pga tour strokes gained rankings

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A HISTORY OF EVERY HOLE AT AUGUSTA

EVERY HOLE AT AUGUSTA

The golf stats that matter most on the PGA Tour

Consider, for a moment, Denny McCarthy. In the 2019-20 season, he was the strokes gained/putting champion of the PGA Tour , and almost became just the second person (after Jason Day) to average an entire stroke gained over the field per round. It was his second straight mythical putting title, and it’s not even a little hyperbolic to call him one of the greatest putters on Earth. That said, if you know anything about Denny McCarthy, you know he’s not one of the greatest players on Earth. In the two seasons when he led the PGA Tour in putting, he finished 111th and 73rd in the FedEx Cup standings and only managed six top-10s in 51 tournaments. There’s no doubt that he’s very good, but there’s also no doubt that in this case, his brilliant putting didn’t translate to superlative results.

Golf, like many sports, is fertile ground for folk wisdom. If you’ve spent time around a course, you’ve heard the expression “drive for show, putt for dough.” McCarthy’s case would cast some doubt on this formulation, but of course the 27-year-old is just one person and it would be a mistake to draw any statistical conclusions from the smallest possible sample size. Right or wrong, though, the “putt for dough” idea is attempting to answer a question of critical importance for players: Which skill matters the most? Which specific aspect of golf has the greatest correlation to sustained success? And which elements are less important than we think?

To search for the answer, I reached out to Rick Gehman, founder of RickRunGood.com and a Golf Digest contributor. There are a few brilliant numbers guys in golf, and he’s one of them. As expected, he took the concept and blew it out of the water. In his words:

I’ve attached a sheet that looks at the 130 official PGA Tour stats and compares them for the 2020 season FedEx Cup Regular Season Points. With only one year, and a shortened one at that, there’s going to be more randomness than usual BUT I think the list certainly passes the eye test.

Gehman’s method was what he called a “straightforward regression model,” in which two variables are compared to each other using 129 qualifying players. The steady variable is FedEx Cup points accrued by a player during the regular season, which was our metric for success (you could argue that total strokes-gained average is better, but I wanted to go by the PGA Tour’s own standard, albeit before the points blow up in the playoffs and skew the results). The second variable is the other 130 stats, with a ranking value assigned to each based on a player’s finish in the year-end standings. By finding out which ones have the closest correlation to each other, you can see which statistics might predict success.

In simpler words, this shows us what the best players did the best.

RELATED: The top 100 PGA Tour pros in 2021, ranked

Let me echo Gehman’s caution up top: With only an abbreviated season’s worth of data, there is bound to be some statistical noise, and to draw definite conclusions of any kind, you’d need to look at a years-long study.

With that said, the list can be found here . The higher the number, the more closely correlated the result is with FedEx Cup success. A few observations:

• As a quality control test, it’s good to see that “official money” and “Official World Golf Ranking” are the top two. Clearly, if these didn’t correlate with our concept of success, something would be seriously wrong.

• Of the comprehensive strokes-gained numbers, SG/approach the green is the most “important” to overall success. It’s the top stat after money and World Ranking, and it’s even above SG/total, which comes in fourth. That last fact is the least intuitive of the results and probably deserves closer inspection.

RELATED: What the sophisticated golf fan should be looking for in 2021

• The top six are: SG/approach the green, SG/off-the-tee, scoring average, SG/total, SG/around the green, and SG/tee-to-green. Again, this all stands to reason and functions as good quality control.

The saying "putt for dough" on the PGA Tour hasn't held up the last two seasons, as Denny McCarthy led both times in strokes gained/putting but finishing 111th and 76th on the FedEx Cup points list, respectively.

Gregory Shamus

• But you might have noticed something missing … where’s putting? Incredibly, SG/putting ranks 64th on the list, exactly at the halfway mark. It’s hard not to think of that number in relation to McCarthy, and while the warning above still has to be observed, it definitely raises some questions about the relative value of putting.

• Looking at the top of the list, there are a lot of stats like “birdie average” and “scoring average” that you’d expect. But when you start getting into highly specific stats, like driving distance and “approaches from > 200 yards” you see the putting categories appear only after several tee-to-green stats.

RELATED: 10 players who will make you money betting on them in 2021

• In particular, long approaches seem to be of some importance. Approaches from longer than 175 yards seem more correlated with success than anything on the green. Greens in regulation is hugely critical, coming in 16th.

