Strokes gained, explained.

Most golfers have heard the term. Far fewer can say what it actually means or how to use it. This page does both. If you finish it, you'll understand the methodology that changed how the PGA Tour evaluates shots, and you'll know what it looks like applied to your game.

1. What strokes gained is

Strokes gained measures how much better or worse a shot was compared to the average outcome from the same starting position. It's a difference, expressed in strokes, between what you did and what an average player at your level would have done from where you stood.

If the average golfer at your skill level needs 2.85 strokes to hole out from 150 yards in the fairway, and your approach leaves you 8 feet from the pin (a position the same average golfer needs 1.5 strokes to hole out from), then your shot was 0.35 strokes better than average. That's your strokes gained on that shot.

The minus-one accounts for the shot itself. Without it, you'd be comparing a position-with-a-shot-taken to a position-without-a-shot-taken, which is nonsense.

Add up strokes gained on every shot in a round and you have the answer to the only question that matters in golf scoring: how much did each shot contribute to your final score, relative to expectation? Bad chip near the green? Your strokes gained on that shot is negative. Great chip near the green? Positive. The math is symmetrical and brutally honest.

2. The math, simplified

Two ingredients go into every strokes gained calculation. Both are tables, in the most boring possible sense of the word.

Ingredient 1: the expected strokes table

For every combination of lie type (green, fairway, rough, sand, recovery, water penalty, out of bounds) and distance to the hole, there's an expected number of strokes to hole out. This is the table that does the work.

Lie	Distance	Expected strokes (scratch golfer)
Green	8 feet	1.5
Green	30 feet	2.0
Fairway	50 yards	2.4
Fairway	150 yards	2.85
Fairway	250 yards	3.4
Rough	150 yards	3.1
Sand (greenside)	20 yards	2.5
Recovery (in trees)	150 yards	3.7

The numbers shift for different skill levels. A 25-handicap takes longer to hole out from every position than a scratch golfer does, so their expected-strokes table has higher values throughout. But the relative ordering is stable: every player at every level holes out faster from the fairway than from the rough at the same distance.

Ingredient 2: the position before and after the shot

That's it. Strokes gained per shot is just: look up expected strokes from where the shot started, look up expected strokes from where it ended, subtract, subtract one more for the shot itself.

3. Where the data comes from

The expected-strokes tables started as PGA Tour ShotLink data. Every shot on Tour has been measured (start position, end position, lie type, distance) since 2003. That's millions of shots, which gives a statistically sound expected-strokes function for tour-pro skill level.

For amateur levels, the tables are derived from the same PGA Tour baseline plus USGA strokes-gained variance research that quantifies how amateur outcomes spread relative to scratch. A 15-handicap doesn't just take more strokes than a scratch player; their outcomes have wider distribution. The expected-strokes value at every distance-lie combination scales accordingly.

This is the part that's not contested. Same data lineage, same math, same lookup tables across every serious strokes-gained tool, from PGATour.com to academic researchers to Yards. The interesting differentiation is in what you do with the math, not where it comes from.

4. Why it has to be personalized

The biggest mistake most "strokes gained tools" make is treating every golfer like the same golfer. A 5-handicap and a 25-handicap should not get the same advice on the same hole.

Two reasons:

Different dispersions. A 5-handicap's driver leaves shots in a tight ellipse around the aim line. Maybe plus or minus 12 yards left/right at 250 yards. A 25-handicap's driver scatters wider, maybe plus or minus 30 yards. On a hole with water down the left, those two players need different aim points. The 5-handicap can aim at the left edge of the fairway and rarely visit the water. The 25-handicap aiming at the same spot drowns a meaningful percentage of tee shots.

Different penalties for missing. The expected-strokes cost of being in the rough vs the fairway grows with handicap. A scratch player loses about 0.25 strokes per shot when in the rough. A 20-handicap loses closer to 0.5. So even when the dispersions were identical, the math would arrive at different conclusions about how aggressively to attack a hazard.

Generic "best aim point" advice misses both. Real strokes gained recommendations require knowing the golfer.

5. How Yards applies strokes gained

Yards runs the math forward, before you tee off, on every hole of every mapped course in the library.

For each shot you'll take, the engine does this:

1. For every viable club in your bag, generate a thousand simulated shots from your current position. Each simulated shot has a landing point determined by your handicap-calibrated dispersion pattern, factoring in your typical lateral spread, your shot shape (draw, straight, fade), and your typical depth variance.
2. For each of those thousand landing points, check what lie it ends up on (against the actual course geometry: fairways, bunkers, water, OB, trees, rough), and look up the expected strokes from that lie and distance.
3. Average the expected strokes across all thousand simulated landings for that club. That's the expected total score from this position if you hit this club.
4. The club with the lowest expected total score is the recommendation.

That's it. There's no proprietary "secret sauce." The methodology is public. What's specific to Yards is the calibration to your handicap and clubs, and the application of the math before you play, instead of after.

6. How strokes gained differs from traditional golf stats

Traditional stat	What it measures	What it misses
Fairways hit	How often you found the fairway off the tee	How far you hit it, where the misses went, whether the misses cost you anything
Greens in regulation	How often you reached the green within (par minus 2) strokes	Whether your miss was 5 feet from the cup or 50, whether it was in a place you could realistically save par from
Putts per round	Total putts	The lengths of the putts you faced. Lots of one-putts from 3 feet looks great until you notice they all followed approaches to 4 feet.
Up and downs	Conversion rate from missed greens	Whether the up-and-downs were from 5 yards in the fairway (easy) or 40 yards in a buried bunker lie (hard)

Strokes gained collapses all of these into one number per shot. It rewards distance off the tee and good misses; it punishes wild misses and three-putts; it doesn't care about category labels like "GIR." It asks the only honest question: did you improve your expected score with that shot, and by how much?

7. What strokes gained can't tell you

Strokes gained is a statistical model. It's the most accurate publicly-available model of golf scoring, but it has limits worth knowing.

It can't tell you how a shot felt. A tee shot that bounced off a tree and ended up in the fairway scores as well as one that flushed it down the middle. The model rewards the outcome, not the process. For practice diagnosis, you still want to watch yourself swing.

It assumes the lie data is accurate. "150 yards in the rough" is a generalization. Real rough has thick spots and thin spots. The model uses the average expected-strokes value for the lie type, which is fine in aggregate and slightly wrong in specifics.

It can't tell you about the mental side. If you triple-bogeyed because you went into a downhill spiral after a bad break, strokes gained captures the outcome (three negative numbers) but not the cause (one bad break followed by tilt). Worth knowing.

It's only as good as the course geometry. If the model thinks the bunker ends at 245 yards and it actually ends at 250, the recommendation can be slightly wrong. This is why Yards's course library has to be accurate, and why community contributors (people who actually play the courses) do the polishing.

Used with these limits in mind, it's the most useful pre-round decision-making tool available to amateur golfers. The math is real. The advantage is real. And until recently, you couldn't get it without spending five-figure sums on coaching and shot-tracking hardware.

Try it on a course · See the community

Sources: PGA Tour ShotLink program (2003 to present) and USGA strokes-gained variance research. Yards Golf Book applies these public methods with handicap-calibrated dispersion modeling.

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