runs off a bowler we rate highly are worth more than the same runs off a weak one, and the wicket of a top batter more than a tailender's.
• Competitions differ in strength. We measure each one by how players who move between leagues do against their ratings, so fifty in a weak league counts for less than fifty in the IPL.
• Scoring rises over the years, so every ball is set against the scoring of its own era.
• A rating is published as runs a match above an average player: the rating per ball, times the balls the player usually faces or bowls in the format.

Power rankings

• Men's T20 players are ranked on the same ratings that drive our previews. Men's and women's ODIs, men's Tests and women's T20s are rated by the same method, refitted on each format with its own par and its own league strengths. Women's Tests are too rare to rate anyone on.
• An international list takes a player once they have faced or bowled 240 balls in the format over the last two years.
• A side's strength is the average rating of the XIs it has fielded over the last two years. An XI from six months ago counts half as much as the latest one.
• The ICC's own rankings sit beside ours. They play no part in the ratings.

Rankings

Win chances in T20s

• a regression on the gap between the sides: batting and bowling ratings phase by phase, set against the competition's scoring, plus team Elo, recent form and each side's experience of the host city;
• a neural network that reads both XIs player by player;
• a ball-by-ball simulation that plays the match out hundreds of times, half with each side batting first, under the competition's own rules, including an Impact Player where the league has one.

Fair prices, par and batting first

• A fair price is one divided by the chance, with no bookmaker's margin. Both the decimal and the fractional price are rounded up, so any price longer than ours is value by our numbers.
• Par is the first-innings total that would be defended half the time at the ground. It starts from the competition's recent scoring, moves by how much higher or lower the ground scores than the rest of the league, and is then set where a pooled model of defended totals puts an even chance.
• Each side's chance batting first or chasing comes from the blend, moved by how often chasing sides have won in that competition. The simulation replays each order thousands of times for the likely first-innings total and winning margin, adjusted to the ground.

Win chances in ODIs

Strengths, weaknesses and form

• A strength or a weakness is a gap between the player and the field in the same competitions, seasons and phases as the player's own balls: an opener against powerplay scoring, a death bowler against death overs. It needs 250 balls behind it (120 in a phase), a gap of at least 8% and two standard errors.
• Recent form in a T20 preview is the player's last ten men's T20s in which they batted or bowled.
• The weather board shows the forecast once a match is within 16 days. Before that it shows real evenings at the ground around the same date in past years, each labelled with its date.
• A T20 preview's take is drafted by an AI language model from the figures on the page. A draft that quotes a number not among those figures, or contradicts a player's rating, is thrown out and rewritten.

How we test it

Track record