How Often Is 300 Chased Down? Research

Across 4,450 completed matches, the side batting first has reached 300 on 692 occasions. It defended that total 582 times and lost it 110 times. So a 300 is chased down 15.9% of the time, and the captain who has just watched his side post one wins 84.1% of the time.

That is still a commanding position. It is not the position it used to be. Two things moved over the life of the format, and they are different claims with different evidence: 300 became much more common, and, separately, it became more chaseable. A page that mixes the two ends up saying that chasing got easier when part of what happened is that 300 stopped being an exceptional score.

Start with the shape of the whole thing. Sort every completed match by what the first innings produced, and the chase rate falls in one unbroken line from 94.1% to 7.5%. Nothing in the data wobbles: each extra 50 runs costs the chasing side, every time.

The falls are not even, though. The steepest step sits between the 150 to 199 band and the 200 to 249 band, where the chase rate drops 24.6 points, from 80.6% to 56%. The 200 to 249 band is also the one place where one-day cricket is close to an even contest: 781 chases and 613 defences from 1,394 matches. Above it the balance tips hard. A first innings of 250 to 299 is run down 33.7% of the time, one of 300 to 349 18.5% of the time, and one of 350 and over just 7.5%.

One number in that table deserves a second look. The 300 to 349 band holds 531 matches, more than three times as many as the 350 and over band, which is the first sign of what the eras will show: 300 is now a routine score, and 350 is not.

In 1971 to 1989, 16 of 562 first innings reached 300, about one match in 35. Not one of them was chased down. By 1990 to 1999 the rate had risen to 7.2%, by 2000 to 2009 to 15.8%, and by 2010 to 2019 to 23.7%, which is close to one match in four.

Then the rise stopped. 2020 onwards sits at 22.6%, a shade below the 2010 to 2019 figure, on 695 matches. Whatever made 300 ordinary had mostly finished doing so by the end of the last decade.

The second change did not stop. The share of those 300s that were run down has risen in every era the archive covers: 0% in 1971 to 1989, then 6.6%, 11.2%, 18% and now 23.6%. In raw counts that is 37 successful chases of 300 in 2020 onwards against 4 in the whole of 1990 to 1999.

The two lines have therefore come apart. Big totals are no more frequent than they were ten years ago, but they hold up less often than they did. A side that posts 300 today is doing something normal, and defending it has become a real piece of work rather than a formality.

Here is the complication the chase rate on its own will not tell you. The average first innings in the archive has risen from 210.9 in 1971 to 1989 to 253.4 in 2010 to 2019, a gain of 42.5 runs, and it stands at 249.1 in 2020 onwards. Scoring rose across the whole format, not only at the top of it.

That changes what 300 means. In 1971 to 1989 a total of 300 stood 89.1 runs clear of an average first innings. In 1990 to 1999 it was 74.9 runs clear. In 2020 onwards it is 50.9. The number on the scoreboard has not moved, but its distance from par has come down by more than a third, and a chasing side is being asked for less of a stretch than the same figure once demanded.

So a chased 300 in 2020 onwards is a smaller feat than a chased 300 in 1990 to 1999, and part of the rise from 6.6% to 23.6% is simply that. It is not all of it: the average has eased slightly since 2010 to 2019 while the chase rate kept climbing, which the falling par score cannot explain. Bats, pitches, ground sizes and playing conditions all changed over the same period, and this archive cannot separate their effects from one another. What it can do is stop you reading a rising chase rate as pure improvement by the batting side. Our guide to the required run rate and collapses covers what changed in the playing conditions.

Scale the question up and the answer changes character. A first innings of 350 or more has been posted 161 times in those completed matches and chased down 12 times, a rate of 7.5%. That is less than half the 18.5% that 300 to 349 allows. Going from 300 to 350 does not shade the odds; it moves the match into a different category.

The era pattern repeats but does not converge. Innings of 350 or more grew from 0.2% of matches in 1971 to 1989 to 6.9% in 2010 to 2019 and 6.3% now, so the score has become a regular event. The success rate against it has moved far less: 2.9% in 2000 to 2009, 9.2% in 2010 to 2019 and 9.1% in 2020 onwards. Across the whole archive, 149 of the 161 totals of 350 or more were successfully defended.

