Set a budget every team can use.

Work backwards from the squad rather than picking a round number. Set the purse so that filling the minimum squad at base price costs about a quarter to a third of it, which leaves the rest as real bidding room. The size of the purse matters far less than that ratio: fifty thousand and one crore (10,000,000 rupees, roughly $120,000) behave identically if the same share of the money is in play.

Yes. The budget is set once for the tournament and applied to every team, so no team can be quietly funded better than another. What a team has left changes as it buys players, but what it started with is the same number for everyone.

No, and deliberately. The budget, the base price and the squad limits lock the moment bidding goes live, because every bid already placed was checked against them. Changing the budget underneath a running auction would make the prices already on the board mean something different from the ones still to come.

Start at roughly 30% of the average slot, which is the purse divided by the minimum squad size. On a one crore purse with a squad of 15 that is about 2 lakh. The calculator rounds it to a number an auctioneer would call out, and shows what four other choices would do to the same auction.

At the base price. A player goes on the block at what they are worth and the first team to raise a hand buys them there. Only once a team is leading does the next bid have to beat the board, which means a team holding exactly the base price is never priced out of a player it can exactly afford.

In Auction setup, under Budget and rules, alongside the budget per team and the squad size. That number applies to every player in the tournament. A player category can override it for its own group, and a price on an individual player overrides both.

The purse, less what its remaining squad slots will cost. On one crore with a minimum squad of 15 and a base of 2 lakh, that is 72 lakh: one crore less fourteen slots at 2 lakh each. The auction enforces this on every bid, so a team cannot strand itself with an unfillable squad.

Because it would then be unable to field a legal squad, and the auction could not finish. Every bid is checked against what the team still has to buy, priced at the cheapest player left in the pool. The reserve covers the slots after this one, not the player currently on the block.

Steps sized against what a player in your auction actually costs, not copied from a televised one. Around 5% of the average slot gives roughly a dozen raises between the base price and a typical sale, which is enough for the room to find a price. Copying IPL increments into a fifty thousand purse gives one bid and a hammer.

Squads end below the minimum, and no software can prevent it because the players do not exist. The check is arithmetic: teams multiplied by minimum squad size must not exceed the players registered. The calculator flags the shortfall while registration is still open rather than on auction night.

Some of them cannot be bought at all, however the bidding goes. Ten teams filling to 20 have 200 places, so a pool of 250 leaves at least 50 unsold. Decide in advance what happens to those players, and tell them before the auction rather than after it.

It stops being able to bid. Once a team reaches the maximum squad size its bids are refused, which keeps the remaining players available to teams that still have places to fill. The minimum squad size does the opposite job: it holds money back so a team can still fill the places it has left.

No. Categories are optional, and the tournament base price already covers every player. They are worth adding when you want a group to come up together, such as marquee players first or wicketkeepers as a set, or when a group should start at a different price from everyone else.

Usually yes, and it costs less bidding room than it looks. A higher floor on a small group barely moves the reserve every team has to hold back, because the reserve is priced at the cheapest player still to come. Raising the floor for everyone is what eats the purse.

It can, if the whole pool sits in expensive categories. The rule that matters is unchanged: a team has to be able to fill its minimum squad at the prices in front of it. Set the tournament base price so the maths holds first, then use categories to shape the auction on top of it.