Duckworth-Lewis for Cricket Dummies like me

Vinod's Cricket Brain is definitely bigger and bettter than mine. So is Abhigyan's. My apologies to Vinod for giving you a wrong bit of information while replying to your query on my post on net run rate calculations. Thankfully, on Abhi's request, I decided to dig further, and my ignorance got revealed. But what's a blogger who can't make a story out of something - so here's my post on the Duckworth-Lewis System, and I dedicate this post to cricket dummies out there, not excluding myself.

Basic premise on which Cricket's most complex system called Duckworth-Lewis works:

Resource Percentage - when any team starts a fresh innings in any full 50 overs one-day international match, they start with 100% of resources left. As the number of overs reduce and/or wickets fall, the Resource Percentage ( simply referred to as RP from here on) left keeps reducing.

note: for any match less than 50 overs, even from the start, the resource percentage doesn't start at 100, but at a lower number. There's a table which tells you all this.

Calculating:

Case 1: When the match gets interrupted with the second innings in progress, and the number of overs have to be reduced for the second innings only.

Say play got interrupted at 110/3, 30 overs and when restarted it was reduced to a 40 overs match.

RP Lost = RP remaining when 20 overs left - RP remaining when 10 overs are left

Net RP which Team 2 is left with = 100% - RP Lost

New Target = Old Target x Net Resource Percentage left. So if Team 2, chasing 800 runs is left with 70% Net RP, their new target will be = 800 x 70% = 560! One hell of a target na !!

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Phew! That was some effort। I just hope i've not bungled on something, else let me know and please forgive. Vinod & Abhigyan raised the query that it was actually possible for the target to be higher than what Team 1 scored, and it's quite possible under Duckworth Lewis. Maybe it has already happened in the past, i don't know, but explaining that would be a far bigger challenge, which I don't feel like accepting right now. Let me know if this was an useless post, and I'm actually the King of the Cricket Dummies.