Four hundred is close to a wall. It has been posted 27 times, and chased down 1 time: 26 of those 27 innings ended in a win for the side that batted first. That is a small sample and should be read as one, but the direction is not in doubt, and our guide to whether you can chase 380 looks at the few chases that got close. The largest target any side has successfully chased anywhere in the archive is 435.

These are the 8 largest successful chases in the archive, ranked by the size of the target. Each links to its scorecard, and the 380 guide covers what the biggest of them had in common.

The ground matters, though not as much as the size of the total. Among venues where a 300 has been posted at least 12 times, the chase rate runs from 26.7% down to 0%. Harare Sports Club, Harare has seen 4 of 15 chased down, and Gaddafi Stadium, Lahore 4 of 15. At the other end, R Premadasa Stadium, Colombo has hosted 22 matches in which the first innings reached 300 and the side batting second has won none of them.

Teams vary more. Sri Lanka has batted second against a 300 more often than anyone, 79 times, winning 10. India has won the most such chases, 19 of 72, a rate of 26.4%. The best rate belongs to Australia, at 31.8%. West Indies, by contrast, has faced 50 such innings and won 4.

Read that table with care. A side that plays most of its cricket in one part of the world faces a different kind of 300 from one that tours everywhere, and the eras a team was strong in matter as much as the team does. The spread here is real, but it is not a ranking of chasing skill.

Three things fall out of the numbers. First, 300 is still a winning score far more often than not: 84.1% of the time across the archive, and even in 2020 onwards the side batting first wins 76.4% of those matches. Second, the gap between 300 and 350 is much wider than the 50 runs suggests, so a bowling side that concedes 300 has lost far less than one that concedes 350. Third, the chase rate has been rising for reasons that are not all about chasing, and a team that treats 300 as the same target it was thirty years ago is working from the wrong number.

You can test all of that yourself. The Chase, our one-day game, puts you in charge of a run chase with the required rate in front of you, and our guide to chasing a big ODI total covers how to pace one.

• The archive covers men's one-day internationals only, and ends on 2026-08-13. Matches played since then are not included, and women's ODIs are not in this dataset at all. The archive also holds no Afghanistan ODIs after 12 March 2024, which its source withholds, and leaves out fixtures abandoned without a ball bowled.
• Every match decided on a revised target, by Duckworth-Lewis, DLS or an earlier rain rule, is excluded (316 matches, 312 of them with a winner). Those are disproportionately the rain-affected games, so these figures describe full-length chases and say nothing about shortened ones.
• 100 matches have no second innings recorded and 5 cards do not name the side batting first, so they cannot be placed in any band. The 47 ties and the 67 matches abandoned after the second innings had begun are excluded from every rate.
• The rain-rule exclusion rests on the result line: it names Duckworth-Lewis or DLS, or says "revised target", as it does for some older matches. A one-day match decided by average run rate or by the most-productive-overs rule that preceded Duckworth-Lewis, but whose result line says neither, is not flagged in the archive, so any that survive in these bands are counted as ordinary chases even though the same logic, that the side batting second was not chasing the first-innings total, would exclude them.
• Several of the samples are small. Only 27 first innings of 400 or more are in these completed matches; the grounds table rests on between 12 and 22 matches per venue, and the least-tested side in the chasers table has faced a 300 only 21 times.
• Comparisons between groups are not causal. A ground's chase rate reflects which teams played there and in which years, not only what the surface does; a team's chase rate reflects its opponents and its era. Nothing here isolates the ground or the side from everything else that was true about those matches.
• The bands are cut at round numbers, so a first innings of 299 and one of 300 sit either side of a line that the match itself did not care about.

Figures computed from CricArcade's match archive with our own analysis scripts. Drafted with AI assistance, checked against the scorecards and edited by Vishal Jaiswal. Found a number that looks wrong? Tell us and we will check it against the scorecard.

• CricArcade ODI match archive: 4,981 matches, 1971-01-05 to 2026-08-13
• Result lines and innings totals as recorded on each scorecard in that archive

More research: Does Winning the Toss Win Tests?, Batting First or Second?, How Strong Is Home Advantage?, The Anatomy of a Collapse.