Why Do My Strokes Gained Numbers Change After Editing a Round?
You fix one distance on hole 7 and your tee shot score changes too. That is not a bug. Here is exactly what golfity recalculates when you save an edit, which numbers should move, and which ones should not.
You correct one distance on hole 7. The approach started from 170 yards, not 150. You save, go back to the round summary, and your tee shot score has moved as well. You never touched the tee shot.
Nothing broke. Strokes gained recalculation runs over the entire round every time you edit and save, and the way shots are scored means one correction almost always moves two numbers. Once you know which numbers should move, you can tell a real data problem from arithmetic doing its job.
What strokes gained recalculation actually does when you save
golfity does not patch the value you edited. When you save a shot-by-shot round, it discards every stored strokes gained figure for that round and rebuilds them from the shot list, then rebuilds the round stats on top of the new values.
It does this for all seven benchmarks in one pass: the tour pro table, scratch, and the 5 through 25 handicap tables. Shot categories are recomputed at the same time, which is why an edit can move a shot from one category to another without you changing anything about how it was labeled.
Every shot is scored against the next one
A shot’s value is the expected strokes from where it started, minus the expected strokes from where it finished, minus the one stroke you used. The full strokes gained method and the basics of the concept cover why that works.
The part that surprises people during an edit: “where it finished” is not stored on the shot. It is read from where the next shot started. Change shot 3’s starting distance and you have also changed shot 2’s finishing distance.
Here is that hole 7 correction on a 400-yard par 4, using the table for a 10 handicap. Expected strokes from the tee: 5.05.
| Shot | Before the edit | After the edit |
|---|---|---|
| Drive, leaves the approach at | 150 yd fairway (3.58) | 170 yd fairway (3.74) |
| Drive scores | 5.05 − 1 − 3.58 = +0.47 | 5.05 − 1 − 3.74 = +0.31 |
| Approach, leaves 12 ft (1.90) | 3.58 − 1 − 1.90 = +0.68 | 3.74 − 1 − 1.90 = +0.84 |
| Two shots combined | +1.15 | +1.15 |
The drive lost 0.16 and the approach gained 0.16. You edited one field and two numbers moved in opposite directions by the same amount.
Your hole total should not move at all
Because each shot subtracts the next shot’s expected strokes, the chain cancels out from end to end. Everything in the middle of a hole disappears from the total, leaving one thing:
Hole strokes gained = expected strokes from the tee − strokes you actually took.
That gives you a free check on any edit. If you corrected a distance in the middle of a hole and the hole total changed, something else changed too. If the hole total held steady and only the category splits moved, the recalculation did exactly what it should.
The edits that genuinely change your totals
Adding or removing a shot. Each stroke is worth a full stroke against the benchmark. Finding a forgotten putt on hole 4 costs you a full 1.00 on that hole, and no amount of distance correction elsewhere will offset it.
Penalty strokes. A penalty line scores zero itself and charges its stroke back to the shot that caused it. Add a forgotten water ball on 12 and the tee shot drops a full stroke while the penalty row sits at 0.00. The detail on how penalties and recovery shots are scored is worth reading before you go hunting for an error there.
Marking a hole as picked up. You never holed out, so the last shot has no known finish. golfity drops that shot from strokes gained entirely rather than guessing. The shot stays in the list so the one before it still scores against a real position, but its own value leaves every total.
Switching the round between yards and meters. Distances get converted and then rounded before the table lookup, so a handful of values shift by a hundredth or two.
Changes too small to be worth chasing
Distances round to the nearest yard before the lookup, and to the nearest foot on the green. From the fairway, 149 yards is 3.572 and 150 yards is 3.580. Correcting an approach from 152 to 150 moves that shot by 0.016.
Anything under about 0.05 on a single shot is rounding, not a data problem.
Category totals move even when the round total does not
This is the part worth paying attention to, because your categories are what you practice from.
The line between around the green and approach sits at 30 yards. Correct a chip from 32 yards to 28 and its entire value leaves your approach total and lands in around the green. Neither the hole total nor the round total changes by a thousandth.
Par is the other one. Tee shots on par 3s are counted as approach shots, not off the tee. Fix a hole you had entered as a par 4 when it was a par 3 and your off-the-tee total loses a shot without a single strokes gained value changing anywhere.
Switching your benchmark is not an edit
All seven benchmark tables are calculated and stored the moment you save. Changing your benchmark in settings just changes which stored set you are reading, which is why the numbers move instantly with no round edit involved.
Expect the size of the change to vary by category rather than shifting everything by a fixed amount, since the tables have different shapes. That is also why the benchmark you compare against can reorder your own strengths and weaknesses.
If it still looks wrong after an edit
Work down this list before assuming the calculation is off:
- Check the shot order. Values chain along the order of the shot list. A shot entered out of sequence is scored against the wrong neighbor, and the two values around it will both look strange.
- Check the last shot of each hole. It should be the one that went in, with the distance of the putt you holed. A missing hole-out leaves the previous shot scoring against nothing.
- Check the lies. Rough instead of fairway at 150 yards is 0.265 strokes on its own, and it will show up on the shot before as well as the shot itself.
- Check where the penalty rows sit. A penalty belongs immediately after the shot that caused it, or the stroke gets charged to the wrong shot.
- Re-open the round summary. Round stats are rebuilt from the corrected shots after the save, so the summary pages are the place to confirm the new numbers rather than a screen you had already loaded.
Fixing mistakes is worth the small confusion. A mis-entered distance leaves your hole totals looking perfectly reasonable while quietly moving strokes between off the tee, approach, and around the green, and those category numbers are the ones that decide what you work on next.