• Scrambling matters, too. Not only is SG/around the green fifth overall, but scrambling itself (31st), sand-save percentage (35th), scrambling from the rough (44th) and scrambling from 10-20 yards (49th) are all relatively high.

• Interestingly, “consecutive cuts” finished dead last, one of only two stats with a negative correlation value. Clearly, in a system like the FedEx Cup where points are top heavy, consistency without at least sporadic excellence is a dubious merit.

• In the “Bryson was right” department, driving distance average (28th) is more closely correlated with success than driving-accuracy percentage (52nd).

• If you’re looking for a magic secret stat that perfectly predicts success, you’ll be disappointed. Personally, I was hoping that we’d somehow find out that all the best players were wizards from the left rough between 150-175 yards. Alas …

RELATED: 7 sleepers you need to watch in 2021

After reading Gehman’s list, I wanted to try one more approach that looked only at the top 30 players on tour from last season. It’s less scientific, but I thought it might be worthwhile. Luis Rivera at the PGA Tour helped immensely by providing me with a spreadsheet of the overall ranking in all the major strokes-gained categories from the top 30 in the 2020 FEC rankings. With these numbers, it was possible to do a quick and dirty check for success correlation.

A clutch putt from Mackenzie Hughes, something his stats show he's prone to do, at the BMW Championship earned him the last spot into the 2020 Tour Championship.

Stacy Revere

With fewer players, there will be outliers, and the data will necessarily be less precise. As an example, we can look at Mackenzie Hughes, who missed nine of his first 11 cuts, then made it all the way to the Tour Championship by virtue of catching fire late. He’s in the McCarthy vein, having finished eighth in putting but worse than 140th in the other major categories. Meanwhile, Hideki Matsuyama goes the other way, cleaning up from off the green but finishing a sad 170th in putting.

Here were the average season-ending rankings for each category among this group of 30:

SG/total : 29.7 SG:/tee-to-green : 41.47 SG/approach : 52.97 SG/off-the-tee : 53.67 SG/putting : 65.73 SG/around the green : 71.9

The similarity here is that putting is relatively low, and the biggest difference comes with “around the green,” which looks a lot less significant here. (Also, fans of strokes gained will be relieved to know that SG/total is No. 1 here, as you’d expect it to be.) Again, Gehman’s method is the more sophisticated metric, and should take precedence, but it’s interesting to see what changes and what doesn’t with a slightly different method.

The broad conclusion is that when you look at 2020, tee-to-green golf seems to be a more useful skill than putting. In the real world, a great player needs both, but we may want to get ahead of the curve and tweak that famous expression: Putt for show, do everything else for dough.

Strokes gained and the stats behind the scorecards on the PGA Tour

Published: 10 January 2024

As the newly revamped 2024 season tees off, Today’s Golfer reflects on what it takes to succeed on tour and the metrics that matter most.

Merger mayhem, mega money moves , ‘Capgate’ controversy, and the battle to bifurcate – 2023’s off-course antics proved more turbulent than ever before.

“Golf is a mess” , puts Andrew ‘Beef’ Johnston, as the PGA Tour’s reimagined calendar-year schedule teed off for its ‘Opening Drive’ in Hawaii. A much-needed pause from the drama dividing a game glittering with talent, global superstars, and record-breaking performances.

Take Scottie Scheffler. The World No.1’s spectacular season of ball striking saw him top the ‘Strokes Gained’ (SG) leaderboards for SG: Off-the-tee and SG: Approach in 2023 – the first time the feat has been achieved in the SG era.

Despite a deflating start to his TGL virtual venture , Rory McIlroy became the first player since 1981 to finish a season with a streak of 10 consecutive top-10 results. Team Europe’s premier gladiator in Rome also set a new all-time driving distance record on tour of 326.3 yards.

And, what to make of Ryder Cup bolter Ludvig Aberg’s remarkable breakthrough season. It took the Texas Tech graduate a mere 75 days to register his first professional win, before slotting in seamlessly alongside Europe’s big guns at Marco Simone.

