Every player card in TheChase500 carries three ratings. Together they tell you what a player brings to a chase, and reading them well is the difference between the 500 Club and a heartbreak finish.
| Rating | What it means |
|---|---|
| BAT | Batting, how good they are at building an innings and staying in. |
| POW | Power, scoring speed and the ability to clear the ropes and keep the rate up. |
| BWL | Bowling, how much they hold up with the ball. This is what your lower order lives or dies on. |
Ratings glow brighter the more elite they are, so you can read a player at a glance:
Each player is colour-coded by role, batter, all-rounder, bowler, wicketkeeper, so you can build the right shape. Your top seven carry the Batting. Your Power is your seven biggest hitters and your Bowling is your four best bowlers, wherever they bat in the order.
Every side also wants a wicketkeeper and that World Cup's captain. A line-up doesn't exist without a wicketkeeper, and a chase like this isn't complete without the leadership of a good captain. Missing one isn't make or break, but each one missing costs your Batting half a point. The draft ticks them off as WK and C as you pick them.
Here is the thing a lot of players wonder: you are chasing, so why does it matter how well your bowlers bowl? Fair question, and technically those bowlers have already conceded the 500. But it is about who is in your team. Picking a prime Dale Steyn or Shoaib Akhtar over some anonymous bowler is what turns your XI into a proper all-time side rather than a top-heavy list of run-scorers.
And it matters to the chase itself: when your batters walk out knowing there are genuine legends and icons sitting in the dugout behind them, it lifts their confidence and morale to get over the line. So the game counts your four best bowlers, wherever they bat. Stack pure batting all the way down and you are missing half of what makes a great cricket team great. The top seven carry the runs, the bowlers carry the pedigree, and both need to be elite.
Every squad in TheChase500 is a real ODI World Cup squad, and every card is that player at that World Cup. Kohli 2011 and Kohli 2023 are different cards, because they were different players. Every rating starts with deep research into the player's real ODI record, at that tournament and across the years around it:
On top of the raw stats comes a weighting for iconic and nostalgia status. A player who defined an era, who fans remember as a match-winner and a legend, gets his due even where the bare numbers understate him. This is the most important part of the system: the stats set the foundation, but the ratings are finished so that players are rated as fans remember them at their peak, in the shirt they are famous for. Older greats are also read in the context of their era, since strike rates across the game were naturally lower in the 1980s and 1990s. Stats inform, cricketing judgement and legacy decide.