"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.
Sean Denning has a very interesting blog, Par Machine, where he shares his evolution towards his goal of becoming a “world-ranked amateur golfer”.
He covers many topics, as how to practice, the cost of golfing (in time and money) or fitness, and he is also big into golf metrics.
In his post Basic Golf Statistics vs Strokes Gained he takes us through his initial steps using strokes gained, manually recording shot data manually in the course (we also prefer this method) and using Golfmetrics (the app created by Mark Broadie) for the analysis. He concludes the post thinking “These numbers aren’t perfect as I only have ten rounds of data so far, but the information is drastically better than basic statistics. Now I know what to practice.”
A few weeks later Sean wrote Using Strokes Gained Analysis to Play Scratch Golf, where he goes deep in the evolution of his strokes gained metrics.
As you can see in the post, he uses his own charts to compare his scores over time. That’s one of the reasons we created the export feature, your scores are yours and you can download them anytime to analyze them any way you want.
He finishes the post with this clear thought: “My conclusion? If you’re serious about getting to scratch, you should be using strokes gained analysis. It’s the best way to figure out where you need help and how to prioritize your practice time.”
You can see your strokes gained by category for each hole in the new scorecard stats we have at Golfity.
golfity can you show the strokes gained (or lost) in each individual shot. Learn which were the best and worse shots of your round.
golfity can also track your traditional stats, as greens in regulation, fairways hit, putting average...
Mark Broadie is the creator of strokes gained, the best metric to analyze golfer's performance
If you want to lower your scores reducing the number of awful shots should be one of your key priorities.