IPL Most Runs in Chases: All-Time Records

Sides batting second have won 666 of the 1,218 completed IPL matches — a little under 55 per cent. That is a persistent edge rather than a large one, and it has held across nineteen seasons of changing pitches, changing rules and changing dew policy. It also means roughly half of every batter's IPL career has been spent chasing a number, which is a materially different job from setting one.

Virat Kohli has 4,375 runs in the second innings, ahead of Rohit Sharma on 3,449 and David Warner on 3,285. The gap is not the interesting part. The interesting part is the average column: Kohli averages 42.89 chasing against 40.42 across his whole IPL career, and he is one of very few high-volume batters whose second-innings numbers are better than their first-innings ones.

Everything here is drawn from the second innings of all 1,243 Indian Premier League matches played between April 2008 and the 2026 final, excluding super overs.

Most IPL runs batting second

#	Player	Runs	Inns	Balls	SR	Avg	50s	100s	Sixes
1	Virat Kohli	4,375	133	3,194	137.0	42.89	30	3	145
2	Rohit Sharma	3,449	135	2,666	129.4	29.99	23	1	156
3	David Warner	3,285	97	2,314	142.0	39.11	34	1	114
4	KL Rahul	2,888	72	2,064	139.9	47.34	28	0	119
5	Shikhar Dhawan	2,843	94	2,242	126.8	36.45	22	1	61
6	Robin Uthappa	2,832	115	2,103	134.7	27.50	15	0	110
7	Sanju Samson	2,643	103	1,922	137.5	29.37	14	1	125
8	Ajinkya Rahane	2,605	97	2,131	122.2	30.65	18	0	61
9	Gautam Gambhir	2,460	89	2,048	120.1	33.70	20	0	25
10	Jos Buttler	2,410	74	1,542	156.3	39.51	15	3	114
11	MS Dhoni	2,336	101	1,728	135.2	39.59	10	0	117
12	Suresh Raina	2,334	91	1,688	138.3	32.87	13	0	85
13	Shubman Gill	2,303	68	1,672	137.7	41.12	15	2	78
14	Faf du Plessis	2,223	71	1,619	137.3	34.20	18	0	80
15	Suryakumar Yadav	2,203	79	1,439	153.1	34.42	16	1	90
16	Ambati Rayudu	2,201	91	1,789	123.0	28.96	9	1	81
17	Shane Watson	2,162	78	1,534	140.9	32.27	15	1	110
18	Manish Pandey	2,131	95	1,783	119.5	28.41	10	0	65
19	Shreyas Iyer	2,102	69	1,491	141.0	42.90	18	1	90
20	Dinesh Karthik	2,099	112	1,581	132.8	24.99	9	0	56

The averages that matter more than the totals

Restrict the list to batters with at least 60 second-innings innings and rank by average, and the order changes considerably.

Player	Chasing average	Chasing SR	Inns
KL Rahul	47.34	139.9	72
Shreyas Iyer	42.90	141.0	69
Virat Kohli	42.89	137.0	133
Shubman Gill	41.12	137.7	68
MS Dhoni	39.59	135.2	101
Jos Buttler	39.51	156.3	74
David Warner	39.11	142.0	97
Shikhar Dhawan	36.45	126.8	94
Suryakumar Yadav	34.42	153.1	79
Faf du Plessis	34.20	137.3	71

KL Rahul at 47.34 has the highest chasing average of any batter with 60 or more second-innings innings, and he has done it without a single second-innings hundred — 28 fifties and no century, which is an unusual shape and a reasonable illustration of what chasing actually asks. A hundred is rarely required. Being there at the end is.

Jos Buttler's 156.3 strike rate with an average close to 40 is the most aggressive combination on the list. Three of his seven IPL hundreds came in second innings, including the 116 that took Rajasthan Royals past a large target in 2022.

Chasing has been the better half of the coin, but not by much

Season	Won chasing	Won defending	Share won chasing
2008	36	22	62%
2010	28	31	47%
2013	37	37	50%
2015	24	32	43%
2016	41	19	68%
2021	37	22	63%
2023	33	40	45%
2024	36	35	51%
2025	37	33	53%
2026	45	27	62%
All seasons	666	552	55%

The swing between 2015 and 2016 — from 43 per cent to 68 per cent — is the widest year-on-year move in the competition's history and had nothing to do with rule changes. It was mostly a function of where matches were played and how much the ball turned. That volatility is why captains still lose tosses and bat second regardless of the aggregate number.

