What Is Strokes Gained in Golf? The Stat, Explained Simply

Quick answer: Strokes gained is a way of scoring a golf shot instead of just counting it. Every position on a course has an expected number of strokes to hole out from there, calculated from huge samples of recorded shots. A shot's strokes gained is the expected strokes from where the ball started, minus the expected strokes from where it finished, minus the one stroke you used. Beat the baseline and the number is positive. Fall short and it is negative. Add up every shot in a round and you get exactly how many strokes better or worse you played than the standard you are being measured against.

In this post, WhysGuy will cover:

• What strokes gained measures, in one sentence and then in detail.
• Where the baseline numbers come from, and why they are the whole idea.
• A worked hole, shot by shot, with the arithmetic shown.
• The four categories and how they add up.
• What a plus or minus number is actually telling you to do.
• Why it beats fairways hit, greens in regulation and putts per round.
• How many rounds it takes before your numbers mean anything.

What Strokes Gained Actually Measures

Traditional golf stats count things. Fairways hit. Greens in regulation. Putts per round. Each one records whether something happened, and none of them record how much it mattered.

Strokes gained measures progress instead. The question it asks about any shot is not "did that go well" but "how much closer to holing out am I now than I should be, given where I started".

To answer that, it needs to know what "should be" looks like. That is the baseline, and it is the reason the stat works.

The formula is short:

Strokes gained = expected strokes from where the ball started, minus expected strokes from where it finished, minus 1.

The minus 1 is the shot you just spent. Everything else is bookkeeping. If a shot moves you forward by more than the one stroke it cost, you gained. If it does not, you lost.

Where the Baseline Comes From

The baseline is a table of expected strokes: for every distance and every lie, how many shots does it take, on average, to get the ball in the hole from there.

The concept comes out of academic work by Columbia professor Mark Broadie, published in his book Every Shot Counts, built on the PGA Tour's ShotLink database. ShotLink laser measures the start and finish of essentially every shot hit in tournament play, which produced a sample large enough to say with confidence what an average tour player scores from 150 yards in the fairway, or from a greenside bunker, or from twenty feet on the green.

Here are a handful of those tour baselines, rounded, so you can see the shape of the thing.

Those are published PGA Tour averages and they are rounded here for readability, so treat them as the illustration and not as a lookup table for your own game. Two things jump out of them.

First, a tour player two feet off the green is not guaranteed anything. From twenty feet the expectation is 1.87 strokes, which means nearly two. Holing it is a bonus, not the standard.

Second, distance matters far less than golfers assume once you are close. The gap between 150 yards in the fairway and 100 yards in the fairway is 0.18 strokes. The gap between 150 in the fairway and 150 in the rough is roughly the same. Position is worth about as much as fifty yards.

Baselines exist for other populations too, not just tour players. A well built amateur baseline says what a 10 handicap or a 20 handicap averages from the same spots, and that is usually the more useful yardstick for the rest of us. More on choosing one below.

A Worked Example: One Hole, Shot by Shot

A 400 yard par 4. Our golfer makes 3. Here is where the birdie actually came from.

The three numbers add to exactly 1.00, which is the same answer you get the easy way: the hole was worth 4.0 strokes when he stood on the tee, he took 3, so he gained 1.

What the breakdown adds is the why. The drive was dead average. The approach to twenty feet, which looks like the shot of the hole on television, was worth about a tenth of a stroke. The birdie came almost entirely from the putt, because a holed twenty footer beats the baseline by 0.87 strokes all on its own.

This is the part that changes how you watch your own golf. Long putts holed are enormous, short putts missed are catastrophic, and the middle of the bag matters more steadily and less dramatically than anyone feels at the time.

The Four Categories

Every shot in a round falls into exactly one bucket, and the four bucket totals add up to your round total.

Tee shots on par 3s go into approach, not off the tee, which surprises people. The logic is that a par 3 tee shot is doing the same job as an approach shot, so it belongs with the shots it resembles.

You will also see two combinations quoted. Tee to green is the first three added together, and it is the best single indicator of ball striking. Total is all four, and it equals your score relative to the baseline.

What a Plus or Minus Number Means

A strokes gained figure is always relative to something, and the something is the baseline. Same round, three baselines, three very different numbers.

One round, one golfer, three yardsticks. The numbers above are an illustration rather than a measured player, and nothing about the golf changed between them. Only the standard did.

• Against a tour baseline, almost every number an amateur produces is negative. A scratch golfer is roughly three strokes a round behind tour average. A 15 handicap is much further back. Negative is the normal condition here, not a verdict.
• Against a handicap baseline for your own level, zero means you played to standard for a golfer like you, and the sign of each category tells you which parts carried the round.
• Against your own history, which is the most honest version, the number says whether this round was better or worse than your normal, and in which department.

The practical read is the ranking, not the absolute value. If your four numbers for the month are off the tee minus 2.1, approach minus 4.8, around the green minus 1.9 and putting minus 1.4, your approach play is costing you more than the other three added together, and it does not matter at all which baseline produced those figures. That is where the practice hours go.

