Chris Gayle's 175*: The IPL Record That Has Stood for 13 Years

On the night of 23 April 2013, a single batsman scored more runs than fourteen complete IPL teams have managed in an entire innings since. Chris Gayle's 175 not out off 66 balls for Royal Challengers Bangalore against Pune Warriors India is not merely the highest individual score in Indian Premier League history — it is the highest score in the history of all professional Twenty20 cricket, anywhere on earth, and after thirteen seasons no one has come within seventeen runs of it.

Records in T20 cricket are supposed to be fragile. Bats are bigger, boundaries are shorter, and the format rewards the kind of fearless hitting that turns a good total into a freakish one almost every week. Yet the longer Gayle's 175* survives, the more it looks less like a score and more like a geological feature — something that happened once, under conditions that have never quite repeated themselves. This is the story of how the most destructive innings in franchise cricket came to be, why it has proved impossible to topple, and what it still tells us about Royal Challengers Bangalore and the IPL itself.

The 66 Balls That Rewrote the Record Book

The context was almost mundane. RCB had endured a sluggish start to IPL 2013, and Pune Warriors India — a franchise that would fold at the end of that season — arrived at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium as comfortable underdogs. Nobody in the half-full stands at the start of the evening sensed that they were about to witness the outer limit of what a human being can do with a cricket bat in twenty overs.

A start that gave no warning

Gayle was not explosive from the first ball. He took his customary look at the bowling, reaching double figures without violence, content to let Tillakaratne Dilshan do the early scoring. Through the powerplay he was measured — the lull before the most sustained assault the format has seen. By the time he reached his half-century off just 17 deliveries, the innings had already shifted from controlled to surreal, and the Pune bowlers had begun the slow realisation that nothing in their plans would matter.

The fastest hundred in professional cricket

Gayle brought up his century off 30 balls — at the time the fastest hundred in all professional cricket, a record that stood at the very top of the sport for years. The milestone barely registered for him; he did not slow down, did not celebrate beyond a raised bat, and simply continued. The second fifty of his innings was quicker than the first. In an era obsessed with strike rate, Gayle was batting at a rate of more than two and a half runs per ball across a full innings — a number that belongs to a single over, not a complete knock.

Seventeen sixes and the geometry of the Chinnaswamy

The final ledger read 13 fours and 17 sixes — and that six-count is itself a standalone IPL record for the most maximums in a single innings. Gayle hit them to every part of the ground, several clearing not just the rope but the stands behind it. The M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, with its short straight boundaries and Bangalore's thin air, has always been a batsman's theatre, but on this night it felt too small to contain him. He finished unbeaten on 175 from 66 deliveries, a strike rate of 265.15.

When the Innings Becomes the Record Book

The scale of Gayle's achievement is best understood not in isolation but against the company it keeps. The table below sets his 175* alongside the other most celebrated individual innings in IPL history — and the gap at the top is the story.

The symmetry is almost poetic: the two highest scores in IPL history, Gayle's 175 and Brendon McCullum's 158 in the tournament's very first match in 2008, both involve Royal Challengers Bangalore — McCullum's as the bowling side, Gayle's as the beneficiary. Seventeen runs separate first from second, a chasm in a format where individual records usually fall by a single boundary.

Gayle's 30-ball hundred also sits at the head of the IPL's fastest-century list, another record he held outright at the global level for years. The next table shows how far clear of the field that effort was.

The full team innings that carried Gayle's hundred — RCB's 263 for 5 — was the highest total in IPL history on the night it was made. That franchise record has since been surpassed; Sunrisers Hyderabad's 287 for 3 against RCB in 2024 now sits at the summit of team totals, and SRH have posted several scores above 263 in the years since. But here lies the crucial asymmetry that explains the longevity of Gayle's feat: team totals keep climbing, yet the individual record refuses to move. Modern teams reach 280 by sharing the load across three or four destructive batsmen. Gayle did it almost alone. RCB won that match by 130 runs, with Pune dismissed for 133 — the margin, like the innings, an outlier that still reads like a misprint.

