Chris Gayle's 175*: The Untouchable IPL Record That Still Stands

On the night of April 23, 2013, Chris Gayle hit a six off the third ball he faced and, for the next 66 deliveries, never really stopped. By the time he was finished, the scoreboard at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium read 175 not out — the highest individual score in the history of the Indian Premier League, and a number that, more than a decade later, no batter has come within 17 runs of touching. It remains the most violent single innings the tournament has ever produced.

Records in T20 cricket are supposed to be fragile. Bats get bigger, boundaries get shorter, strike rates climb every season. Yet Gayle's 175* has survived a generation of power-hitters, two new franchises, and an entire philosophical shift in how the format is played. To understand why it has lasted, you have to go back to the night itself — and to the cold mathematics of what one man did to a bowling attack in seventy-five minutes of cricket.

The Innings That Broke The Format

Royal Challengers Bangalore were hosting Pune Warriors India, a now-defunct franchise that folded after the 2013 season. Nothing about the build-up suggested history. RCB had a settled top order, Pune were mid-table, and the Chinnaswamy is a small, batting-friendly ground — a good night for runs, but small grounds had hosted hundreds of forgettable matches before.

Gayle opened the batting and was dropped early, a half-chance that would prove enormously expensive. From there the innings accelerated through gears that, at the time, did not seem to exist.

Fifty in 17 balls

Gayle reached his half-century off just 17 deliveries. That alone would have been a headline on most nights. He was not slogging across the line or relying on edges — he was hitting cleanly down the ground and over square leg, picking length early and clearing the rope with a swing that looked closer to a golf drive than a cricket shot.

A hundred in 30 balls

The hundred arrived off 30 balls — the fastest century in all of professional Twenty20 cricket at the time, and still the fastest in IPL history. To put 30 balls in perspective: a top-order batter who scores a run-a-ball century, which is already considered a strong T20 hundred, takes 100 deliveries. Gayle did it in less than a third of that. He went from 50 to 100 in 13 balls.

175 not out off 66 balls

By the close of the RCB innings, Gayle was unbeaten on 175 from 66 balls — 13 fours and a barely believable 17 sixes, at a strike rate of 265.15. The 17 sixes set a record for the most maximums in a single T20 innings anywhere in the world. RCB finished on 263 for 5, which stood as the highest team total in IPL history for eleven years until Sunrisers Hyderabad posted 287 for 3 in 2024. Pune Warriors, chasing a target that had effectively ended the contest at the halfway mark, were dismissed for 133. RCB won by 130 runs.

The margin tells the story better than any adjective. A single innings turned a routine league fixture into the most lopsided result the competition had seen.

The Numbers Behind The Record

What separates Gayle's 175* from every great IPL innings that followed is not just the total — it is the combination of total, strike rate, and sheer six-hitting in one package. Plenty of batters have scored fast. Plenty have cleared the rope at will. No one has done all of it, to this degree, in the same seventy-five minutes.

Here is where the innings sits among the highest individual scores the IPL has ever produced.

The gap between first and second place is the detail that should be impossible. McCullum's 158* off the very first ball of IPL history in 2008 is itself a legendary innings — and Gayle beat it by 17 runs. In no other major batting record does the holder sit so far clear of the field. The highest Test score, the most ODI runs, the fastest 50-over hundred — all have been chased down to the wire. Gayle's number has simply sat there, untouched.

The fastest-century record is just as instructive. Speed of scoring is the most directly contested skill in T20, the thing every coaching academy now drills. And yet:

Seven deliveries separate Gayle from the next-fastest hundred ever scored in the IPL. In a format where the margins are usually a ball or two, seven balls is a chasm. It is the difference between a very good T20 player and something the format had not been built to contain.

Why The Record Has Survived

The temptation is to file Gayle's 175* under "perfect storm" — small ground, dropped catch, weak attack — and move on. That misreads what happened. Conditions help everyone equally; the Chinnaswamy has hosted thousands of innings by world-class hitters and none has come close. The record survives for reasons that are specific to the batter and to a window of T20 history that has now closed.

First, Gayle occupied a structural position that barely exists anymore. He opened the batting and was given license to bat through twenty overs without ever being asked to rotate strike or protect a partner. Modern teams stack their order with finishers and rarely let one man monopolize the strike for an entire innings. The platform that allowed a single batter to face 66 of a possible 120 deliveries has largely been engineered out of the game.