By mid-November, Aberg had also added a first PGA Tour title at the RSM Classic, rewriting the PGA Tour record book along the way with his 72-hole total of 253 – equaling Justin Thomas’ mark, with closing back-to-back 61s adding up to the lowest final 36-hole total ever. Somehow that wasn’t enough to pip Eric Cole to the PGA Tour’s Rookie of the Year award.

Scandi compatriot Viktor Hovland also had a 2023 to remember, finishing as FedExCup Champion after storming to back-to-back victories at the business end of the season.

Not only were the numbers following the dollar sign on Hovland’s cheques rather impressive, but so too were the stats behind his performances.

The Norwegian World No.4 became the first player in 30 years to lead the field in Driving Accuracy, Greens in Regulation and Scrambling on route to the Tour Championship, and the first in 40 to win back-to-back while topping both fields in Driving Accuracy.

A resurgent Rickie Fowler returned to the winner’s circle at the Rocket Mortgage Classic on the back of reinventing his approach play. The Californian finished 2023 tied sixth for SG: Approach, after struggling to break 150 th in the two preceding seasons.

A special mention must also go to Lucas Glover who delivered his first multi-win season at 43 years old. His two wins came back-to-back, stealing the perhaps unwanted title of the oldest back-to-back winner on tour from Vijay Singh.

Of course, the above achievements provide a mere snapshot of a season where the talent on the turf still managed to outshine the chaos off it.

And whether you prefer Coke or Pepsi, DC or Marvel, PGA or LIV, a 58 is a 58, and Bryson DeChambeau’s historic efforts at Greenbrier stand with the best performance across golf’s 2023 tours.

Performances of this caliber not only take an extraordinary work rate, talent, and belief, but an uncompromising attention to detail, and hunger to dive down into the metrics that matter most and differentiate the best from the rest at this elite level.

DeChambeau is not alone in his data-driven approach to understanding performance. Matt Fitzpatrick is another determined to find silver bullets in the data he religiously records from every shot, and Edoardo Molinari’s stock is fast rising as a leading performance analyst to Team Europe and others looking for an empirical edge.

Numbers can have their pitfalls, however.

Granted, they don’t have opinions – which is refreshingly helpful in golf at present – but they can lead us all off the fairway and down a rabbit hole.

Which ones are meaningful, and which ones are simply ‘nice to know’?

Golf is a multi-faceted skill-based game like no other. There is no hierarchical model that determines performance outcomes. Good shots can be punished, bad shots can be rewarded, and we can all lay testament to that.

The right player, on the right day, on the right course has a puncher’s chance of winning on tour. The 69 different winners across 92 PGA and DP World Tour tournaments illustrate this point as well as any.

Climbing to the top tiers of the Official Golf World Rankings requires something more, however.

The highest rungs on the ladder can only be reached via a consistency of performance over time, earned by featuring frequently on the first page of Sunday afternoon leaderboards.

What can we learn from the performance characteristics of these players? What are the non-negotiables and how well-rounded do the best really need to be?

The validity of ‘Strokes Gained’ as a performance measure

Columbia University professor Mark Broadie’s ‘Strokes Gained’ measurement tool has undoubtedly revolutionized our understanding of the critical determinants of golf performance at the highest level.

An ever-growing bank of ShotLink data continually refines our knowledge of the exact number of strokes required for the ‘average PGA Tour golfer’ to put the ball in the hole from any given location on the course.

SG essentially provides a meaningful performance benchmark, enabling interested parties to measure how much better or worse a tour pro performs in specific areas of the game compared to their counterparts.

And in the same way that we accept the end-of-year world rankings to fairly reflect ‘what’ happened in the preceding 12 months of competition, the vast data underpinning end-of-season SG leaderboards is now widely accepted as a logical explanation of ‘how’ it happened too.

The cumulation of SG: Tee-to-Green and SG: Putting is known as SG: Total – a leaderboard topped by Scottie Scheffler in 2023, despite being the only player in the top 10 to finish below the tour average for putting. More on Scottie’s flat stick issues later.

Diving into the data

A linear regression of SG: Total against a medium-term success metric (end-of-year world ranking), shows a reasonable measure of fit against the model (R 2 = 0.51).

Simply put, SG: Total is roughly 50% successful at predicting world-ranking positions at the end of a season.

The relationship appears strongest for those players at the top of the SG: Total leaderboard, an observation also noted in a previous analysis that reported how SG: Total is an increasingly useful indicator of end-of-year ranking for the top 30 players.

