Bid Increments in a Cricket Auction, Explained

The bid increment is how much the price goes up when somebody raises. It sounds like a detail. It decides how long your auction takes and whether the room ever finds out what a player is worth.

Two failures, both common, both from copying a number rather than working one out.

Increments too large. A base price of 20,000 with a 25,000 step means the second bid is 45,000 and the third is 70,000. A player worth about 50,000 gets exactly one bid. The auction becomes a series of yes or no decisions rather than a contest, and the prices that come out of it are noise.

Increments too small. A one crore budget (10,000,000 rupees, about $120,000) with a 5,000 step needs forty raises to move a player from 2 lakh to 4 lakh (a lakh is 100,000 rupees, roughly $1,200). The room loses interest, the auctioneer loses their voice, and a hundred-player auction runs past midnight.

The number to size against

Not the budget. The average slot, which is the budget divided by the minimum squad size. That is roughly what a normal player in your auction costs.

On a one crore budget with a minimum squad of 15, the average slot is about 6.6 lakh. On a fifty thousand budget with a squad of 11, it is about 4,500. Those two auctions need completely different ladders, and the ratio between them is the only thing that transfers.

A step of about 5% of the average slot gives roughly a dozen raises between the base price and a typical sale. That is enough for the room to find a price, and short enough to keep the night moving.

A ladder, not a number

One step for the whole auction is a compromise: too big at the bottom, too small at the top. Real auctions use a ladder, where the step grows as the price does.

Three bands is enough:

Worked through on a one crore budget with a squad of 15:

That top band ends at 72 lakh because that is the most any team can bid on one player with those settings, so the ladder covers every price the night can produce.

The same shape on a fifty thousand budget with a squad of 11:

Same auction, different scale. This is why the IPL's numbers cannot be borrowed: they are correct for their average slot and wrong for yours.

The purse calculator generates this ladder for whatever budget and squad size you enter, and it can be copied straight into the auction settings.

What the software does with it

Set the ladder in Auction setup, under Budget and rules, as a set of ranges with a step for each. During the night, the bid button offers the next amount up the ladder rather than asking the auctioneer to compute it while the room is shouting.

Two behaviours worth knowing:

The opening bid is the base price, not base plus a step. The first team to raise a hand buys at the base price. Otherwise no player could ever be sold at their own base price.

Above the top band, the top step keeps applying. A ladder that stops short does not stop the auction; it just keeps using the largest step you configured. Better to set the top band to the maximum single bid your budget allows, so nothing is left to chance.

Choosing your own

If you want to reason about it rather than copy a table:

1. Work out the average slot: budget divided by minimum squad size.
2. First step: 5% of that, rounded to a number an auctioneer would say out loud.
3. Second step: double the first, applying from about the average slot upward.
4. Third step: five times the first, applying from about three times the average slot upward.
5. End the top band at the maximum one team can bid on one player.

Round every one of those to something callable. A step of 4,732 is arithmetically fine and useless in a room. 5,000 is the number.

More on how the whole night runs in how a cricket player auction works, and on the budgets themselves in squad balance and the max bid.