Chances are you’ve seen the term Strokes Gained on TV broadcasts or golf websites, but what it actually means often feels like a complicated secret reserved for the pros. The good news is, it’s not. Strokes Gained is the single best way to understand your golf game, and this article will break it down in a simple, practical way. We’ll cover what it is, why it completely changed how we evaluate performance, and how you can use its power to find the real weaknesses in your game and start shooting lower scores.
At its core, Strokes Gained measures your performance on every single shot you hit by comparing it to the performance of a set group of other golfers. For the stats you see on the PGA Tour, that benchmark is a massive database of shots hit by other tour professionals. Think of it this way: traditional stats like "Greens in Regulation" simply say yes or no - either you hit the green or you didn't. Strokes Gained asks a much smarter question: "Given your starting position, how much better or worse was your shot than the average tour pro?"
Every shot in golf has a value based on its starting location (distance and lie) and its ending location. This value is expressed as the average number of strokes it takes a professional to get the ball in the hole from that spot.
Let's say you're 150 yards out in the middle of the fairway. Based on historical PGA Tour data, a pro on average takes 2.8 strokes to hole out from this exact position. This is your starting value.
The entire revolutionary concept was developed by Mark Broadie, a professor at Columbia Business School. Broadie analyzed millions of shots tracked by the PGA Tour's ShotLink system to create a definitive baseline for how tour pros perform from virtually any location on a golf course. Before his work, our understanding of golf performance was surprisingly primitive and, frankly, misleading.
For decades, we relied on traditional stats like:
Broadie’s Strokes Gained framework cuts through this noise. It gets to the heart of what matters: which parts of your game are helping you score better, and which are holding you back?
To give golfers a clear picture of their performance, Strokes Gained is broken down into several areas. Each category tells a specific story about a part of your game.
This category measures all your shots hit with a tee on par-4 and par-5 holes. It doesn't just grade you on accuracy, it’s a brilliant- combo of distance and direction. A long drive that lands in the rough can still be valued higher than a short drive that finds the fairway because it leaves you with a much shorter, easier approach shot. SG: OTT identifies players who use their driver as a weapon to set up scoring opportunities.
Most golf coaches and analysts agree this is the most important statistical category for scoring well. It includes any shot from outside 100 yards that is *not* hit from the tee box. This is your iron and hybrid play. Consistently good approach players leave themselves shorter putts, which takes pressure off their putting and leads directly to more birdies.
This covers your short game from within 100 yards of the hole (excluding any shots taken from the putting surface itself). This is the home of chipping, pitching, and sand shots. Great scramblers who "get up and down" excel in this category, turning missed greens into pars.
SG: Putting finally allowed us to measure putting skill in isolation. It purely measures how you perform on the greens. It compares your number of putts from a specific starting distance to the tour average. A one-putt from 40 feet results in a huge gain, while a three-putt from 10 feet results in a major loss. It no longer matters if the putt is for a birdie or a bogey, its value is determined by distance and nothing else.
To see a golfer's all-around performance with their long game, you can combine OTT, APP, and ATG. This is called Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green (SG:T2G). When a player is "dialed in" with their ball-striking, they will have a high SG:T2G. When you add SG: Putting to that number, you get Strokes Gained: Total, which gives you the complete summary of how a player performed against the field in a given round.
This isn't just a nerdy stat for tour pros, it's a powerful diagnostic tool for any golfer who wants to improve. Your feelings about your game are often wrong. You might walk off the course completely frustrated with your putting after a round with three 3-putts. But what Strokes Gained data might show you is that the real problem wasn't your putting - it was that your approach shots consistently left you with tough, downhill 40-foot putts. Your putting wasn't the issue, your iron play was setting you up for failure.
Without this insight, you might spend the next week grinding on the practice green, completely ignoring the real source of your high scores.
Imagine your Strokes Gained data (when compared to players of your own handicap) told you this:
This paints a crystal-clear picture. You're a solid driver and a good putter for your level! But your approach shots are costing you three full strokes every single round. Now, your practice has a purpose. Instead of just mindlessly hitting balls, you can focus 80% of your time on what truly matters: your iron play from 125-175 yards. This is how you stop wasting time and start making measurable progress.
thankfully , you don’t need to be a math whiz with a complicated spreadsheet to benefit from Strokes Gained. Today, there are amazing technologies that do all the heavy lifting for you. Systems like Arccos Caddie and Shot Scope use small sensors on your clubs and a connected app to automatically track every shot you hit. They record the starting and ending positions, run the data against a benchmark for your specific handicap level, and spit out a beautiful breakdown of your Strokes Gained performance in every category.
Using one of these tools is like getting an x-ray of your golf game. It removes all the emotion and guesswork and shows you the unfiltered truth. The most important thing is to compare yourself against the right group. While it's interesting to see how you stack up against a PGA Tour pro, seeing how you compare to a 5-handicap (or whatever your goal is) is far more useful. It shines a spotlight on the precise areas you need to improve to reach that next level.
Strokes Gained provides an honest and unbelievably insightful look into what's helping and hurting your golf scores. By moving beyond traditional, often misleading stats, it gives you a clear and accurate road map to smarter practice and better on-course performance.
Understanding this data is the first step, but a big question remains: "What do I do now?" Interpreting performance data and translating it into a concrete improvement plan is where personalized coaching comes in. At Caddie AI, we bridge that gap. We can provide you with that on-demand expert advice to interpret your round, give custom-tailored drills based on your weaknesses, and even help you build better strategies right on the course, making Strokes Gained insights simple and actionable for every golfer.
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