IPL 2023 Playoffs Race: CSK and LSG have a 97% chance of finishing in the top 4 | Cricket News – Times of India

If you are an RCB fan, you will have to hope that the team wins their last two league stage matches and MI and LSG lose their last games. GT have already guaranteed themselves the top spot and CSK and LSG have a very very good chance of making the top 4 on points.
With 6 matches left to play in the league stage of IPL 2023, there remain 64 possible combinations of results. TOI looks at each of these possibilities to calculate the chances of individual teams making it to the playoffs. As things stand, one team is guaranteed to finish on top, two others are almost certain to make the play-offs, a fourth has a very strong possibility, leaving four others to cling on and hope. The bottom two are already knocked out.
TOI’s Shankar Raghuraman does the number crunching to determine how the teams stand as of Thursday, May 18 morning, in 9 points:
1. GT are already guaranteed to top the table at the end of the group stage. No other team can reach 18 points.
2. CSK’s chances of making it to the top four on points are also very good at 96.9% with only two possible combinations of results placing them in fifth spot – both involving RCB, LSG and MI winning their remaining games and CSK losing to DC. The result of the PBKS-RR game would not matter in that case
3. Third placed LSG in a very similar situation with a 96.9% chance of being among the top four in terms of points. The only way they can finish fifth on points is if they lose their last game and RCB, CSK and MI win theirs
4. Fourth placed MI have a slightly lower chance of making the top four on points at 87.5%. They can finish fifth on points if they lose their last game against SRH and RCB win both their remaining games

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5. Fifth placed RCB’s chances of making the top four in terms of points are now at just 25%. However, if they win both their remaining games, they will at least be tied for fourth and can only miss out on NRR if both MI and LSG win their final encounters
6. RR are now in sixth spot, and they can only make the play-offs through the NRR route since the best they can achieve is tied fourth. For that to happen, they must win against PBKS and hope SRH beat MI. The good news for them is that currently their NRR is better than two of the three teams they could be tied with – MI and KKR – and just a little worse than the third, RCB
7. Seventh placed KKR have a 9.4% chance of being among the top four on points and even that will involve a three-way or four-way tie. They will need to win their last match big to make up for their currently poor NRR
8. Eighth placed PBKS are in a very similar situation – a 9.4% chance of tying for fourth spot with one to three other teams and an NRR that is slightly worse than even KKR’s
9. Ninth and tenth placed SRH and DC are already out of the play-off races
How we calculate these probabilities:
We looked at all 64 possible combinations of results with 6 matches remaining. We assumed that for any given match the chances of either side winning are even. We then looked at how many of the combinations put each team in one of the top four slots by points. That gives us our probability number. We do not take net run rates or No Results (NR) into consideration because predicting those in advance is impossible.