Strokes Gained: What It Is, How to Calculate It, and How to Use It to Find Your Weaknesses

Strokes gained is the single most useful statistic in golf, and also one of the most confusing to explain. This article breaks it down in plain language: what it actually measures, the math behind it (with a full worked example), and how to use it to figure out what's actually costing you strokes, rather than guessing.

The problem strokes gained was built to solve

For decades, golfers tracked stats like fairways hit, greens in regulation, and putts per round. These stats have a real problem: they don't account for how hard the shot was, and they can flat-out lie to you about where your game is weak.

Here's the classic example. Two golfers each take 30 putts in a round, a totally average number. Golfer A's approach shots were sharp all day, leaving mostly 8-footers. Golfer B's approach shots were scattered, leaving mostly 30-footers. Golfer A had a mediocre putting day and still made most of those short putts. Golfer B actually putted brilliantly to only need 30 putts from that far away. "Putts per round" says they putted identically. In reality, Golfer B is the better putter and Golfer A has an approach-shot problem hiding behind a decent-looking putting stat.

Strokes gained fixes this by asking a different question for every single shot: given exactly where this shot started, how many strokes does it typically take to finish the hole from there, and how many strokes did this player actually take? The difference is what the player gained or lost on that one shot, and it's precise enough to account for distance, lie, and difficulty in a way "did you hit the fairway" never could.

Who invented it

Strokes gained was developed by Mark Broadie, a professor at Columbia Business School, using hundreds of thousands of shots recorded by the PGA Tour's ShotLink tracking system. The PGA Tour officially adopted Strokes Gained: Putting in 2011, and by 2016 had expanded the system to cover every part of the game. It's not a marketing gimmick or a TV-broadcast buzzword, it's a rigorous statistical model built on real shot data, and it has become the standard the entire golf analytics industry is built around.

The formula

Here it is in full:

Strokes Gained = (Expected Strokes from the starting position) − (Expected Strokes from the finishing position) − 1

The "minus 1" accounts for the stroke the player just used to move the ball from the start to the finish. "Expected strokes" (also called the benchmark) represents the average number of shots it takes a group of golfers to finish the hole from that exact spot, based on real recorded data from millions of shots.

The standard, original version of this benchmark, the one Mark Broadie built and the one the PGA Tour uses officially on broadcasts and PGATour.com, is built from the average PGA Tour player, using shot-by-shot data recorded by the Tour's ShotLink system. Every position on a golf course, every distance, every lie (fairway, rough, sand, green) has its own PGA Tour benchmark value. When you see "Strokes Gained" on TV or on a leaderboard, this is the benchmark being used.

A full worked example

Let's say you're playing a 446-yard par 4. Data shows the benchmark from the tee on a hole like this is 4.10 strokes: on average, PGA Tour players finish this hole in 4.10 shots.

You hit a good drive. It lands in the fairway, 116 yards from the hole. The benchmark from 116 yards in the fairway is 2.825 strokes, meaning the average PGA Tour player typically needs 2.825 more shots to finish from there.

Strokes gained on that tee shot = 4.10 − 2.825 − 1 = 0.275 strokes gained. Your drive was worth just over a quarter of a stroke better than the reference average, because it left you in a notably easier spot than average.

Now say your approach shot from 116 yards finishes 16 feet from the hole. The benchmark from 16 feet on the green is roughly 1.9 strokes (the average PGA Tour player two-putts or occasionally one-putts from there). Strokes gained on the approach shot = 2.825 − 1.9 − 1 = -0.075, a tiny loss, since a shot to 16 feet is almost exactly what's expected from 116 yards out.

Then you make the putt. Benchmark from 16 feet is 1.9 strokes; you finish the hole (0 strokes remaining) in exactly 1 stroke. Strokes gained on the putt = 1.9 − 0 − 1 = +0.9, a big gain, because making a 16-footer is well ahead of what's typically expected.

Add up the three shots: 0.275 − 0.075 + 0.9 = 1.1 strokes gained for the hole, on a score of 3 (birdie) where the benchmark predicted 4.10. That single number, 1.1, tells you exactly how much better than average you played that hole, and the per-shot breakdown tells you exactly which shots produced that result.

The categories

Once you calculate strokes gained shot by shot, you group the shots into categories to see where your game is actually strong or weak.

Strokes Gained: Off the Tee. Tee shots on par 4s and par 5s only (a tee shot on a par 3 is scored as an approach shot instead, since the target is the green, not a fairway landing area). This isolates how much your drive sets up the rest of the hole, combining both distance and accuracy into one number instead of treating them as two separate stats.

Strokes Gained: Approach. Shots aimed at the green from anywhere outside about 30 yards, including tee shots on par 3s. This is where the largest strokes-gained differences between skill levels usually show up, and it's widely considered the single strongest predictor of good scoring.

Strokes Gained: Around the Green. Chips, pitches, and bunker shots from within roughly 30 yards of the green, where the shot is meant to finish on the putting surface. This is the classic "short game" category.

Strokes Gained: Putting. Every putt taken once the ball is on the green. A putt from the fringe or the first cut doesn't count as an official putt in this system, since it's grouped under Around the Green instead.

Strokes Gained: Tee to Green. Off the Tee + Approach + Around the Green added together, everything except putting. This is a useful way to separate "ball-striking and short game" from "putting" as two broad buckets.

Strokes Gained: Total. All four categories added together. This is your overall performance relative to the baseline for the entire round, and by definition, Off the Tee + Approach + Around the Green + Putting = Total.

How to actually calculate this for your own game

You don't need to do the arithmetic above by hand for every shot, and almost nobody does. In practice, there are two realistic paths:

Use a tracking app. Apps built specifically for this (Golfity, Shot Scope, Arccos, and others) let you log where each shot started and finished (either by tapping a map, using GPS, or wearing sensors), and the app calculates strokes gained automatically using the same benchmark data the PGA Tour uses. This is by far the easiest and most accurate way to get real numbers, and most of these apps also let you choose which reference group to compare against (see below), not just the PGA Tour.

Estimate manually with published benchmark tables. If you don't want to use an app, you can track basic shot data yourself (starting distance and lie, finishing distance and lie, for every shot) and look up approximate benchmark values from published strokes-gained tables. This is more work and less precise, but it works, especially if you only want a rough read on one specific part of your game rather than a full round-by-round system.

Either way, the input data you need is the same: for every shot, where did it start (distance and lie) and where did it finish (distance and lie). That's the entire raw material strokes gained is built from.

Comparing against the right baseline

This is the part most golfers get wrong when they first start looking at strokes gained, and it trips people up because the same shot can score completely differently depending on one setting.

The PGA Tour average is the standard benchmark, the default. It's what Broadie originally built, it's what the PGA Tour itself uses, and it's the benchmark baked into most published strokes-gained tables and calculators unless you specifically choose otherwise.

But most consumer tracking apps (Golfity, Shot Scope, Arccos, and others) let you switch the benchmark to a different reference group entirely, not just relabel the same numbers. Typical options include a scratch golfer, or a specific handicap band (5, 10, 15, 20, 25). Choosing a different benchmark swaps out the entire "expected strokes" table the app compares you against, since a scratch golfer's average outcome from 150 yards in the rough is a completely different number than a PGA Tour player's, which is itself different again from a 20-handicap's.

Here's why that matters in practice. Say you hit a drive 240 yards and it lands in the fairway. Nothing about that shot changes, but the strokes-gained result does, depending on which benchmark the app is set to:

- Compared against the PGA Tour benchmark, the average Tour player's drive on that hole lands much further and in an easier spot. Your 240-yard fairway drive is worse than that average, so it scores as strokes lost. - Compared against a 15-handicap benchmark, the average 15-handicap golfer's drive on that hole is likely shorter, or in the rough. Your same 240-yard fairway drive is better than that average, so the identical shot scores as strokes gained.

