Play at home and bat second in the IPL
Home Advantage
There has been lots of studies in lots of sports about why there is a home advantage. The general observation in sports like baseball, is that it’s due to the calls the umpire makes. So essentially whenever there is a judgment call the umpire tends to favor the home team. Now at this stage, I have no idea if this is true in IPL cricket (will figure it out in a later post) but there is certainly an advantage for Home teams as shown below.

The screenshot above shows the breakdown of wins in IPL using IBM Watson Analytics and as we can see home teams win 54% of the time. It’s not a massive advantage but it’s still an advantage.
The advantage of batting second
We know that there is a home advantage in IPL 20–20 cricket but we also know there is an advantage to batting second, and the advantage is just slightly less than the advantage to being at home. The reason for the advantage is explained to be psychological, i.e. you are chasing a target (however not sure if this has been proven).
The following chart shows how home advantage breaks down with the advantage of batting second.

If we look at the previous chart, it becomes clear that if you are batting second then there is only a slight advantage to whether you are batting at home or away. Of all the games where you batted 2nd 50.7% were won at home at 49.3% were won away.
However if you are batting first, then there is a massive advantage to being at home. Of all the games won when batting first 57.2% of those games were won at home, and only 42.8% of those games were won away.
Away teams batting first have significantly reduced chances of winning
So it should be pretty clear that the coin toss is pretty much the most important part of the IPL cricket game. If you are the home team, losing that coin toss pretty much knocks out your home advantage. If you are the away team, losing that coin toss, has just reduced your chances of winning by the same amount as the home advantage.
The following chart visualizes this.

The chart above shows that you have a massive reduced chance of winning the game if you are playing away and batting first. All other combinations are pretty small advantages.
If you are an away team batting first then you only have a 41.6% chance of winning compared to the 58.4% chance of winning that a home team batting second has.
Summary
To be honest, this was just me playing with some data. I started off thinking that home advantage was a big thing (and it is). I came away realizing that who bats first or second is even more important. Hopefully, i will get some time to drive into the specifics more later.
