I Won Official IPL Merch Just by Knowing My Cricket. Here’s How.

There are two types of people during IPL season. The ones who just watch. And the ones who watch, predict, debate, and could probably tell you the exact strike rate of every opener in the top five without blinking. I am very much the second type.

Unstop ran something called the Unstop Premier League, or UPL, during IPL season. The concept was simple and genuinely brilliant: for every IPL match played during the week, Unstop dropped five MCQ questions tied to that game. Who would win the toss. Which team would take it home. Who would be the top scorer. How many runs a certain player would smash. Pure cricket knowledge, pure IPL instinct, five questions per match, every match of the week.

Each question was worth 100 points. Five questions meant a maximum of 500 points per match. With multiple matches in a week, the ceiling for the week sat at 3,500 points if you went perfect across every game. Points stacked up across the week and the leaderboard moved in real time. It had the energy of fantasy cricket but without the complicated team-building — just you, your cricket brain, and five clean questions per game.

I crossed 1,500 points in a week. And then kept going.

Here’s how the rewards worked. Hit 1,500 points in a week and you unlock a merch — not a knockoff from a street stall. The real thing, earned one prediction at a time. But Unstop didn’t stop there. Keep your streak alive across weeks, stay consistent match after match, and push past 2,500 points — and the rewards stepped up to full gift kits with goodies that made the whole thing feel like a proper celebration of cricket fandom. The more consistent you were week over week, the more you earned. It wasn’t just about one good week. It rewarded showing up for every match, every question, every game of the season.

The best part was the format itself. It wasn’t one big exam you had to clear in a single sitting. It was woven into the IPL schedule — every match was a new set of questions, every game was another chance to score, another chance to make up ground or extend your lead. If you had a rough game’s predictions, the next match was right around the corner. It rewarded consistency over a week, not just one lucky guess on a big game.

The questions were sharp too. Not just “who will win” softballs. They tested real IPL knowledge — specific player tendencies, pitch conditions, team form, head-to-head records. The kind of things you know not because you crammed them but because you’ve actually been watching cricket.

Unstop as a platform already hosts hackathons, case competitions, and quizzes for students — but UPL showed a different side of it. Not everything has to be career-building and resume-padding. Sometimes a competition can just be for the love of the game, and it can still reward you with something real at the end. That’s a rare thing to pull off, and they nailed it.

If UPL comes back next IPL season — and I genuinely hope it does — block your calendar. Not because it’s going to land you a job or add a line to your LinkedIn. Just because it’s one of the most fun things you can do during IPL season as a student who actually knows their cricket.