Strokes gained, explained for club golfers
By Chalk Golf ·
Fairways hit and putts per round tell you what happened. Strokes gained tells you what it cost. It gives every shot a number: how much closer to holing out it got you, compared with what a tour player would have managed from the same spot. Add the numbers up and you know which part of your game is losing the strokes, rather than guessing from the scorecard.
The idea is Mark Broadie's, a Columbia Business School professor who worked it out from the PGA Tour's ShotLink data, where every shot in a tour event is measured. The Tour adopted strokes gained putting in 2011 and the other categories in 2016, and the same maths works for anyone who knows where each shot started and finished.
One shot, one number
Every spot on a golf course has an expected number of strokes to hole out from it. For a tour player it is about 4.02 from a 420-yard tee, 2.98 from 160 yards in the fairway and 1.93 from 25 feet on the green. A shot is scored by the difference it made:
strokes gained = expected before − expected after − 1
The minus one is the stroke you took. If you finish the hole, the expected strokes after the shot is zero.
Take a drive on that 420-yard par 4 that leaves 165 yards in the fairway. Expected strokes from the tee are 4.02 and from 165 yards 3.005, so the drive gained 4.02 − 3.005 − 1, or +0.02. A perfectly ordinary tour drive scores about zero. A drive into the rough that leaves 190 yards (expected 3.37) scores 4.02 − 3.37 − 1, or −0.35: it cost a third of a stroke before the second shot was played.
A whole hole
Here is the par 4 played two ways. The first is a par, the second a bogey made the usual way.
| Shot | From | Expected | Left after | Gained |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tee, 420 yds | 4.02 | Fairway, 165 yds (3.01) | +0.02 |
| 2 | Fairway, 165 yds | 3.01 | Green, 25 ft (1.93) | +0.08 |
| 3 | Green, 25 ft | 1.93 | Green, 3 ft (1.04) | −0.12 |
| 4 | Green, 3 ft | 1.04 | Holed | +0.04 |
| Par 4 | +0.02 | |||
Four strokes against an expectation of 4.02 is +0.02, and the shot-by-shot numbers add up to the same thing. That is always true: a hole's strokes gained is the expected strokes from the tee minus the strokes you took. The detail is in where they went.
| Shot | From | Expected | Left after | Gained |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tee, 420 yds | 4.02 | Rough, 190 yds (3.37) | −0.35 |
| 2 | Rough, 190 yds | 3.37 | Sand, 15 yds (2.48) | −0.12 |
| 3 | Sand, 15 yds | 2.48 | Green, 20 ft (1.87) | −0.39 |
| 4 | Green, 20 ft | 1.87 | Green, 2 ft (1.01) | −0.14 |
| 5 | Green, 2 ft | 1.01 | Holed | +0.01 |
| Bogey 5 | −0.98 | |||
The bogey cost about a stroke, as a bogey must. But the scorecard would blame the drive, and the number says the bunker shot cost more than the drive and the approach together. That is the point of the exercise. You can run your own holes through the strokes gained calculator.
The four categories
The Tour splits the total four ways, and most apps follow it:
- Off the tee: the first shot on a par 4 or par 5.
- Approach: shots from outside 30 yards that aren't a par-4 or par-5 tee shot. The tee shot on a par 3 is an approach.
- Around the green: shots from 30 yards and in, off the green.
- Putting: everything on the green.
The exact boundary varies. The Tour draws its around-the-green line at 30 yards; some writers use 50. It doesn't change the total, only how it is divided.
Why putting looks small
From 8 feet a tour player holes about half, so the expected putts are 1.50. From 25 feet it is 1.93, and from 3 feet 1.04. Those numbers are close to the putts you actually take, which is why putting strokes gained tend to be small: two putts from 25 feet is −0.07, not a disaster, and a three-putt from there is −1.07, which is. The big numbers in putting come from three-putts and missed short ones, and from how close your approaches finish, which is counted in approach, not putting.
The long game is where the expectations and the reality drift apart. Broadie found that for golfers of every level, about two-thirds of the scoring gap to better players comes from shots outside 100 yards, and putting accounts for roughly 15 per cent. A 15-handicapper doesn't lose 16 strokes a round to a tour player on the greens. They lose most of them before they get there: drives that find trouble, and approaches that miss the green or finish 40 feet away when the baseline expects 25.
What the baseline is
The expected strokes come from Broadie's published table for PGA Tour players, by lie and distance: tee, fairway, rough, sand and green. It is a stable, public reference, which is why it is used as the measuring stick rather than a scratch golfer or a 15-handicapper. Measured against it, a club golfer's numbers are negative in every category, and that's fine. The useful comparison is between your own categories, and between this month and last.
If you'd rather compare with your own standard, subtract your usual total: a round at −12 when you normally lose 16 is four strokes gained on yourself.
Getting the numbers from a real round
Strokes gained needs the start and finish of every shot, which a scorecard doesn't have. In Chalk Golf, the Mark button records where you're standing before each shot: the GPS position, the lie read from the course map and the yards to the green. A hole with every shot marked is scored against the same baseline as above, the round summary shows its total, and the Stats tab shows the total per 18 holes with the weakest category in bold.
Sources
- Mark Broadie, Every Shot Counts (Gotham Books, 2014): the expected-strokes baseline and the analysis of where amateurs lose strokes.
- Mark Broadie, "Assessing Golfer Performance on the PGA TOUR", Interfaces 42(2), 2012.
- PGA Tour — Stats: the strokes gained categories as the Tour publishes them.
Checked 2 November 2026.