One of the striking aspects of IPL 2026 is the normalcy of the 200-plus total – teams have achieved it 39 times in the first 48 matches this season. That’s 12 more than at the same stage in IPL 2025, which itself was a season when run rates touched new highs. More than the frequency of such totals, it’s the ease with which they are being chased down that has been truly astounding in IPL 2026.
After 48 games of IPL 2026, teams chasing targets of 200 or more have a 12-11 win-loss record. At the same stage last season, it was only 4-13; over the entire 2025 season, it was 9-24. Even totals exceeding 220 have been chased down regularly, often with ridiculous ease: in 13 games, teams batting second have won eight and lost only five. In 15 such matches in 2025, the teams chasing had a 2-13 win-loss record. Thus, even taking into account the Impact Player rule, which was around last year as well, there has been a dramatic change in how teams have tackled targets that used to be in the super-difficult category. How have chases changed so much?
The Powerplay charge
Powerplay run rates have surged like never before this season, touching an all-time high of ten per over, but in high chases the powerplay influence is even greater. In all 23 200-plus chases this season, the average run rate in the first six overs has been 11.78, a 12% jump over the 2025 Powerplay run rate of 10.48 in such chases. On average, teams have scored 31.55% of their target in this phase, which constitutes 30% of the total overs (six out of 20).
In the 12 successful chases, the powerplay run rate has surged even further, to a phenomenal 13.81. That’s a jump of almost 21% over last year’s run rate of 11.43 in nine successful 200-plus chases. On average, chasing teams have scored more than 37% of their target in this phase, compared to just 32% last year.
Looking individually at those 12 matches, the highest percentage contribution in the powerplay came in the game between Rajasthan Royals and Royal Challengers Bengaluru in Guwahati, when RR, chasing 202, were 97 for 1 after the powerplay, thanks largely to Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, who scored a stunning 26-ball 78. There were two other matches when teams scored more than 40% of their target in the powerplay, including Punjab Kings’ incredible chase of 265 against Delhi Capitals.
There were only four instances, out of 12, when the contribution of the powerplay scores were under 36% in these successful chases. The lowest of those was 28%, when RCB scored 58 for 1 out of a target of 206 against Gujarat Titans (GT).
In each of these cases except one – the RCB game mentioned above – the run rate at the end of the powerplay was greater than the asking rate at the start of the innings, which meant that the ask in the remaining 14 overs was smaller than it was at the start of the chase. In ten out of 12 cases it was under 11, including the RR-RCB match when it went down as low as 7.5.
The halfway story
At the ten-over mark of these chases, teams had scored at least 50% of their target in ten out of 12 cases, and only three times did they lose more than two wickets. In that Guwahati game against RCB, RR had polished off almost 68% of their target at the halfway mark. Even in the RCB-GT match when RCB had scored only 28% of their target in the powerplay, they turned it on in the next four overs, scoring 60, so that at the halfway mark they had scored 57% of their target, with nine wickets in hand.
The run-rate and required-run-rate graph after ten overs indicates the dominance of the chasing teams. The asking rate dropped to under ten in six of the 12 matches, and to below 11 in two more matches. With wickets in hand, those chases have invariably turned out to be pretty straightforward. Only three of these 12 chases have gone into the 20th over, and even those haven’t gone beyond 19.2. The others have concluded by the 19th over, with RCB’s 15.4-over demolition of a 202-run target against SRH in the season opener being the quickest chase of a 200-plus target ever in the IPL. That first match truly set the tone for the rest of the season.
Of course, it’s not that every big chase has been achieved successfully. Eleven times teams have been unsuccessful, and some of those have been huge defeats: Chennai Super Kings beat Mumbai Indians (MI) by 103 runs, while MI beat GT by 99. The average margin of victory in these 11 games has been almost 47 runs, while the median is 47 as well, indicating some one-sided results which went against the chasing teams.
Even so, the fact that teams have chased down targets of 200-plus more often than not is a huge departure from past trends in the IPL, even with the Impact sub. In fact, in all previous IPLs put together, there were only five instances of teams successfully overhauling 220-plus targets; in 48 matches this season alone, it has been achieved eight times. Perhaps no stat demonstrates more effectively how batting benchmarks have shifted in IPL 2026.
