What Is Strokes Gained? The Statistic Behind Every Data Mondays Article

Fairways hit, greens in regulation, putts per round: the old counting statistics tell you what happened without telling you how much it mattered. A putt from three feet and a putt from thirty feet both count as one stroke on the card. Strokes gained was built to fix that, and it is the statistic underneath every tournament article on this site. Here is what it measures, in plain English.

The idea in one sentence

Strokes gained compares each shot with what an average PGA TOUR player would need from the same place. Start with the average number of strokes it takes a TOUR player to hole out from where your ball lies. Hit the shot. Look up the same average from where it finished. The difference between the two, minus the one stroke you just used, is the strokes gained on that shot. Beat the average and the number is positive. Fall short and it is negative.

An example makes it concrete. Suppose the average TOUR player needs 2.8 strokes to finish from 150 yards in the fairway, and 1.5 strokes from 8 feet on the green. An approach that goes from the first spot to the second gained 2.8 minus 1.5 minus 1, which is 0.3 of a stroke. Hit it to 30 feet instead, where the average is about 2 strokes to finish, and the same swing scored minus 0.2. Same club, same distance, same "green in regulation" on the old scorecard, but half a stroke apart in what actually happened. Those illustrative averages are rounded for the arithmetic; the real baseline tables run to inches on the green.

Where the baseline comes from

The averages are the whole trick, and they exist because the PGA TOUR has recorded the position of every shot at its events through its ShotLink system since 2003. Mark Broadie, a professor at Columbia Business School, used that record to build the baseline and to work out how to split a golfer's score into the parts of the game that produced it. His paper "Assessing Golfer Performance on the PGA TOUR," published in the journal Interfaces in 2012, is the academic source, and his 2014 book Every Shot Counts is the version written for golfers (author's site).

Broadie's paper is worth a look even if you skip the mathematics, because two of its findings still shape how the game is discussed. First, shots that start more than 100 yards from the hole explained about two-thirds of the variability in scores among PGA TOUR golfers in his sample, which is the origin of the modern emphasis on approach play and driving. Second, Tiger Woods over 2003 to 2010 was about 3.2 strokes a round better than an average tournament field, and roughly two-thirds of that came from his long game, not the putter that commentators credited (Broadie, 2012, author's preprint). Both findings describe those players in those years. They are not laws about golf, but they were the first honest measurement of where scoring comes from at the top of the game.

The categories

Add up the strokes gained on every shot of a certain kind and you have a category. The PGA TOUR publishes six: total, tee-to-green, off the tee, approach the green, around the green and putting. The four that Data Action Golf uses are:

• Off the tee. Tee shots on par 4s and par 5s.
• Approach. Shots into the green from distance.
• Around the green. Short shots near the green that are not putts. The tournament articles also call this short game.
• Putting. Every stroke on the green.

Where "approach" ends and "around the green" begins is a definition, not a law of nature, and different publishers draw the line in different places. Data Golf, whose numbers this site uses, counts every shot from within 50 yards of the hole as around the green. Data Golf also computes its strokes gained from shot-level data on its own, following the TOUR's method closely but not identically, so a number on this site can differ by a few tenths from the figure on a broadcast graphic. Neither is wrong. They are two careful measurements of the same shots.

Why the field average matters

A strokes-gained number is always relative to a field. When a tournament article says a winner was 9.2 strokes better than the field with his approach play, it means that across four rounds his approach shots beat what the average player in that week's field did from the same spots by 9.2 strokes in total. It does not mean he hit 9.2 more greens, and it is not a tally against par. On a brutal course where everybody struggles, a player can lose strokes to par and still gain strokes on the field, which is exactly why the statistic is useful: it separates the golfer from the golf course.

This is also why strokes gained figures sum to roughly zero across a field. Every stroke one player gains is a stroke somebody else, in aggregate, lost. A winner's total strokes gained for the week is therefore his advantage over the field-average player, and that is the number every tournament article on this site breaks into its parts. The method is set out in how Data Action Golf reads a winner.

What it does not tell you

Strokes gained is an attribution, not an explanation. It can tell you that a player gained six strokes putting. It cannot tell you whether he read the greens well, got a good bounce, or holed the kind of putt he usually misses. It has no opinion about wind, pin positions, pressure or pairings. And a single week is a single week: a huge approach number at one tournament is a fact about that tournament, not a forecast about the next one.

What it means for your game

You do not have ShotLink following you around on Saturday, but the idea travels. Every shot has two outcomes that matter: where it finished, and what the next shot looks like from there. Strokes gained is a formal way of scoring the second one. The amateur version is simpler and kinder than the scorecard. A green in regulation that leaves a downhill 40-footer was not a good shot; a miss on the front edge that leaves a straight chip was not a bad one. Track where your approach shots finish for three rounds and you will learn more about your scoring than any swing tip can teach you. That idea, notice your own pattern before you try to change it, is Fred Shoemaker's, not mine, and strokes gained is the professional game's proof that he was right.

Data Action Golf's own app measures your gaps in strokes, the same unit, against benchmarks drawn from the 2025 PGA TOUR season, so the number on your screen and the number in a tournament article mean the same thing. Feel lies. The measurement does not.

Better data always means better golf, and this is the piece of data the rest of the site stands on.