But what for the relative importance of SG: Total’s constituent parts? Does the age-old anecdote of “drive for show, putt for dough” have any credibility?

Quite the opposite in fact.

We took the top 90 players from each SG leaderboard on the PGA Tour and divided them into three groups to see how proficiency in each facet of the game affected WR.

Not all SG statistics are born equal!

For this to be true we might expect more balanced average rankings for each SG metric and more proportional differentials between each level of player.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the SG: Total leaders had the lowest WR for the most elite group (24.73), followed by SG: Tee-to-Green (30.57), and then SG: Approach (35.40).

SG: Around-the-Green (46.47), SG: Putting (52.83), and SG: Off-the-Tee (56.50) round off the order – which would be sequential in terms of importance be it not for performance Off-the-tee on par 4s and 5s.

These data therefore highlight the importance of a strong all-round tee-to-green game if you want to reach the higher echelons of the WRs, and more specifically a dialed-in ‘approach game’ is critical.

A glance at the illustrious list of PGA Tour winners on the SG: Approach leaderboard and you’ll understand why.

The next pool of players (ranked 31-60) for SG: Approach don’t necessarily end the year further up the WRs than the final group (ranked 61-90). The same can be said of the SG: Around-the-Green leaderboard.

Birdie or better conversion rate may go some way to explaining this. It’s one thing hitting the green, it’s another taking your chances – and you’re not mixing it with the McIlroys and Hovlands of this world without being able to do this somewhat consistently.

With average driving distance on tour in the region of 300 yards, players are typically left with 125-150 yards on average length par 4s on tour.

A key distance to get nailed down, and interestingly the Green-in-Regulation leaderboards read very differently when the approach length edges beyond 150 yards.

Food for thought considering the recent decision to roll the golf ball back 15 yards from 2028.

How important is a well-rounded skillset?

Back to Scottie Scheffler, and if you’re going to have a weakness…

The World No.1 ranked first on four out of the six SG leaderboards, fifth for SG: Around-the-Green, and an eyebrow-raising 162 nd for SG: Putting, losing an average of 0.3 shots on the field.

McNealy, Montgomery, and McCarthy stepped up on 2023’s putting podium. Not exactly golf’s household names with all due respect.

And while we do see the likes of Schauffele, Homa, Hatton, and Burns challenging atop the SG: Putting leaderboard, our results tend to support the notion that the putter doesn’t need to be red hot every week.

It seems more important to give yourself chances all year round and keep faith that a putting purple patch will arrive, and hopefully in time for Major week.

We shouldn’t dismiss the short game as a ‘nice string to the bow’, however. The world’s best take fewer putts per round, convert more birdies, scramble better from both the sand and rough, and gain more shots in general both around and on the green.

The differentials between performance levels are just smaller than tee-to-green.

A final result of note is that driving the ball further does not differentiate between these groupings of elite players.

It appears to be important enough to put a shorter shaft in your hand for the next shot, but no match for being able to pepper the pin. A 300-yard drive quickly loses its value if you struggle to hit areas of the dancefloor where more putts are holed than missed.

This is what the best are doing consistently better than the rest.

But what does it actually take to win you ask?

Reassuringly, more of the same.

The SG data from the 41 PGA Tour events with individual champions in 2023 again stress the importance of a skillset with a laser-like approach play at the heart.

Champions on tour placed 39th on average for SG: Total, with the relative importance of each game facet decreasing in importance as the ball made its way to the hole.

The most striking difference between the two measures of success (WR and winning on tour), lies in the superior performance off the tee across the season for those going on to lift trophies.

It appears a less crucial weapon for climbing the WRs but is seemingly a key piece of artillery for those who won in 2023. Winners Scheffler, Aberg, McIlroy, and Hovland all feature in the top 8 for SG: Off-the-Tee, helping the metric rise in stature.

Interestingly, despite Scheffler dominating the majority of the SG leaderboards, it’s McIlroy who has the lowest average ranking across all six SG categories, adding weight to the Northern Irishman’s stake as the most complete player on tour.

Rahm, Homa, and Hovland also feature in the conversation for the best all-rounder based on this data.

Let’s wrap up by contradicting the last 2,000 words.

Statistics are great talking points, and very often can be reliable predictors of future success. But the beauty of sport, and indeed professional golf resides in its unpredictability and unwillingness to read the script.

