The much awaited IPL auctions had some very interesting stats when the Day 1 ended. The top scorer and highest wicket taker of the IPL namely Chris Gayle and Lasith Malinga went unsold. The confidence was placed into the tried and tested players. The franchises had the chance to retain players and some of them made full use of it to retain their star players. The rules of IPL were made in a way that allows the retained players to earn a huge chunk of money and hence a few teams decided to go into the auctions with full purse.

Ben Stokes remains the hottest property in the Indian Premier League although questions were raised on his availability. The English all-rounder had steered Rising Pune Supergiants to the playoffs last year, was bought  by Rajasthan Royals for  Rs 12.50 crore which makes him the most expensive buy of the first day of auctions. Other big winners include KL Rahul who was bought by Kings XI Punjab for Rs 11 crore and Rashid Khan for Rs 9 crore. 

Looking at the overall story of the retained players and the auctioned players we have the Indian cricket team captain Virat Kohli at the top with 17Cr and followed by the previous Indian cricket team captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni and highly talented Rohit Sharma at 15Cr. Ben Stokes comes next in the list with 12.5Cr making him the costliest buy of this season followed by Steve Smith and David Warner who were both retained for 12Cr to their name. After establishing the stronghold on top 3 the Indian players came back into the top grosser with Hardik Pandya and Suresh Raina being retained for 11Cr each and also K L Rahul and Manish Pandey being sold for 11Cr. South African A B De Villers also joins them at 11Cr mark to complete the list of Top 10 players.  

The Squads :

CSK : MS Dhoni, Suresh Raina, Ravindra Jadeja, Faf du Plessis, Harbhajan Singh, Dwayne Bravo, Shane Watson, Kedar Jadhav, Ambati Rayudu, Imran Tahir, Karn Sharma, Shardul Thakur 

DD : Chris Morris, Rishabh Pant, Shreyas Iyer, Glenn Maxwell, Gautam Gambhir, Jason Roy, Colin Munro, Mohammad Shami, Kagiso Rabada, Amit Mishra, Prithvi Shaw, Rahul Tewatia, Vijay Shankar

KXIP : Axar Patel, Ravichandran Ashwin, Yuvraj Singh, Karun Nair, KL Rahul, David Miller, Aaron Finch, Marcus Stoinis, Mayank Agarwal, Ankit Singh Rajpoot, Manoj Tiwary, Mohit Sharma 

KKR : Sunil Narine, Andre Russell, Mitchell Starc, Chris Lynn, Dinesh Karthik, Robin Uthappa, Piyush Chawla, Kuldeep Yadav, Shubman Gill, Ishank Jaggi, Kamlesh Nagarkoti, Nitish Rana, Vinay Kumar

MI : Rohit Sharma, Hardik Pandya, Jasprit Bumrah, Kieron Pollard, Mustafizur Rahman, Patrick Cummins, Suryakumar Yadav, Krunal Pandya, Ishan Kishan, Rahul Chahar, Evin Lewis, Saurabh Tiwary, Ben Cutting

RR : Steve Smith, Ben Stokes, Ajinkya Rahane, Stuart Binny, Sanju Samson, Jos Buttler, Rahul Tripathi, D'Arcy Short, Jofra Archer, Krishnappa Gowtham, Dhawal Kulkarni, Jaydev Unadkat 
 

RCB : Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers, Sarfaraz Khan, Brendon McCullum, Chris Woakes, Colin de Grandhomme, Quinton de Kock, Umesh Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal, Manan Vohra, Kulwant Khejroliya, Aniket Choudhary, Navdeep Saini, Murugan Ashwin, Mandeep Singh, Washington Sundar, Pawan Negi, Mohammad Siraj, Nathan Coulter-Nile 

SRH : David Warner, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Shikhar Dhawan, Shakib Al Hasan, Kane Williamson, Manish Pandey, Carlos Brathwaite, Yusuf Pathan, Wriddhiman Saha, Rashid Khan, Ricky Bhui, Deepak Hooda, Siddharth Kaul, T. Natarajan, Basil Thampi, Syed Khaleel Ahmed, Mohammad Nabi, Sandeep Sharma