How to Tell If Your Putting Is Actually Good
You think you putt well, but the only evidence is a gut feeling and a putt total that hides more than it shows. Here is the honest way to grade your putting.
Ask most golfers if they putt well and you get an answer built on almost nothing. They remember the 30-footer that dropped on 17 and forget the four putts inside six feet they pushed by all day. Putting feel is the most unreliable witness in your game, and the stat most players lean on instead, putts per round, barely does better.
Proper putting analysis means grading each putt against how hard it actually was, not against your mood walking off the 18th green. Once you do that, “I’m a good putter” turns from a hunch into a number you can defend. Here is how to get there.
Why your usual evidence lies to you
Two stats dominate how amateurs judge putting, and both have a hole in the middle.
Putts per round counts how often you used the putter and nothing else. A player who hits two greens and chips everything close can card 27 putts while barely testing his stroke. A player who hits 15 greens and faces long birdie putts all day can card 33 and have putted brilliantly. We pulled that contradiction apart in why 30 putts can be great or terrible, and the short version is that the total tells you about your short game and your ball striking at least as much as your putter.
Memory is worse. You anchor on the one putt that mattered emotionally and lose the eight ordinary ones that decided your round. A good putting day and a bad one feel nearly identical at the time, because the difference lives in eight-foot conversions you never bother to remember.
So before grading your putting, throw out both the gut feeling and the raw count. They are starting noise, not evidence.
The three questions that actually grade your putting
Real putting analysis splits into three honest questions. Answer them and you know exactly where you stand.
Are you making the putts you should make?
Make rate by distance is the backbone of putting, because expectations are not flat. A scratch golfer makes roughly 50% from 8 feet, around 30% from 12 feet, and only about 15% from 20 feet. Tour players hole about 90% from 4 feet and still miss more than half from 10.
That means a single make-percentage number is meaningless without the distance attached. Holing 40% of your putts sounds mediocre until you learn they averaged 14 feet, at which point it is excellent. The only useful version of this stat is broken into buckets: how you convert from 3 to 5 feet, 5 to 10, 10 to 20, and beyond. Most amateurs who think they putt badly are actually fine from range and quietly leaking strokes from 4 to 8 feet, the zone where every miss is a stroke handed back.
Are you lagging the long ones close?
The second job of putting has nothing to do with making putts. From 30, 40, 50 feet, the goal is a stress-free tap-in, and the stat that measures it is three-putt avoidance plus average distance left.
A golfer who never three-putts from long range is doing something genuinely hard, even if his make rate from 10 feet is ordinary. Lag putting is where high totals quietly come from: leave yourself five-footers all day after long approaches and your putt count climbs through no fault of your stroke. If you three-putt more than once or twice a round, your speed control is the leak, and no amount of work on your 6-foot stroke fixes it. This is also why the real cost of a three-putt depends entirely on where it started.
What does the difficulty-adjusted number say?
The first two questions are diagnostic. The third gives you the verdict, and it is the only stat that combines everything into one honest figure: strokes gained putting.
Built by Columbia professor Mark Broadie, strokes gained putting compares every putt you hit to the average strokes a benchmark golfer needs from that exact distance. Two-putt from 45 feet and you gain a fraction of a stroke, because even good putters often need two from there. Two-putt from 7 feet and you lose a fraction, because the benchmark usually gets down in fewer. Add every tiny credit and debit across 18 holes and you get one number that already accounts for distance, green difficulty, and how many greens you hit.
That is the figure that survives scrutiny. A round of 31 putts can be +2.1 or -1.5 strokes gained putting depending entirely on the distances involved, and only the difficulty-adjusted version knows which. You can see the full method in understanding strokes gained putting, or run a few of your own putts through the strokes gained putting calculator to feel how the math treats distance.
Putting it into a verdict
A genuinely good putter clears all three bars. Solid make rates inside 10 feet, almost no three-putts from long range, and a strokes gained putting number that sits at or above zero against a benchmark that matches your level. Miss one of those and you have found your actual weakness instead of a vague sense that “the putts weren’t dropping.”
The distinction matters because the three problems need different practice. Weak make rates from 6 feet means drilling short putts. Three-putts from distance means working speed on long lag putts. A strong putt count masking poor strokes gained usually means your approach play is feeding you easy short-game saves, not that your putter is elite. Picking the right benchmark is part of reading the number honestly, which is why comparing to a 10-handicap can beat comparing to a pro.
Let the round do the grading
You cannot run this analysis from memory, and you should not try. The inputs, first-putt distance, make rates by bucket, three-putt count, and the difficulty adjustment, only exist if something records them while you play.
golfity does that automatically. Track a round and it logs every first-putt distance, separates lag putting from short putting, flags three-putts by where they started, and reports your strokes gained putting next to the raw count. The next time you walk off a green convinced you putted well, you will have an actual answer instead of a feeling, and usually it will point at the part of your putting that is genuinely costing you strokes. For a sense of where your numbers should land, our guide to a good putting average by handicap gives you the benchmarks to measure against.