Take a bow Nico Echavarria, stepping up from 406 th in the WRs to win the Puerto Rico Open on 21-under par, rising over 100 places in the space of a week to 287 th .

What was his super-strength? Timing. Pure and simple. The Columbian didn’t break inside the top 125 in any SG category that year.

It may not have been the most stellar field in the world, but Echavarria can call himself a PGA Tour winner, and no doubt the only numbers that mattered to him were $684,000.

It just goes to show the strength in depth across the tour, every dog has his day, but consistency is king if you want to be a top dog on tour.

Analysis – what we did

Our sample explored relationships between the top 90 ranked players from PGA Tour ShotLink leaderboards and success outcomes in golf – world ranking and tour wins.

The only exception being if a featured player finished the year ranked outside the world’s top 200. We deemed this as being a reasonable cut-off for describing players who regularly compete in top-tier tour events.

Limitations worth noting are the significant absence of data from LIV Tour players, and the fact that not every round of golf is captured by ShotLink, which may elevate or suppress a true reflection of performance across the season in some cases.

That said, the results are in good agreement with past studies and provide an objective starting point for conversations into the performance determinants of elite golfing performance.

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About the author

Ross Tugwood

Golf Equipment Writer

Ross Tugwood is a golf equipment writer for todays-golfer.com, specializing in data, analytics, science, and innovation.

Ross is passionate about optimizing sports performance and has a decade of experience working with professional athletes and coaches for British Athletics, the UK Sports Institute, and Team GB.

He has post-graduate degrees in Performance Analysis and Sports Journalism, enabling him to critically analyze and review the latest golf equipment and technology to help you make better-informed buying decisions.

Last Updated: Jan 18, 2024

What is Strokes Gained? Explanation, Calculation, and Examples

Strokes gained is a golf stats methodology popularized by Mark Broadie and adopted by the PGA Tour which measures a golfer's skill by each part of their game.

Written By: Zach Gollwitzer

Posted in: Golf Statistics

Tags: Data-Driven Golf

Term Overview

A brief overview of the term including definition, usage, origins, helpful visuals.

The strokes gained methodology is the most accurate way to measure the overall skill of a golfer. It can assess a golfer's putting skill, chipping skill, approach shot skill, driving skill, or all of these combined into one statistic. It is a relative statistic based on average "benchmarks" for each type of shot.

During the Tour Championship, Tiger Woods gained 0.8 strokes putting, lost 0.3 strokes around the greens, gained 1.1 strokes on approach shots, and gained 0.2 strokes on drives. Overall, he gained 1.8 strokes on the field across his entire game during this tournament.

Strokes gained was an effort between Mark Broadie and the PGA Tour. The TOUR gave Broadie, an academic researcher access to the database of ShotLink data, which he then spent years researching, analyzing, and formulating what would become the "Strokes Gained Approach". This is now a statistic published by the PGA Tour for all events.

Table of Contents

Tired of hearing the phrase "strokes gained" from the guys in your fantasy golf league or Sunday foursome and not understanding it?

In this post, I'm breaking it all down— it's a lot easier than you think.

What is it?

Strokes gained is a golf statistics methodology.

It is made up of four main components:

• Strokes gained off the tee
• Strokes gained approach
• Strokes gained around the green
• Strokes gained putting

The purpose of this method is to independently and objectively assess each part of a golfer's game.

It helps us accurately answer questions like:

• What is the strongest part of Rickie Fowler's game?
• Who putted the best at the Masters last year?
• Which golf course has the most challenging greens to putt on?
• How much did approach shots contribute to Tiger's victory at the Tour Championship?

Basic Formula

The basic strokes gained formula is calculated on a shot-by-shot basis and is the following:

Strokes Gained = Benchmark Avg. Shots to Hole Out (start) - Benchmark Avg. Shots to Hole Out (end) - 1

Where "Benchmark" represents an average value calculated by looking at hundreds of thousands of golf shots hit by tour pros and captured by the ShotLink system .

For example, the "benchmark" may say that from 160 yards in the middle of the fairway, on average , a tour pro will take 2.98 shots to hole out, while a 10-foot putt will take an average of 1.61 shots to hole out. If a tour pro hits that 160-yard approach shot from the fairway to 10 feet, we could say their "strokes gained" on this shot was:

Strokes Gained = 2.98 - 1.61 - 1 = 0.37 strokes

In other words, they have reduced their "expected" shots to hole out by 1.37, and after we subtract the shot they just took (1), they gained 0.37 strokes against the "field".

How Amateurs Can Use It

While there are a growing number of ways for amateurs to track their own strokes gained statistics, I recommend purchasing the Arccos tracking system .

This shot-tracking system will track your shots automatically and show you a dashboard of your strokes gained statistics against players of a similar handicap to you.

What is Strokes Gained?

Let's dive a little deeper.

What's the story behind strokes gained, and how does it really work?

Strokes Gained History

While I'm not the one to ask for the full history and backstory (you can read Every Shot Counts for that), here are the cliff notes of how we got here:

• Early 2000s —The concept of "strokes gained" was developed by Mark Broadie, a quant-finance professor at Columbia Business School thanks to hundreds of thousands of shot data points collected by the Tour's ShotLink system
• 2011 —In May of 2011, the PGA Tour officially adopted strokes gained putting and soon thereafter introduced the remaining statistics ( approach , off the tee , around the green ).
• Coaches and their players start using strokes gained stats to influence their practice strategy and on-course strategy .
• Shot tracking systems like Arccos begin incorporating these statistics in their ecosystems making these metrics available to amateur golfers for the first time ever (technically, GolfMetrics, developed by Broadie was first, but Arccos is far more popular nowadays)

Common Uses of Strokes Gained Data

Strokes gained data is primarily used for the following:

• Game improvement —gives golfers better insights of what they need to practice and how they should strategize while playing
• Live Broadcasts —gives announcers incredibly detailed metrics to share with viewers (e.g. "Tiger has never missed a putt inside 5 feet on this hole")
• Sports Betting (fantasy golf) —many sports betting models and algorithms incorporate strokes gained data

Is Strokes Gained Better than Traditional Statistics?

By a landslide.

While traditional statistics are easier to track and a great way to get started for amateur golfers, they come with some severe limitations:

• Not Independently Measured —traditional stats like GIR , scrambling, fairway percentage, and putts per round are not independent. For example, I could chunk a chip shot, make a 40 foot putt for par, and my "scrambling" stat will improve. Does this mean I'm great at chipping? No! It just means I made a lucky putt. These traditional stats are co-mingled.
• Do not account for external factors —if a golfer plays a course that has tight fairways, their driving accuracy will decline. This doesn't always mean they hit the ball poorly; it just means they played a TOUGH course!

These are just a few of the many problems that come with traditional stats.

I won't sit here and claim that strokes gained stats don't have any limitations, but they're significantly better than traditional golf stats.

Let's find out why.

How is Strokes Gained Calculated?

In its most basic form, "strokes gained" measures how many strokes a golfer gains or loses against the "benchmark", which is generally historical shot data from players of similar skill levels.

The PGA Tour (and other tours) measure every shot a player takes during the competition using ShotLink , which then goes into their databases and is used to calculate the "benchmark".

The "benchmark" tells use the average number of strokes taken from various distances and locations (fairway, rough, sand) on the golf course.

Example Benchmark Data

Below are some sample benchmarks from Broadie's book, Every Shot Counts. These benchmarks represent PGA Tour data from 2004-2012.

Long Game Benchmarks

In reality, strokes gained will be calculated from a benchmark table with thousands of distances and data points.

But how do we read this?

Here are a few examples:

• If a tour pro is hitting a 100-yard shot from the rough, we expect them to take 3.02 strokes to hole out from this scenario.
• A 400-yard par 4 is short for tour pros, so it makes sense that the average is under par
• If a tour pro is stuck behind a tree from 200 yards and has to chip out to the fairway, we expect them to take 3.87 shots to hole out (see "Recovery" column)

As you can see, the "average shots taken" benchmarks are a function of both location AND distance.

Putting Benchmarks

Similar to the first table, we have average benchmarks for putting at different distances.

These are pretty straightforward—if a tour pro has a 9-foot putt, we expect them to take 1.56 strokes to hole out. In other words, a 45% probability of making the putt.

Strokes Gained Formula

As mentioned above, the strokes gained formula is:

We take the benchmark number of strokes from the shot we are hitting, subtract the benchmark number of strokes from where we hit the shot to, and subtract 1 (because we hit 1 shot).

