The shortest format of the game is most amenable to upsets. But in a league as long as the IPL – where each team plays a minimum of 14 games – form and luck tend to even out, with the cream eventually rising to the top.Does that make predictions easy? Definitely not. Elite sport rests on the glorious interplay between risk and reward, and it is anybody’s guess as to which way the balance will tilt.But sports prediction is not an exercise in futility either. There is past history to look at, a we...