How silly20 works

A commissioner creates the league (purse, single or double round-robin, matches per day, overseas cap) and shares the join code; friends join until the auction starts. Each owner names a team and claims a home ground: every deck is unique to one team, and grounds play differently (spin grips at some, dew punishes bowling second at others).

The Public rooms page lists open leagues anyone signed-in can take a seat in. Each card shows the seats and an announced auction time, and the room starts itself on that clock. Hosts can flip on bots: clearly-labeled robot teams take every empty seat, bid for real out of their own purses, and play out the season, so a league always happens, even a league of one human, or none. You can walk out of any lobby before the auction starts; once bidding opens, your seat is yours for the season.

Live auction room, everyone at once. Owners nominate players; a nomination opens a 30 second window at base price, and every bid resets a 15 second going-once clock. Highest bid when the clock dies wins the lot. No bids? The player passes, and can be re-nominated later. You can queue requests for players you want brought up.

Tiers set base prices (marquee 100, gold 60, silver 30, base 10) and are reputation, not a spoiler: they don’t tell you how a player performs here. Finding the underpriced pick is the whole skill.

You can never spend yourself out of a legal squad: the room always holds back enough of your purse to fill the remaining slots (15 players minimum).

Fixtures generate the day after the auction, at real T20 hours: evening marquee slot, doubleheaders add an afternoon game. Before each match you set your XI and a toss preference (bat / field / auto):

· exactly 11 players
· at least 5 genuine bowling options
· overseas players up to the league cap (default 4)
· a wicketkeeper. Playing without one costs you in the field

Part-time bowlers (tagged pt, e.g. “pt OS”) can be handed an over mid-match like their real selves, but never count toward your 5 options, and a keeper only bowls if someone else takes the gloves.

Your batting order is exactly the order you submit. The sim never reorders it, so where you bat your finisher is your call, not the captain's. Your XI locks at the scheduled time; miss it and your last submitted XI plays. You can apply one XI to all remaining matches. If both owners flag ready, the match sims early. Injuries rule players out for a stretch, and the picker shows who’s out and when they’re back.

Matches sim on schedule and can be watched as a ball-by-ball broadcast (about fifteen minutes, capped at ten). While a broadcast runs, the result is hidden everywhere: scorecards, tables, share links. Nobody gets spoiled before the watch.

No rain, ever. Every match runs its full 40 overs. Tied matches go to a super over, and if that ties, another.

Big-league bracket for 5+ teams: Qualifier 1 (1st v 2nd), Eliminator (3rd v 4th), Qualifier 2, Final. One match per evening at the marquee hour. Four teams: 4th goes home, 1st gets a bye to the final. Venues are drawn neutral or hosted by the higher seed, per league setting.

The title doesn't have to be the end. On the final standings, the commissioner can open Season 2: every team carries over (name, owner, home ground) and a retention window opens before the new auction.

Retention is IPL rules made simple: keep any of last season's players at the price you paid for them (that price is now their salary, deducted from the new purse), or release them back to the auction and keep the money. Keep the whole squad if the purse carries it; do nothing and that's exactly what happens.

Owners can walk away between seasons and new owners can take the empty seats. Any season the commissioner calls it, a mega auction comes: retentions capped, everyone else back on the block, dynasties broken up the hard way. The league's Career tab keeps the receipts: titles, season ladder, all-time records.

Every ball is a fresh contest, and the odds of each outcome are built in layers, all of them learned from real professional T20 ball-by-ball data (via Cricsheet):

The players. How this batter actually plays this phase against this bowling type, and how this bowler actually bowls to this hand. Real records, leaning on recent seasons, and judged by who they were made against. A boundary spree in a weak league does not read like one against the best. Play someone far outside his real role and it costs him: an opener sent to finish does not magically become a finisher, and a fifth-bowler pressed into frontline work bowls like what he is.

The innings. New batters play themselves in, each on his own real curve. Some drive from ball one, some shelve the six early. Set batters cash in, and truly deep innings keep climbing. Wickets in hand and batting depth set the license to swing; a chase reads the ask, not the clock: a dying chase slogs, a won one knocks off singles.

The ground and the clock. Seventy-plus real venues, each with its own character: spin grip, pace carry, boundary size (sixes are harder at big grounds, twos and threes easier), scoring level, and its real climate by the hour, so an afternoon game plays hotter than the evening one. The start hour decides whether the chase lands in the dew, and at dewy grounds the deck itself changes under the team bowling second.

Form. Players run hot and cold across a season, real purple patches and slumps that arc over a week of fixtures, not coin-flips per match. Form is never displayed; you read it the way real scouts do, through scorecards.

The captain: who bowls when. Every bowler carries a phase fingerprint: where his real-life captains actually use him (new ball, middle overs, death), learned from his actual career. Your sim captain largely respects those habits. Draft Bhuvneshwar and expect him to take the new ball, because that is who he is; draft Bumrah and expect overs banked for the death, because real captains save him. Sit a spinner who has never bowled a 20th over in his life, and don’t expect him to close out yours.

Around the fingerprints, the captain reads the match like a real one. A death bowler's banked overs are protected, but a dying defense releases them early, best against the crisis. A bowler outbowling the rest of the innings gets the recall; one who just got carted waits. When spin as a whole is bleeding, expect the ball back in a seamer’s hand. The captain reads "spin is not working today", not just one bad over. Matchup hunts happen, but only when clearly worth breaking routine for, and part-timers get a look when the game begs. An attack without a real seamer starts as the underdog it is.

What we never show: the numbers themselves. Form and ratings are discovered through scorecards, not dashboards. Scouting is the game.

One honest note: the engine is under active development and improves almost daily, so we can’t promise it plays exactly as described on any given day. What we do promise is fairness: every change applies to every team in every league at once. There is no version of this engine that prefers your rivals.

The sim improves in numbered steps, and every finished match remembers which version played it, so old results never change. See the engine changelog.

The engine plays honest cricket, so cricket wisdom applies. Some truths owners learn the hard way:

You win with bowlers. A team carrying one or two frontline bowlers padded out with all-rounders and part-timers will win a couple of matches. It will not win a league. Someone has to defend 20 overs every game.

Balance beats stacking. Seven top-order stars fighting for six slots buys you nothing once the runs are scored; an all-spin attack lives and dies by the deck and has nobody to close the innings. No real team looks like that, and no sim team gets away with it either.

Specialists earn their overs. If nobody in your XI has real new-ball or death experience, the captain still has to hand those overs to someone, and whoever it is will bowl them like a man doing an unfamiliar job. A bowler with a thin career record bowls like a typical bowler of his type until he is somebody.

Pick a keeper. Playing without one costs you in the field, every match.