This formula is used on a shot-by-shot basis.

Strokes Gained Example Calculation

Imagine we are given the following "benchmark" tables for long game and putting:

Using this table, let's follow Tiger Woods as he plays the 18th hole at Pebble Beach .

Shot 1: Tee Shot

Tiger's first shot is from the tee box from 540 yards. Looking at the sample table above, we can see that the "benchmark" at this location (tee) and from this distance (540 yards) is 4.65 strokes.

Tiger hits his drive down the middle (fairway) and ends up 240 yards (distance) from the pin, which from the table above, we know has a benchmark value of 3.45 strokes.

Given this information, we can calculate strokes gained off the tee for this shot:

Strokes Gained Off the Tee = 4.65 - 3.45 - 1 = 0.20 strokes

Shot 2: Approach Shot

Tiger's next shot is from 240 yards in the fairway. He plays conservatively and hits a 4-iron 20 yards short of the green.

Let's grab our benchmarks at these starting and ending locations:

• 240 yards (distance) from fairway (location) has a benchmark value of 3.45 strokes
• 20 yards (distance) from the fairway (location) has a benchmark value of 2.40

So our strokes gained approach is:

Strokes Gained Approach = 3.45 - 2.40 - 1 = 0.05 strokes

So far, after two shots, Tiger has gained 0.20 + 0.05 = 0.25 shots on the field.

Shot 3: Chip Shot

For Tiger's third shot, he chips it from 20 yards to a distance of 10-feet from the hole.

Not exactly what he was looking for, but he's got a makeable birdie putt!

Let's look up our benchmark averages for these two shots:

• 20-yard chip from the fairway has a benchmark value of 2.40
• 10-foot putt has a benchmark value of 1.61

Since Tiger is within 30 yards from the edge of the green, this shot qualifies as a strokes gained around the green calculation:

Strokes Gained Around the Green = 2.40 - 1.61 - 1 = -0.21 strokes

In this case, Tiger didn't hit a great chip, and therefore, has lost strokes on the field.

So far, through 3 shots, he has gained 0.20 + 0.05 - 0.21 = 0.04 strokes on the field this hole.

Shot 4: Birdie Putt

In this scenario, let's say Tiger nails his birdie putt from 10 feet.

Since a 10-foot putt has a benchmark average of 1.61, he gains 0.61 shots on the field with the strokes gained putting metric:

Strokes gained putting = 1.61 - 0 - 1 = 0.61

Entire Hole Calculation

If we wanted to calculate the entire strokes gained value for this 18th hole, we just add the individual components together:

Strokes Gained = SG Tee + SG Approach + SG Around Green + SG Putting

Our final calculation is:

Strokes Gained (hole) = 0.20 + 0.05 - 0.21 + 0.61 = 0.65

And guess what?

The math all ties out. Remember how a 540-yard hole from the tee had an average of 4.65 strokes to hole out?

If we subtract Tiger's score, we arrive at the same value:

Strokes Gained = 4.65 - 4 = 0.65

Calculation Methodology

As you can see, we can use this strokes gained methodology in all sorts of ways:

• By area of game (e.g. putting)
• By tournament
• By a player's career
• By a player's season

Since we're dealing with the same base unit (strokes), we can mix and match however we want!

The overall methodology goes like this:

• Establish a baseline —to calculate strokes gained, you need a dataset that will allow you to establish your "benchmark" or "baseline" for shots of varying distances and locations (see table above)
• Calculate —you can then calculate individual strokes gained values
• Aggregate —and finally, aggregate them by hole, round, tournament, or however you can think of!
• Adjust —we haven't talked about this yet, but as you'll see in the strokes gained putting section below, some adjustments are made for official reporting on Tour.

What types of Strokes Gained Data Can we Calculate?

As you may have noticed from our example hole at Pebble Beach above, I calculated strokes gained in several "buckets".

While the math is the same for each, it is useful to measure individual areas of a golfer's game.

Let's see what each represents:

Strokes Gained Off the Tee

Strokes gained off the tee measures all tee shots on par 4s and par 5s. It does NOT include par 3 tee shots.

This metric is a measure of both driving distance AND accuracy.

