Cognizant's Doosra

As India is a country of cricket fanatics, Cognizant has introduced a new fantasy cricket game called Doosra to boost the World Cup fever among employees. The game has been designed by Cognizant employees to knock off employee work pressure (?) with a little bit of fun. Doosra will be active for the entire duration of World cup and to login to Doosra, you should be a Cognizant employee (or have a Cognizant employee's login credentials!) For someone like me, who is not much into cricket, Doosra will make a difference. People in Cognizant seem hooked to the game that they keep talking about it all the time. Doosra is more like predicting the possibilities of winning or losing a game. It has two play modes: Super 11 and My Team. To begin with, every player will be provided with a minimum points in each play mode. It is the employee's way of playing the game that would double, triple or make it 10 times the minimum points provided. There will be a fixed amount of 1100 points in Super 11 that will be given to each player for every match and the player has to select 11 players from two teams that are playing the match as per the fixtures. The player has to apportion the 1100 points among the 11 chosen players and a star player (from the 11) has to be chosen. Depending upon the runs scored, wickets taken etc, the player will be awarded points. Points are awarded based on the points the player has given to each of the 11 players. Suppose if a player has chosen Sachin Tendulkar among the 11 players and have awarded 200 points from the 1100 basic points, and if Sachin has scored 100 runs in that particular match, then the 200 is multiplied with 100 runs + bonus points for every 25th, 50th, 75th and 100th run and if he is chosen as the star player, the final value is tripled. Hence the 11 players has to be cautiously chosen and the 1100 initial points has to be cautiously assigned.

For My Team play mode, the player has to place a bet on one of the two teams that plays the match that day. The player will be provided with 5000 initial points and the player will be awarded 1000 points everyday. For example, if its between India and Pakistan, the player can place the bet on either India or Pakistan. Similar to Super 11, the points are multiplied depending upon the bet. If the player bets all the points on a team, the points are quadrupled and if the team loses, the player loses all his points; If the player bets more than 50% of the bet, the points are doubled and if the team loses, the player loses only the percentage of the bet he had placed on the team.

Doosra has become an obsession among all Cognizant employees. When Doosra was introduced, the number of Doosra players increased every minute and now has around 45k players. If you have a question of what is gained from the game, well, its just mere fun and that the winners will win "exciting prizes." Though Doosra players were given weekly prizes for the top players, I hope the grand prize is gotta be really "exciting".

Very recently Doosra team have added two new features to the site- Silly Points and Tweets. Tweet is something everyone knows in this day and age (for the ones who doesnt know, its an exchange of short messages among individuals; social networking!) Silly Points has the statistics of the winners, losers, bets, highest score etc.

Its really fun to have such a game and I sincerely appreciate Doosra developers to have brought such an amazing game to all Cognizant employees. I had bet all my points on England in the England VS Ireland match and lost all my points. Not just me, 98% of the employees have lost their bet on England. After all, Circket is a funny game. You never know what will happen! Looking forward to win all other matches and I hope I would win that "exciting prize." ;-)

Here are some screen shots of Doosra: