Guides / Practice and Improvement

What Is Strokes Gained?

Strokes gained measures every shot against one number: the average strokes it takes to finish the hole from exactly where your ball was sitting. Here is how that works, and the honest answer to whether you should be tracking it yet.

The one idea: par is not the benchmark

Every ordinary golf stat compares you to par or counts events. Strokes gained compares you to a position. Your ball sits somewhere, and that spot carries an expected number of strokes to finish the hole. After the swing it sits somewhere else, with its own expected number. The difference, minus the stroke you spent, is strokes gained.

Par knows nothing about where your ball is. A par made by driving into the trees and holing a 40-footer reads identically to a par from the fairway. Putt counts are as blind: two putts from 40 feet is decent work, two putts from 4 feet gave a stroke away, and the card writes 2 for both.

The method comes from Mark Broadie, a professor at Columbia Business School, who built it from tour shot data and published it in Every Shot Counts. The PGA Tour made it an official putting statistic in 2011, then extended it to full swings. The USGA has published its own explainer crediting Broadie.

What a baseline actually is

A baseline is a lookup table, nothing more mysterious. Feed it a distance and a lie and it returns the average strokes it took a large population of golfers to hole out from there. The published baselines were estimated from PGA Tour shot data, so that population is tour players. Remember that.

Putting shows it most clearly, since distance is the only input. These are the tour figures from Broadie's published putting benchmark:

Two things fall out. Thirty feet is where the average is exactly two putts, so every lag from beyond it is a small win and every one inside it a small loss. And the curve is steepest between 3 and 10 feet, which is where putting skill lives.

Full-swing baselines add lie as a second input. From the fairway, about 2.94 strokes remain at 150 yards and 3.12 at 200. Rough costs roughly a quarter stroke more at the same distance, and greenside sand has its own steeper curve.

How one shot becomes a number

Walk a 400-yard par 4 with it: a drive of 250 yards into the fairway, an approach to 10 feet, one putt.

Those add to +0.93, exactly the tee baseline of 3.93 minus the 3 strokes played. The shot values always telescope back to your score, so nothing is invented in the middle.

Now the shots that hurt. A three-putt from 30 feet is 2.00 expected against 3 actual, so exactly -1.00, one whole stroke, which makes three-putts the most legible loss in the system. If that is your leak, the three-putt guide is the cure. Two putts from 4 feet is 1.14 against 2, so -0.86, and the card records an ordinary two-putt.

One result surprises everybody. That 250-yard drive into the fairway is a good golf shot, and it graded at -0.01. Zero is not bad; it means the shot did what a tour player averages from that tee. Positive does not mean good, it means better than the benchmark.

The four categories

Every shot lands in one of four buckets, reported separately. The split is what makes the method useful: a total says you played badly, the split says where.

Two details trip people up. Par 3 tee shots grade as approach, because off the tee covers par 4s and par 5s only. And the four sum to your total, so a total of -6 becomes a diagnosis only when you see it was -4 approach and -0.4 putting.

Why most golfers should not start here

If you shoot between 85 and 105, strokes gained is not your next move, and this page would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Three reasons, in order of weight.

The capture cost scales per shot. Strokes gained needs a start and an end position for every stroke you play, plus a baseline table to look them up in. That is a computation over shot-level data, not a mark in a scorecard margin, which is why our guide to how to track golf stats files it under what not to track by hand. Either something records it while you play or it does not get recorded, and half-recorded shot data is worse than none, because the holes that go missing are the ugly ones.

It answers a question you do not have yet. At this scoring level the strokes are not hiding. They are in penalties, doubles, and three-putts, all visible on a paper card. You do not need a benchmark model to establish that two balls in the water cost you two shots. The five stats worth tracking find those leaks in ten seconds a hole.

It describes, it does not prescribe. Strokes gained names the quarter of your game that leaked. It does not tell you to leave driver in the bag on the 7th, or to take one more club at the middle of the green. At 95, the fix is a decision change, and a category number is a slow route to one.

What has to go quiet first

There is a clean gate, and it is the one the stats guide already sets. Strokes gained earns its place when the basic numbers stop shouting:

• Penalties near zero in most rounds, not just the good ones.
• Doubles or worse down to one or none per round.
• Three-putts rare enough that you remember the individual ones.
• Your review comes back with nothing obvious after five rounds of looking.

That last line is the real signal, and it is a good problem to have. When you can lay five rounds side by side and genuinely cannot name the leak, the leak has moved out of obvious errors and into shot quality, which is what strokes gained was built to measure.

The number nobody can honestly give you

Here is the part most explanations skip. Every published baseline is a tour baseline. Broadie's benchmarks were estimated from PGA Tour shot data, and the tour's own strokes gained statistics are defined against the field of a tour event. So when a 20-handicap runs a round through one, the result is heavily negative in all four categories by construction, not by verdict.

Which raises the obvious question: what should a 15-handicap's strokes gained look like? You will find tables on the open web that claim to answer it, handicap by handicap. Read the sourcing before you trust one. An amateur baseline needs a large, position-level dataset of amateur shots, and the organizations sitting on datasets like that are commercial ones with something to sell. The figures are not independently verifiable, and they do not agree with each other.

There is no governing-body equivalent here either. The World Handicap System gives amateur golf a published, auditable method for turning scores into a Handicap Index. Nothing like it exists for amateur strokes gained baselines, so this page will not reproduce a table it cannot stand behind.

Grading against yourself, not against scratch

If the benchmark is a scratch-level baseline, a mid handicapper is supposed to come out negative. A golfer with a Handicap Index of 12 loses roughly 12 strokes over 18 holes to a scratch reference, so a raw total of -12 is an ordinary round and -9 is a good one. Without that context, both read like an indictment of golf you played well.

That context is what ParPath adds. Track shots during a round and the app computes strokes gained from them, split four ways, with strokes lost to penalties on their own line so a drowned tee ball does not vanish into an approach number. Then it does the part the tour framing has no reason to do: it grades your total against your own handicap rather than against scratch.

Two things worth knowing. Shot tracking is a new part of the app, so treat the picture as one that sharpens as more rounds are tracked. And the handicap it grades against is ParPath's own estimate, produced after three completed rounds with at least 14 holes scored in each. It is an estimate for tracking your own progress, not an official golf handicap, which still goes through your club or association.

The bottom line

• It compares a shot to a position, not to par: expected strokes before, minus expected strokes after, minus the one you played.
• A baseline is a lookup table of average strokes to hole out from a distance and lie. Thirty feet is exactly two putts.
• Four categories sum to the total. The total is a headline, the split is the story.
• Zero is not bad. Zero matches the benchmark, and every published benchmark is a tour one.
• It cannot be tracked by hand, and it answers a question you do not have while penalties and three-putts still cost you rounds.
• Graduate when the basics go quiet and your own review stops finding anything obvious.
• Nobody neutral publishes amateur baselines by handicap. Compare yourself to yourself.

Strokes gained is the best measurement idea golf has produced, and still the wrong first tool for most people reading about it. Learn it now, so that when your scorecard stops handing you the answer, you know where to look next.