What is strokes gained?

Everybody talks about strokes gained but do you really know what it is?

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.

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Strokes gained

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Mark Broadie is the creator of strokes gained, the best metric to analyze golfer's performance
Mark Broadie, the creator of strokes gained

Mark Broadie is the creator of strokes gained, the best metric to analyze golfer's performance

Mark Broadie published in 2008 this article and started the Strokes Gained revolution
Assessing Golfer Performance Using Golfmetrics

Mark Broadie published in 2008 this article and started the Strokes Gained revolution

We calculate your strokes gained for each shot in a hole, to help you better understand this new metric
Example of strokes gained calculation

We calculate your strokes gained for each shot in a hole, to help you better understand this new metric

You can see your strokes gained by category for each hole in the new scorecard stats we have at Golfity.
Scorecard with strokes gained

You can see your strokes gained by category for each hole in the new scorecard stats we have at Golfity.

If you want to get your strokes gained you can easily track your shots on a regular scorecard, just like Mike Carroll shows us.
Manual shot entry for strokes gained

If you want to get your strokes gained you can easily track your shots on a regular scorecard, just like Mike Carroll shows us.

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