This Startup’s Cricket Simulation Tool Looks To Tap India’s Love For IPL Fantasy Games

Six months after live sports and businesses catering to sports events in India went silent, the return of the Indian Premier League has given many Indians something to look forward to amid the restricted reality of a pandemic. Come IPL, the popularity of fantasy cricket platforms also skyrockets and multiple IPL sponsorship deals struck by the likes of Dream11 and MPL, only serve to emphasise this. 

Riding on this wave of fantasy cricket and India’s love for the gentleman’s game, Kabaddi Adda founders are looking to create more sophisticated fantasy sports players with their cricket manager platform called SuperCric. Said to be built with an AI-powered proprietary cricket simulator, SuperCric uses real historical data to enable better choice-making for fantasy gamers during live matches. It is said to have a 90% accuracy rate in predicting wins for fantasy gamers.

Built during the Covid-19 lockdown, the SuperCric website was launched in September 2020. “I’ll be honest with you, it was a Covid-related product and it sparked out of necessity and opportunity,” said Suhail Chandhok, cofounder of SuperCric

A lot of Kabaddi Adda’s work relied on live sports earlier, and when the pandemic came about, the company saw it as both an opportunity and adversity. SuperCric aims to tap into the sports enthusiasts’ need for entertainment with live tournament’s getting cancelled globally. 

“Everyone at home loves to be an armchair expert in India. Every single person wants to tell MS Dhoni how to captain better, they want to tell Virat Kohli how to captain better. So, we built a tool which in a way, simulates that experience,” said Chandhok. 

SuperCric allows users to simulate a cricket match based on current players and real data collected on these players over time. Currently, given that the IPL is going on, the tool is trained on the player’s history from the past IPL matches. “The platform is a mix of data aggregation, combined with AI, machine learning, and the ability to put the algorithms together to simulate match results,” Chandhok added.  

Further, SuperCric is currently free to play and users earn points in their wallet for each win. Moving forward, the company plans to partner with ecommerce companies and rewards platforms like Cred and SimSim to enable the redeeming of SuperCric coins on these digital platforms. Another obvious collaboration-in-the-making is with the fantasy platforms. Chandhok noted that SuperCric can help fantasy platforms attract more users who are much more confident to play these games because of SuperCric’s simulation tool and thus, spend more on fantasy games.

SuperCric’s parent company AnalytIQ Sports Technology was founded by Chandhok, Srikanth Viswanathan, Dhanya Parameshwaran and Arvind Sivdas in 2019. Launched in September 2020, SuperCric has raised angel funding from Malta-based company, Nordanvind Gaming. Interestingly, the director of Nordanvind Gaming, Pontus Lemberg owns an international cricket-based forecasting website CricketPrediction.com.

Chandhok himself is a former professional sportsman and currently a sports commentator with global sporting properties like Indian Premier League (IPL), Pro Kabaddi League, Wimbledon Tennis, among others. Chandhok also played professional cricket in Australia, the UK, and enjoyed a stint with the IPL’s Royal Challengers Bangalore in 2009 and 2010.

The Uphill Battle To Acquire Users

“For a product like ours built for a crowded gaming market in India, customer acquisition and marketing has to go hand in hand. That’s why we have set aside a significant chunk of our funding capital for the marketing expenses,” said Chandhok. 

 In the immediate future, SuperCric is specifically targeting the viewers of IPL 2020, which is expected to have a viewership of over 600 Mn people across India.

Till now, the company claims to have a health user traction with users spending 28 minutes a day on the platform. “By the end of this IPL season, the company wants to onboard over a million users. That is our target and I think we’re starting strong,” said Chandhok.  With the company’s SEO and marketing initiatives yet to be launched, this does sound like an ambitious target.  

Chandhok added that the metric of success for the company currently would be a high user stickiness. “If a player uses the SuperCric tool to make choices on fantasy games and come back to the platform each time — that would be the biggest win for us,” he added.

SuperCric has chosen to go the website-first route, and does not plan to build an app. Chandhok argues that the target demographic of SuperCric users comes from Tier 2 and beyond regions and these users often do not have enough memory or data to utilise. That’s why the company has decided to keep the product limited to the website model. 

However, the fact that Google Play Store does not allow real-money games could also be a reason. Google Play Store policy notes games with ‘loyalty’ (e.g. engagement or activity) points that can be exchanged for items or prizes of real-world monetary value, as a violation of its Play Store policy. 

Eventually, SuperCric wants to revive the concept of exchanging trump cards but in the digital mode. Users will have cards of popular cricketers and the card value will grow as players win more simulated games. The company envisions these cards becoming collector’s items and users can also redeem the card’s value — at least that’s the plan. 

“In our childhood, we all had trump cards of cricketers. We want to bring back that experience, by creating digital cards of cricketers and monetise the trading of these cards,” said Chandhok. 

Going forward, SuperCric plans to include many more sports tournaments, especially Kabaddi where the company cofounders have already established an expertise. Further, also extend it to national tournaments, army trophies, and anything that is played across the country. In addition to this, SuperCric also has plans to operate in markets beyond India in the coming years and considers its international investor Nordanvind Gaming as an important strategic partner in that direction. 

Correction Note | 12:55, October 08, 2020

• SuperCric’s parent company AnalytIQ Sports Technology was launched in 2019 while SuperCric was launched in September 2020. This distinction was made added to the article.
• Some sections of this article have been edited post-publishing to fix typographical errors and improve the clarity of language.