Golfers almost never guess this ranking correctly about themselves. The category that feels worst is usually the one with the most memorable disasters, which is not the same as the one leaking the most strokes.

Why It Beats Fairways Hit and Putts Per Round

Three specific failures of the old stats, each of which strokes gained fixes.

Fairways hit treats every miss the same. A drive in the first cut with a clear shot at the green and a drive behind a tree are both one missed fairway. One of them costs you a tenth of a stroke and the other costs you a stroke and a half.

Putts per round rewards bad iron play. Miss every green, chip it to three feet, hole out, and you finish with a gorgeous putting stat that was manufactured by your wedges. Meanwhile the golfer who hit fourteen greens and two putted from thirty five feet all day looks like a poor putter. Strokes gained putting fixes this by measuring each putt from its actual starting distance, so a two putt from forty feet is a small gain and a two putt from six feet is a real loss.

Greens in regulation ignores where on the green. Thirty five feet and four feet are both a green in regulation, and they are worth about 0.8 strokes apart.

None of this makes the old stats useless. They are quick, they need no technology, and they are a decent first pass. They just cannot rank your problems, and ranking your problems is the entire job of practice planning.

How Many Rounds Before the Number Means Anything

Golf is a small sample game, and every category settles at a different speed.

• Putting stabilises fastest. You hit around thirty putts a round, so five to ten rounds usually gives you a number you can act on.
• Approach needs roughly the same, ten rounds or so, because you hit a dozen or more approach shots per round and the misses are somewhat repeatable.
• Around the green is slower, because the number of attempts varies enormously depending on how you struck it.
• Off the tee is the noisiest of all. Fourteen attempts a round, and a single out of bounds swings the round number by more than a stroke. Give it ten or more rounds and look at the median as well as the average.

The rule of thumb: one round tells you what happened, five rounds start to suggest a pattern, and ten or more rounds in one category is a measurement you can plan around. Anyone offering you a diagnosis off a single round is reading noise.

Choosing the Right Baseline for Your Game

This is the question that decides whether strokes gained is useful to you or just discouraging.

Comparing an 18 handicap to tour average produces a page full of large negative numbers and no information. Every category reads "you are much worse than a professional", which you already knew, and the ranking gets distorted because the gap to tour standard is not evenly sized across the four categories.

Three baselines worth knowing about:

1. Tour average. The original, and the one used on television. Best treated as a reference point rather than a measuring stick.
2. A handicap level baseline. Expected strokes tables built for a scratch, 5, 10, 15 or 20 handicap. This is the one that makes the four category numbers comparable to each other and honest about where you actually sit.
3. Your own rolling average. No standard required. Am I better at this than I was two months ago, in this specific part of the game? For tracking improvement this is the best of the three, and it is the one most golfers should watch week to week.

If you do not know which baseline a number is built on, the number does not mean anything yet. That is the single most common way strokes gained gets misread.

Common Mistakes

• Reading a negative number as a failing grade. Against a tour baseline, negative is the normal state for every amateur. Read the ranking across your four categories, not the sign.
• Comparing numbers built on different baselines. Your putting number against a 15 handicap baseline and your driving number against tour average cannot be laid next to each other.
• Judging a category off one round. Especially driving. One penalty shot is worth more than most of the round's real signal.
• Assuming putting is the problem. Missed putts are memorable, and putting is usually the smallest of the four numbers for amateur golfers. Approach play is normally the largest.
• Chasing distance because the tee shot number is negative. Off the tee combines distance and position, and for most amateurs the losses come from balls out of play, not from yards.
• Forgetting that par 3 tee shots are approach shots. If you count them off the tee you will misread two categories at once.

Getting Your Own Numbers

You do not need a tour sized dataset to get this working for you. What you need is a record of where each shot started and finished, and something that knows the baseline.

The WhyGolf app does both. You track your shots during the round, on the phone or the watch, and it works out strokes gained for you category by category, from the same round that gives you GPS distances and your scorecard. The scorecard posts to GHIN when you finish, so the round counts toward your index at the same time, and the AI coaching side reads the same numbers to tell you what they suggest working on. Most of it is free.

If you want to see the maths on the category almost everyone can improve fastest, strokes gained putting walks through the expected putts table, distance by distance, with a full eighteen hole example.

Key Takeaways

• Strokes gained scores a shot instead of counting it. Expected strokes where the ball started, minus expected strokes where it finished, minus the one stroke you used.
• The baseline is the whole idea. Tour average, handicap level or your own history, and a number from one of them cannot be compared with a number from another.
• Four categories, one total. Off the tee, approach, around the green and putting, and they add up to exactly how far from the baseline you played.
• Read the ranking, not the sign. Which category is leaking the most strokes is the only question that changes what you do on Saturday morning.
• Give it ten rounds. Putting settles first, driving last, and a single round is a story rather than a measurement.