MECHANICAL PREMIER LEAGUE BY ENGINEERING STUDENTS

"AKIN to the Indian Premier League and the Karnataka Premier League, students from a city-based engineering college have started the MPL, which stands for Mechanical Premier League. While the first two leagues see fireworks on the field, the latter involves a click on the mouse or a tap on the keys of their computer or mobile phone"

• The MPL is a brainchild of students from BMS College of Engineering who call themselves the Consortium of Naveens and Ganesh (CoN-G). It has over 100 followers and counting since its inception on August 24 this year.Three Naveens - Bhat, Yadav and Kumar - and Ganesh Kamath started a group on social networking site Facebook, called CoN-G TV.
  

“It began with our group taking the lead in sharing funny snippets of college life on Facebook via posts on the fan page. Soon, the entire class would come online at around 8.15 pm every day when such posts were uploaded,” said Naveen Bhat.

• MPL teams follow the Champions League T20 match that is on right now. Fifteen students own a team each and compete against each other by predicting winners of the ongoing matches.
• The teams predict on the Toss (1 run), Who Bats First (2 runs), Man of the Match (5 runs) and Winner (6 runs) and gain the allocated runs on getting them right.

• “The team members message their predictions via an SMS, which are then updated in a special form we have developed,” says Naveen Yadav. The MPL has teams such as Ghost Riders, KARBANGIANS and Brats 11, each with a unique log. The followers of CoN-G also have specially designed T-shirts.
• “With only seven more matches to go (Champions League), there is nail-biting curiosity among the players and their followers,” says Naveen Kumar, who is constantly bombarded with ‘What’s the score’ since he heads the score calculation team. There is stiff competition for the top three slots.
• “I have to constantly follow up on the matches, keep a record of a particular cricketer’s performance and then predict a winner. It involves making clever choices and applying probability concepts,” said Nikhil Hulamani, the owner of Thunderbolts, which is in the third position with 282 runs. Meanwhile, everyone has their eyes on the coveted prize, a hand-drawn certificate that Bhat is still trying to draw.