Optimal playing strategies of a batsman against bowling type in limited-over cricket: An application of game theory

ABSTRACT

Every player is expected to contribute to team’s batting effort irrespective of their batting position. The expected contribution of each batsman is to score runs as quickly as possible without getting dismissed. It has often seen that based on different situations within a game, a batsman must play either carefully to defend his wicket or strike out aggressively to score runs quickly. Based on the expertise of the batsman, the captain of the fielding team arrange the fielders in such a way that the batsman couldn’t maximize his score. However, the arrangement of fielders is also dependent on the type of bowler (spin/fast) as well as team’s bowling strategies. Therefore, this study tries to find out the optimal playing strategies of a batsman on the field against different bowling types through the approach of game theory. To substantiate the model with live data a batsman’s strategies against different types of bowlers are explained in this work.

KEYWORDS:

• Game theory
• linear programming
• mixed strategy
• probability
• sports

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for his/her detailed, careful, and exhaustive comments. These have led to very substantial improvement of the paper.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.