2026's 62 per cent is a return to the top of the range, and it followed the change that allowed a second ball in the second innings from the eleventh over onward. The intention was to reduce the dew advantage for chasing sides. The season's results suggest it did not.

The highest successful chases

Target	Chase completed	Team	Opponent	Venue	Season
265	265/4 in 18.5 ov	Punjab Kings	Delhi Capitals	Arun Jaitley Stadium, Delhi	2026
262	262/2 in 18.4 ov	Punjab Kings	Kolkata Knight Riders	Eden Gardens, Kolkata	2024
246	247/2 in 18.3 ov	Sunrisers Hyderabad	Punjab Kings	Rajiv Gandhi Intl Stadium, Hyderabad	2025
244	249/4 in 18.4 ov	Sunrisers Hyderabad	Mumbai Indians	Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai	2026
229	229/5 in 18.3 ov	Sunrisers Hyderabad	Rajasthan Royals	Sawai Mansingh Stadium, Jaipur	2026
229	229/4 in 18.4 ov	Mumbai Indians	Lucknow Super Giants	Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai	2026
228	230/4 in 18.4 ov	Royal Challengers Bengaluru	Lucknow Super Giants	Ekana Stadium, Lucknow	2025
226	226/3 in 19.1 ov	Delhi Capitals	Rajasthan Royals	Sawai Mansingh Stadium, Jaipur	2026
224	226/6 in 19.3 ov	Rajasthan Royals	Kings XI Punjab	Sharjah Cricket Stadium	2020
224	224/8 in 20 ov	Rajasthan Royals	Kolkata Knight Riders	Eden Gardens, Kolkata	2024

Every one of these ten came in 2020 or later, and five in 2026 alone. That is the clearest evidence that the chasing edge has been amplified rather than eroded by the scoring inflation of recent seasons. Punjab Kings hold the top two entries, having chased 262 at Eden Gardens in 2024 and 265 at the Arun Jaitley Stadium two years later.

Why Kohli's chasing record is the one people argue about

Virat Kohli has 133 second-innings innings, more than anyone in the top ten of this list. Across them he averages 42.89 at a strike rate of 137.0 — and his three second-innings hundreds are fewer than his six in the first innings.

The argument is whether 137 is fast enough to chase 190 at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium. What the number does not capture is how often he was the only batter still there. On the counter side, batters who struck faster in chases — Suryakumar Yadav at 153.1, Buttler at 156.3 — did so across 54 and 59 fewer innings respectively, and neither has been asked to hold a chase together as often.

What separates a chase from an equivalent first innings

Two things, and both show up in the numbers. Sixes come more freely batting second: Rohit Sharma hit 156 second-innings sixes from 2,666 balls, a better rate than his overall career figure. And dismissals cluster differently — the required rate creates forced risk in a way that a first innings does not, which is why the low averages on this list belong to players who batted at four and five rather than at the top.

For the first-innings equivalent of this list, the most runs in wins records approach the same question from a results angle rather than an innings-order one. Team-level chasing records live on the IPL hub, and the domestic context sits in the guide to cricket in India.

Sources and method

Chasing figures here mean the second innings of a match, identified from the ball-by-ball archive rather than from the toss, so a side that batted second after choosing to do so is counted the same as one that was put in. Super-over innings are excluded throughout. Matches abandoned before a second innings began contribute nothing, which is why the chase/defend totals sum to 1,218 rather than 1,243.

All aggregates are computed from the Cricsheet archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0) covering every IPL match from 18 April 2008 to 31 May 2026. Balls faced exclude wides and include no-balls; strike rate is second-innings runs off the bat per 100 second-innings balls faced. Averages divide second-innings runs by second-innings dismissals. The 60-innings bar on the average table is our own qualification and is stated because a small-sample average table is not a record.

"Target chased" in the successful-chases table is the first-innings total plus one, which is the number the batting side actually had to reach. Where a chase was affected by a revised Duckworth-Lewis-Stern target, the match is excluded from that table rather than listed with a misleading figure. Franchise and venue names are as they stood at the time of the match.