The Blog

Strokes gained has been around long enough to collect a set of misconceptions that survive because they sound reasonable. Here are seven of them, and what your own numbers say instead.

Telling yourself to concentrate harder rarely survives the back nine. Your shot data shows exactly where attention slips, and gives you something specific to hold onto instead.

For most of its existence golf measured itself with one number per round. It took until 2003 for anyone to record where the ball actually went, and until the 2010s for that idea to reach club golfers.

A 25 mph day can wipe two strokes off your round before you make a single bad swing. Wind does not get subtracted from your strokes gained, so it pays to know exactly where it takes the strokes from.

The first card in the post-round deck is your scorecard, hole by hole, rendered to be read on a phone screen. Here is what it carries and when it beats posting the total.

Strokes gained looks complicated because the answers come back as decimals. The calculation underneath is a single subtraction applied to every shot, using a lookup table of expected strokes built from tour data.