Count your putts for a round, and you get a number that can punish good golf. Hit every green, and you might two-putt your way to 34 putts. Miss half of them, chip to three feet, and you might finish with 28. The golfer who played the better round ends up with the worse putting statistic.
That is the problem strokes gained was designed to solve. In solving it, the method overturned one of the most repeated pieces of advice in golf.
The problem it solved
Traditional golf statistics cannot be meaningfully combined. Fairways hit, greens in regulation, putts per round, and scrambling percentage all measure something real, but they use different units. There is no way to tell whether a drive into the rough cost you more or less than a putt left short.
Worse, several of these statistics interfere with one another. Putts per round depends heavily on approach play. A golfer who misses more greens also hits more chips, and chips tend to finish closer to the hole than approach shots. As a result, total putts does not isolate putting performance.
Strokes gained solved this problem by expressing the value of every shot in the same currency: strokes.
The idea in one hole
The method rests on a benchmark: the average number of strokes a golfer takes to finish the hole from a given position. That position is defined by two things—the distance to the hole and the lie, such as the tee, fairway, rough, sand, green, or a recovery position.
Once you have a benchmark for every position on the course, you can grade every shot. A shot moves the ball from a position worth a certain number of strokes to one worth fewer. Because the shot itself uses one stroke, its value is calculated like this:
Benchmark before the shot − benchmark after the shot − 1
Mark Broadie, the Columbia Business School professor who developed the method, uses a par 3 to explain it. The field averages 3.2 strokes on the hole.
| Shot | Benchmark before | Benchmark after | Strokes gained |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tee shot to 16 feet | 3.2 | 1.8 | +0.4 |
| Putt left one inch short | 1.8 | 1.0 | −0.2 |
| Tap-in | 1.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
The tee shot reduced the expected score from 3.2 strokes to 1.8 while using one stroke, so it gained 0.4.
The missed birdie putt is the interesting part. From 16 feet, Tour players hole about 20% of their putts and take 1.8 strokes to finish on average. Missing from that distance is the normal outcome, so the miss costs 0.2 strokes rather than a full stroke.
This changes how you think about your own round. The three-footer you missed hurt you far more than the 20-footer you missed, but no traditional putting statistic shows that difference.
The numbers also add up cleanly, which is what makes the system work. The three shots above total +0.2 strokes gained, matching the golfer’s par against a benchmark of 3.2. Every shot in a round can be calculated the same way and then grouped into driving, approach play, short game, and putting.
Broadie’s second golfer plays the same hole differently, missing the green, chipping to four feet, and making the putt for the same par. His tee shot loses 0.4 strokes, his chip gains 0.5, and his putt gains 0.1. The scores are identical, but the routes to those scores are completely different. Strokes gained makes that difference visible.
Where the numbers come from
The benchmarks are not estimates. They come from the PGA Tour’s ShotLink system, which had recorded more than eight million shots between 2003 and 2010 when Broadie published his analysis—about one million shots per year. Roughly 250 volunteers work at each tournament, and shot locations are measured to within one inch on the greens and one foot everywhere else.
The Tour adopted the method in stages. Strokes gained: putting arrived in May 2011. The driving, approach, and around-the-green categories followed in May 2016.
What it found about the long game
The finding that made the method famous was this: long-game shots—those that begin more than 100 yards from the hole—explain about two-thirds of the variation in scores among Tour professionals.
| 2003 to 2010 | Total strokes gained per round | From the long game | Long-game share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tiger Woods | 3.20 | 2.08 | 65% |
| Top ten golfers | 1.84 | 1.20 | 65% |
| Bottom ten, ranked 290 to 299 | −1.36 | −0.97 | 71% |
Tiger Woods led that era by gaining 3.2 strokes per round. He ranked third in putting, so putting was a genuine strength, but it was still worth only 0.70 strokes per round compared with 2.08 from the long game.
The players at risk of losing their Tour cards were not losing most of their strokes on the greens either. They gave up 71% of them before they got there.
Broadie made the same point another way in Every Shot Counts. Putting accounts for about 15% of the difference between the ten best players in the world and an average Tour professional. “Drive for show and putt for dough” is a good rhyme, but a poor description of where scoring differences come from.
What that means below Tour level
The obvious objection is that amateurs are not Tour players. Broadie anticipated it. He created a separate dataset called Golfmetrics to answer the same question for recreational golfers, then examined where the ten-shot difference between a golfer who shoots 90 and one who shoots 80 comes from.
About 40% of the gap comes from approach play. Driving accounts for another 28%. Once again, roughly two-thirds of the difference lies in the long game, with shots into the green mattering most.
That finding aligns with the data now published by amateur shot-tracking companies. Shot Scope and Arccos both calculate strokes gained against handicap-based benchmarks, and approach play consistently emerges as the largest source of lost strokes—by a wide margin over putting.
It also explains a familiar frustration. If your index sits in the crowded range between 10 and 20, where most indexed golfers are found, the practice green may be the most comfortable place to spend an hour, but it is often one of the least valuable. Most of the available strokes are found on shots from 100 to 200 yards, which is also where knowing your real club distances matters most.
What strokes gained does not tell you
Three limitations are worth stating plainly because strokes gained is often quoted as though it settles every argument on its own.
First, it is relative rather than absolute. Every figure is measured against a chosen benchmark. Gaining 0.5 strokes against a 15-handicap benchmark is not the same achievement as gaining 0.5 strokes against the PGA Tour. The benchmark must always accompany the number.
Second, it needs enough data to become meaningful. A single round contains only a handful of shots in each category, and one lucky chip-in can distort the result. Tour analysts study performance across entire seasons for good reason.
Third, it tells you where you are losing strokes, but not why. Strokes gained might show that you lose 2.4 shots per round on approaches. It cannot tell you whether the cause is poor distance control, inconsistent contact, or bad target selection. Answering that question requires a coach, a launch monitor, or a well-designed practice session.
How to use it
You do not need a tracking system to act on this idea. You simply need to stop judging your round by the two or three shots you remember most clearly.
Write down where each lost stroke came from, and be honest about the category. An approach shot that finishes short of the green still counts as an approach mistake, even if the chip that follows is also poor. Track this for five rounds, and the pattern should become clear enough to guide your practice. It will almost certainly point somewhere other than the putting green.
Then build each practice session around one category and give it a measurable success condition. For example, aim to finish at least six of ten approach shots past the pin from 150 yards.
That is what Ingrain does. Sessions last 10 to 30 minutes and target one weakness at a time. The app remembers what happened during your previous session, so the next one focuses on what still needs work.
Strokes gained did not tell golfers anything they could not have discovered by watching carefully. It simply made the evidence impossible to argue with.
Research behind this article
The definition of strokes gained, the benchmark method, the par-3 example, the ShotLink sample of more than eight million shots from 2003 to 2010, the measurement tolerances, and the per-round strokes-gained figures for Tiger Woods and the top and bottom ten golfers come from Mark Broadie’s paper, “Assessing Golfer Performance on the PGA TOUR,” published in Interfaces.
The finding that putting accounts for about 15% of the gap between the world’s top ten players and an average Tour professional, along with the Golfmetrics analysis of the ten shots separating a golfer who shoots 90 from one who shoots 80, appears in Broadie’s book Every Shot Counts.
The dates of the PGA Tour’s adoption of strokes gained: putting and the tee-to-green categories come from the Tour’s published statistical history. Amateur strokes-gained benchmarks by handicap come from Shot Scope and Arccos.