What the Unbroken Record Means in 2026

Thirteen years on, the names at the top of the IPL's batting charts have changed, the strike rates of the chasing pack have crept upward, and bats have only grown heavier. And still 175 stands. Understanding why it has survived this long is the key to appreciating it.

The paradox is that T20 has become more aggressive, not less, since 2013 — and that has worked against the record rather than for it. The modern game is built on relentless team aggression from ball one, which means that by the time a single batsman is set, the innings is often already half spent on someone else's scoring. The conditions for a 175 require a specific and rare alignment: an opener who bats through twenty overs, who is given the freedom to do so, and who finds a ground and an attack offering no resistance whatsoever. Gayle, a man uniquely capable of conserving energy early and then detonating, was the one player temperamentally built to occupy the crease for the full duration and still strike at 265.

This is exactly the kind of question CricMind's Oracle is designed to interrogate: when our prediction engine weighs a batsman's ceiling against venue dimensions, bowling quality, and match state, an innings like Gayle's 175* sits at the absolute edge of the probability distribution — the kind of three-sigma event that models acknowledge is possible but almost never forecast. The Oracle's value is precisely in mapping how a single player can bend a match's win probability by forty percentage points in twenty minutes, and no innings in IPL history bent it further than this one.

For Royal Challengers Bangalore — now Royal Challengers Bengaluru, and at last IPL champions after their maiden title in 2025 — Gayle's 175* belongs to a particular era of the franchise: dazzling individual brilliance that did not, for many years, translate into silverware. Alongside Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers, Gayle made the Chinnaswamy the most feared batting venue in the competition, a place where totals of 200 felt routine and where the home crowd came to expect the impossible. That the team finally lifted the trophy more than a decade later only deepens the nostalgia for those years of spectacular, trophy-less fireworks.

Three Takeaways

• The record's survival is about format evolution, not lack of talent. Modern T20 spreads aggression across a whole top order, which paradoxically makes a lone 175 harder to produce than it was in 2013 — the opportunity to bat through twenty overs and dominate every ball has become rarer, not more common.
• Gayle held three records in one innings. The highest individual score (175\*), the most sixes in an innings (17), and the fastest century (30 balls) all came from the same 66 deliveries — a concentration of record-breaking that no single innings in IPL history has matched before or since.
• Team totals climb while individual ceilings hold. SRH's 287 has surpassed RCB's 263 team record, but the 175 individual mark has only grown more secure with time — proof that collective firepower and individual peaks are now decoupled in the T20 game.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the highest individual score in IPL history?

Chris Gayle's 175 not out off 66 balls, scored for Royal Challengers Bangalore against Pune Warriors India on 23 April 2013 at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore. It is also the highest score in the history of all professional Twenty20 cricket.

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

Gayle hit 17 sixes and 13 fours. The 17 sixes remain the record for the most maximums in a single IPL innings.

How fast was Gayle's century in that innings?

He reached 100 off just 30 balls, which at the time was the fastest century in all of professional cricket and remains the fastest hundred in IPL history.

Has anyone come close to breaking the 175* record?

No. The second-highest IPL score is Brendon McCullum's 158 not out from the tournament's inaugural match in 2008 — seventeen runs short. In thirteen seasons since, no batsman has surpassed 158, let alone 175.

What was the team total in that match?

RCB scored 263 for 5, which was the highest team total in IPL history at the time. It has since been surpassed by Sunrisers Hyderabad's 287 for 3 against RCB in 2024, the current record team total.

Did RCB win the match?

Yes, comfortably. RCB won by 130 runs, bowling Pune Warriors India out for 133 in reply.

Why has the individual record lasted so long when team totals keep rising?

Modern T20 teams build huge totals by sharing aggression across several batsmen who all strike at high rates. A 175 requires one player to bat through almost the entire innings while dominating every delivery — an alignment of opportunity, conditions and individual capacity that has become rarer as the game has grown more uniformly aggressive.