Second, he was a genuine outlier of his era. When Gayle hit 17 sixes, the rest of the league was still treating 200 as a par total and a strike rate of 150 as aggressive. He was playing a version of T20 that the rest of the format would not catch up to for years. By the time power-hitting became universal, bowling attacks and field-setting had evolved specifically to stop it — which is precisely why no one has matched the number even as the average score has climbed.

Third, the innings sits at the intersection of three records at once: highest score, fastest hundred, most sixes. A batter today might break any one of them on a hot night. Breaking all three in a single innings, the way Gayle did, requires a kind of sustained, uninterrupted carnage that the modern game's tactical balance is designed to prevent.

What It Means For Cricket Today

More than a decade on, the 175* functions as a benchmark the IPL measures itself against rather than a record it expects to break. Every time a batter goes berserk — a Royal Challengers Bengaluru opener tearing into a powerplay, a finisher launching a late assault — the commentary instinctively reaches for Gayle's night as the ceiling. It is the number that defines the upper bound of what is possible.

This is also where prediction and pattern recognition earn their place. When a batter like Virat Kohli — who shared dressing rooms and partnerships with Gayle through those RCB years — gets going at the Chinnaswamy, the question is never simply "how many will he score" but "how does tonight compare to the nights that rewrote the record book." CricMind's Oracle engine reads exactly that kind of context: ground dimensions, matchup history, the tempo of an innings as it builds, and the probability that a fast start becomes a generational one. The 175* is the data point at the very edge of every model — the reminder that cricket's outliers are real, and that the math has to leave room for the impossible.

For franchises, the innings reshaped how openers are valued. The "anchor who accelerates" was quietly replaced by the "hitter who never decelerates," and the auction economy followed. Teams began paying premiums for batters who could, in theory, do to an attack what Gayle did to Pune Warriors — even knowing that the ceiling itself would almost certainly never be reached again.

Three Takeaways

• The margin is the miracle. Gayle's 175* beats the second-highest IPL score by 17 runs and the second-fastest hundred by 7 balls. No other major batting record is held by such a distance, which is the single strongest reason it has endured.
• It belonged to a vanished tactical world. A top-order batter facing 66 of 120 deliveries, with full license and no rotation, is a structure modern T20 has largely abolished — making the platform for such an innings nearly impossible to recreate.
• It is the format's ceiling, not its average. Power-hitting has become universal, scores have climbed, and bats have improved — yet the record stands, because it was always an outlier rather than a trend that newer players could simply ride past.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the highest individual score in IPL history?

Chris Gayle's 175 not out for Royal Challengers Bangalore against Pune Warriors India on April 23, 2013, is the highest individual score in IPL history. He made it off just 66 balls with 13 fours and 17 sixes.

How many sixes did Chris Gayle hit in his 175*?

Gayle hit 17 sixes in the innings, which set the record for the most maximums in a single T20 cricket innings anywhere in the world. He also struck 13 fours.

Is Chris Gayle's 30-ball century still the fastest in IPL history?

Yes. The hundred he reached during the 175* came off 30 balls and remains the fastest century in IPL history. The next-fastest IPL hundred came off 37 balls, by Yusuf Pathan in 2010.

What was the final result of the match?

Royal Challengers Bangalore posted 263 for 5, then bowled out Pune Warriors India for 133 to win by 130 runs. The RCB total stood as the highest in IPL history for eleven years until Sunrisers Hyderabad scored 287 for 3 in 2024.

Why has the 175* never been broken?

The innings combined three records — highest score, fastest hundred, and most sixes — in one knock. It also relied on a tactical structure, with one opener facing the bulk of the deliveries, that modern T20 teams have largely engineered away. As a result it has survived even as average scores have risen across the league.

Who has come closest to the record?

Brendon McCullum's 158 not out in the very first IPL match in 2008 is the second-highest individual score, 17 runs behind Gayle. No batter has scored 160 or more in an IPL innings since.

Did Chris Gayle hold other IPL records too?

Yes. Beyond the highest score and fastest century, Gayle was for years the leading six-hitter in IPL history and one of the most prolific opening batters the tournament has produced, particularly during his time at Royal Challengers Bangalore.