Everybody talks about strokes gained but do you really know what it is?
Strokes gained is a golf stat created by Mark Broadie, a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. He is a business professor but also an avid golf player who though he could use data to analyze a golf player's game.
Broadie had access to ShotLink data from the PGA Tour, which is a "collection and analysis of shot-by-shot data during competition play" and used it to develop the strokes gained metric.
The definition of strokes gained on the PGA tour website is "Strokes gained is a better method for measuring performance because it compares a player’s performance to the rest of the field and because it can isolate individual aspects of the game".
This means we can compare each and every shot you take with a benchmark, which is normally the PGA Tour (where we have Shotlink tracking each and every shot, which means we have tons of data). This will allow you to know how good or bad each of your shots was, which will be very helpful to know where you need to improve.
Bryson DeChambeau hit a 417 yards drive at the 2020 Ryder Cup, how many strokes did he gain with that?
"If you’re serious about getting to scratch, you should be using strokes gained analysis". That's what Sean Denning concludes in his blog, Par Machine.
Easy to use strokes gained calculator, calculate the strokes gained for any of your shots
If you want to know if you are putting well, putts gained is the way to go and golfity will calculate your putts gained
The PGA Tour measures strokes gained in four different categories