Same shot, same distance, same lie, opposite result, purely because the reference group changed.

This matters because every amateur golfer is negative against the PGA Tour baseline, in every category, always. A 15-handicap golfer might lose 2 strokes per round on approach shots compared to tour pros. That's not a personal failing, it's simply the gap between an amateur and the best golfers alive. Seeing a wall of negative numbers against tour data doesn't tell you anything useful about your own game, and mostly just feels discouraging.

The useful comparison, if your goal is finding your own strengths and weaknesses rather than marveling at how far away tour pros are, is against golfers at your own level. When you switch your app's benchmark to your own handicap band, the categories where you're better than that average are your relative strengths, and the categories where you're worse are your relative weaknesses, even though every number would still be negative if you switched the same round back to the PGA Tour benchmark.

What a typical amateur profile looks like

Research based on Broadie's data shows a fairly consistent pattern across handicap levels: approach play is where the largest gap between skill levels shows up, while putting and around-the-green tend to be smaller gaps.

For a golfer who shoots around 90 (roughly a 16 to 22 handicap, the single largest group in amateur golf), a typical breakdown against the PGA Tour baseline looks something like:

Notice the shape of that table. Approach shots account for nearly half of everything a bogey golfer gives up, more than tee shots and putting combined. That doesn't mean approach shots are being badly mishit, it usually means solid contact is finishing 40 or 50 feet from the hole instead of 15 or 20 feet, which turns routine two-putts into three-putt risks and turns makeable birdie looks into simple pars. Putting, which gets a disproportionate amount of practice time and range-session attention from most golfers, is actually the smallest gap on the table.

This is exactly the kind of insight traditional stats can't give you. "Putts per round" would never reveal that approach play, not putting, is where most mid-handicap golfers are actually leaking strokes.

Using strokes gained to find your own strengths and weaknesses

Once you have a few rounds of real strokes-gained data (most sources suggest 3 to 5 rounds minimum before trends become reliable, and about 10 rounds before the data is genuinely actionable), here's how to read it:

Look at your weakest category relative to your own handicap level, not relative to zero. If you're a 15-handicap and your approach category is worse than the typical 15-handicap benchmark, that's your priority, even if your putting number looks worse in raw terms.

Look at the shape of your profile, not just the total. A golfer with a lopsided profile (say, strong putting but weak approach play) has a very different practice plan than a golfer who's roughly even across all four categories. The total tells you how you're doing; the breakdown tells you what to actually do about it.

Weight your practice time by where the strokes actually are. Since approach play is the largest category for most amateurs, and putting is usually the smallest, a golfer who spends most practice time putting because "that's what everyone says to practice" may be polishing the smallest number on the scorecard while the biggest leak goes untouched.

Drill down inside a weak category before assuming you know the fix. If your around-the-green number is weak, that could mean you're specifically bad from greenside bunkers, or specifically bad from rough just off the green, or specifically bad at controlling distance on pitches from 15 to 30 yards. Each of those points to a different practice fix. The category total tells you where to look; you still have to look closer to know what to actually work on.

Track it over time, not just once. A single round of strokes-gained data is a snapshot, and can be skewed by one unusually good or bad hole. Even half a stroke of improvement in one category over a season is a real, meaningful gain, and that trend only becomes visible if you keep tracking.

What strokes gained doesn't tell you

Strokes gained is a powerful tool, but it has real limits worth knowing about. It's built from historical averages, so it doesn't account for things like unusually thick rough, firm or fast greens, difficult pin placements, or wind on a specific day, all of which can make a "below benchmark" result look worse than the shot actually was. It also won't tell you why a shot came up short, only that it did, the diagnosis of a specific swing fault still comes from watching contact and ball flight, not from the stroke-gained number itself. Think of strokes gained as the tool that tells you where to point your attention; the actual fix still comes from there.