Study · IPL, PSL, BPL · 2019 to 2026 · 1,018 games
Chase it,
mostly.
In 1,018 games across South Asia's three big T20 leagues, the side batting second won 54.3%. Captains know it: 75% of toss winners chose to field.
1,018 completed games from Cricsheet ball-by-ball records, 23 March 2019 to 31 May 2026 · Published 7 November 2026 ·
Free to quote under CC BY 4.0 ·
Download the data (CSV)
T202019-26
74.9%
Toss winners chose to field
168 → 196
IPL 1st-innings average
League
by league.
| League | Games | Chose to field | Toss winner won | Chasing side won | 1st-innings average |
|---|
| IPL | 532 | 75.8% | 51.5% | 54.3% | 179.4 |
| PSL | 239 | 71.1% | 57.7% | 52.3% | 178.0 |
| BPL | 247 | 76.5% | 52.2% | 56.3% | 160.3 |
| All | 1,018 | 74.9% | 53.1% | 54.3% | 174.4 |
Resampled 4,000 times, the chasing side's win rate lands between 50.0% and 58.5% in the IPL, 50.2% and 62.3% in the BPL, and 46.0% and 58.6% in the PSL. So the chasing edge is small: just clear of a coin flip in the IPL and BPL, not proven in the PSL.
The
toss.
Winning the toss was worth little on its own: toss winners won 51.5% in the IPL, 57.7% in the PSL and 52.2% in the BPL. What mattered more was the choice. In the IPL, toss winners who fielded won 53.8% of 403 games; those who batted won 44.2% of 129. The BPL split the same way (55.6% against 41.4%). The PSL did not (57.1% against 59.4%).
The IPL
run boom.
| Season | Games | Chasing side won | 1st-innings average | Overs 1-6 | Overs 16-20 |
|---|
| 2019 | 57 | 61.4% | 168.3 | 46.2 | 52.5 |
| 2020 | 56 | 51.8% | 169.2 | 46.3 | 53.0 |
| 2021 | 59 | 62.7% | 159.3 | 43.7 | 47.7 |
| 2022 | 74 | 50.0% | 171.1 | 47.8 | 51.4 |
| 2023 | 73 | 45.2% | 183.5 | 53.2 | 54.2 |
| 2024 | 71 | 50.7% | 189.6 | 54.3 | 55.9 |
| 2025 | 70 | 52.9% | 190.4 | 58.3 | 53.7 |
| 2026 | 72 | 62.5% | 195.9 | 60.0 | 52.1 |
The average IPL first innings rose from 168 runs in 2019 to 196 in 2026. Most of it came at the start: the first six overs went from 46 runs to 60, while the last five overs barely moved.
IPL 2020 and part of IPL 2021 were played in the UAE; those games are kept and shown under their city.
Grounds
by ground.
| City | Games | Chasing side won | 1st-innings average |
|---|
| Rawalpindi | 36 | 44.4% | 194.3 |
| Hyderabad | 33 | 45.5% | 190.9 |
| Chattogram | 56 | 46.4% | 171.0 |
| Kolkata | 35 | 48.6% | 195.5 |
| Ahmedabad | 41 | 51.2% | 185.8 |
| Lahore | 80 | 51.2% | 178.9 |
| Abu Dhabi | 49 | 53.1% | 165.6 |
| Bengaluru | 30 | 53.3% | 188.3 |
| Sylhet | 66 | 56.1% | 158.3 |
| Chennai | 48 | 56.2% | 164.5 |
| Delhi | 35 | 57.1% | 186.6 |
| Mumbai | 92 | 57.6% | 179.8 |
| Lucknow | 27 | 59.3% | 177.4 |
| Dhaka | 125 | 60.8% | 156.6 |
| Karachi | 87 | 62.1% | 173.2 |
| Jaipur | 28 | 64.3% | 186.8 |
Across these 16 grounds (25 games or more), the higher the average first innings, the less often the chase came off (correlation -0.41). Dhaka, with low first-innings scores, favoured the chase; Rawalpindi and Kolkata, with big ones, did not. Sixteen grounds is a small sample, so treat this as a pattern to watch, not a law.
Is it
real?
The run boom is large and steady across eight IPL seasons. The chasing edge is real but small, and it moves from season to season (IPL: 45% to 63%). No betting prices are used in this study: it is about the game, not the odds.
Cricket
guide.
How cricket markets work, in plain words: match winner, toss, top batter and more. Free.
Read the cricket guide
How we
measured.
The method
We took every completed men's game in the Indian Premier League, Pakistan Super League and Bangladesh Premier League in our ball-by-ball archive, 23 March 2019 to 31 May 2026. Seasons are labelled by the year they start. Ties and no-results are left out; rain-adjusted results are kept. The chasing side is the team batting in the second innings. First-innings runs include extras; overs 1-6 are the powerplay and overs 16-20 the death overs.
Ranges are bootstrap percentiles from 4,000 resamples. The ground table only shows cities with 25 games or more.
Ball-by-ball source: Cricsheet (cricsheet.org), used under the Open Data Commons Attribution License. Our derived table is shared under CC BY 4.0; please credit both.
The data file
ipl-psl-bpl-toss-and-chasing-2019-2026.csv has one row per game. Columns: match_id, comp_code (ipl, psl, bpl), season_start_year, match_date, venue, city, team1, team2, toss_winner, toss_decision, bat1, r1 (first-innings runs), pp1 (first-innings runs in overs 1-6), d1 (runs in overs 16-20), bat2, r2, winner, win_by_runs, win_by_wickets, outcome_method, chaser_won, toss_won.
Free to use, share and adapt under CC BY 4.0. Please credit “Bet Better (betbetter.world)” and link to this page.
Cite this study
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