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Why a rain-affected chase gets a revised target, how the method thinks about overs and wickets, and why the answer is never simply “scale the score by the overs”.
This is not an official DLS calculator. The official method uses resource tables published by the ICC and licensed to scorers. This site does not have them and does not attempt to reconstruct them. Where a real match has a revised target, it comes from the match data provider and is shown on the match page as the official figure — never from the model below.
A side scores 280 from 50 overs. Rain cuts the chase to 35. What should the target be?
The intuitive answer — scale by overs, so 280 × 35/50 = 196 — is wrong, and unfairly so. The chasing side knows from the first ball that it has only 35 overs, so it can attack from the start with all ten wickets intact. The side batting first had to pace an innings across 50. Simple proportion hands the chasing side a significant advantage.
The insight behind Duckworth–Lewis, later refined by Stern, is that a batting side starts with two resources — overs to face and wickets to lose — and its remaining scoring capacity is a function of both.
A side with 20 overs and 10 wickets left has far more resource than a side with 20 overs and 2 wickets left, even though the overs are identical. That is why the method needs a two-dimensional table rather than a single ratio.
The revised target scales the par score by the ratio of the two sides’ resources. When the chasing side has fewer resources, the target comes down — but by less than simple proportion, because the resources it keeps are the most productive ones.
The explorer below uses a simplified model built for this page. It reproduces the shape of a resource table without claiming to reproduce its values.
Unofficial. This uses a simplified model built for this page, not the Duckworth–Lewis–Stern method. It will not reproduce official revised targets and must never be used to set one.
Illustrative revised target — not official
237
The chasing side has 84.4% of the batting resource the first side had (100.0%), so the par score is scaled down in proportion.
The shape is the point: resources fall as overs run out, and fall faster once wickets are gone. The official tables have this shape; these specific numbers are not theirs.
| Wickets lost | 0 | 5 | 10 | 15 | 20 | 25 | 30 | 35 | 40 | 45 | 50 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0.0 | 18.5 | 34.3 | 47.8 | 59.2 | 69.0 | 77.3 | 84.4 | 90.5 | 95.6 | 100.0 |
| 3 | 0.0 | 23.2 | 41.2 | 55.3 | 66.2 | 74.7 | 81.4 | 86.6 | 90.6 | 93.7 | 96.2 |
| 6 | 0.0 | 24.6 | 42.2 | 54.6 | 63.5 | 69.8 | 74.3 | 77.5 | 79.8 | 81.4 | 82.6 |
| 8 | 0.0 | 19.4 | 32.4 | 41.1 | 46.9 | 50.8 | 53.4 | 55.2 | 56.4 | 57.2 | 57.7 |
Columns are overs remaining. Values are illustrative resource percentages.
“DLS punishes the chasing side.” It adjusts for resources. An interruption can raise or lower a target depending on when it happens and how many wickets have fallen.
“The par score is the score to beat.” Par is the score for a tie. The target is par plus one.
“Wickets in hand do not matter once overs are set.” They matter throughout. Two sides on the same score with the same overs left but different wickets have different par scores.