With the emergence of the playoffs of this year’ss Indian Premium League (IPL), and the kind of craze the tournament has been garnering, people are now head over heels lost keeping hopes on their favorite IPL teams. Since the Net Run Rate (NRR) is playing a major role in deciding the worth of the teams, cricket fans are now wondering what the four-digit decimals next to their team’s name mean, and how they are calculated.

People are banging their heads to understand the meaning of the NRR, and the role it is playing in deciding the fate of their favorite teams. However, here we came up with a step by step procedure explaining how the NRR is calculated.

A team’s run rate (RR), or runs per over (RPO), is the average number of runs scored per over by the whole team in the whole innings (or the whole innings so far), i.e.

So if a team scores 250 runs off 50 overs then their RR is

Note that as an over is made up of six balls, each ball is 1/6 of an over, despite being normally written in cricket’s notation as .1 of an over. So if they got that same score off 47.5 overs, their RR would be

The concept of net run rate involves taking the opponents’ final run rate away from the team’s run rate, i.e.

Usually, runs and overs bowled are summed together throughout a season to compare teams in a league table. A team’s overall NRR for a tournament is not defined as the sum or average of the NRR’s from the individual matches, but as:

The exceptions to this are:

1. If a team is bowled out, it is not the overs faced which their score is divided by; instead the full quota of overs to which it would have been entitled is used (e.g. 50 overs for an uninterrupted One Day Internationals, and 20 overs for a Twenty20 match).

2. If a match is interrupted and Duckworth-Lewis revised targets are set, the actual runs scored and overs faced are used for Team 2’s innings (the side which batted second), but the revised targets and revised overs are used for Team 1’s innings, i.e.

3. If the match is concluded, Team 1 is credited with 1 run less than the final Target Score for Team 2, of the total number of overs allocated to Team 2 to reach the target.[1]

4. If the match is abandoned, but a result achieved, Team 1 is credited with Team 2’s Par Score off the same number of overs faced by Team 2.[1]

5. If a match is abandoned as a No Result, none of the runs scored or overs bowled count towards this calculation.

Especially, this year, we have seen people posting videos and sheets on which they calculated the NRR values resembling the possibilities of their favorite team walking into the playoffs. Well, our explanation above might help you in making it a bit simple.