In his book, Every Shot Counts , Mark Broadie calculated that for every 20 yards added to tee shots, a tour player gains ~0.75 strokes on the field. Furthermore, he found a positive correlation between a player's distance off the tee and overall driving accuracy.

To learn more about this statistic, you can read my full post on strokes gained off the tee .

Strokes Gained Approach Shots

Strokes gained approach shots represent par 3 tee shots + any shot that is greater than 30 yards from the edge of the green (excluding par 4 and 5 tee shots)

This metric is a measure of ball striking , typically with irons .

In his prime, Tiger Woods led the tour in this stat by a large margin. In 2006, Tiger gained 2.1 strokes per round through his ball striking.

Absolutely INSANE.

To learn more about this statistic, you can read my full post on strokes gained approach shots .

Strokes Gained Around the Green

Strokes gained around the green measures all shots within 30 yards of the edge of the green that are not putts.

This metric measures a golfer's chipping, pitching, and bunker play inside 30 yards.

To learn more about this statistic, you can read my full post on strokes gained around the green .

Strokes Gained Putting

Strokes gained putting measures all putts.

As you can probably guess, this tells us how skilled a golfer is with the flat stick .

Unlike other strokes gained stats, this metric is reported by the tour on an adjusted basis.

Strokes Gained Putting to the Field: An Adjusted Metric

Let's imagine two pro golfers play in two separate tournaments.

At one tournament, the greens are wicked fast and dry. At the other tournament, it just rained, so the greens are much slower and relatively flat.

If we calculated strokes gained putting for each of these golfers, who do you think will have a better metric?

Of course, the golfer on the easy, slow greens!

Since strokes gained statistics are reported across tournaments, the PGA Tour needed a method for adjusting it based on the difficulty of the greens.

So on a per-round basis, strokes gained putting is adjusted based on historical performance of all pros at a given course. For example, Pebble Beach has notoriously challenging greens, and therefore, a player will get ~0.77 strokes added to their strokes gained putting metric for each round played at Pebble beach.

To learn more about this statistic, you can read my full post on strokes gained putting .

Strokes Gained Tee to Green (Aggregate Metric)

Strokes gained tee to green is an aggregate metric that combines strokes gained off the tee, strokes gained approach, and strokes gained around the green.

There's not much to say about this one. It's a measure of how well a golfer performs excluding putting.

Strokes Gained Total (Aggregate Metric)

Total strokes gained combines all non-aggregated metrics which includes off the tee, approach, around the green, and putting.

As we have discussed throughout this post, the aggregated strokes gained metric is an overall measurement of a golfer's skill.

In general, this is correlated with world golf rankings. The players leading this metric win lots of tournaments.

Can Amateur Golfers Use Strokes Gained Off the Tee?

At the time of writing, the golf industry has come a long way with consumer-grade technology. With the proliferation of shot trackers and personal launch monitors , it has become easier for amateur golfers to assess their games with real on-course data.

That said, tracking strokes gained off the tee statistics still proves difficult for many golfers.

Because as we talked about earlier, strokes gained calculations require benchmark data.

This means that for a 15-handicap golfer to assess their game with strokes gained data, all of the following things must be tracked:

• Every shot must be tracked (ending location AND distance)
• Thousands of golfers who play to a 15 handicap must also track their shots
• All this data must be aggregated in one spot (ecosystem)

For the PGA Tour, this is easy. ShotLink tracks every golf shot from every tournament for every tour pro automatically.

For us amateurs, we don't have this luxury (and frankly, most of us probably don't want all of our shots tracked!)

There are a few options though and I'm excited to see how this evolves in the next decade!

Option #1: Automatic Tracking

In my opinion, automatic strokes gained tracking is the best option. Tracking every shot for every round you play is exhausting and most golfers do not have the discipline to keep this up over a long enough period for it to start helping their games.

At the time of writing, here are a few shot trackers that also have strokes gained statistics built-in to their ecosystems:

• Arccos Shot Trackers: The Arccos system has strokes gained calculations available to users (via the app) and thanks to all the amateur data they have collected, you can compare your rounds against golfers of similar skill levels. This is a huge benefit and allows for the most accurate strokes gained data.
• ShotScope Trackers: A close second to Arccos, ShotScope offers shot trackers and an app that calculates strokes gained data. From what I've seen, ShotScope does not have quite as many data points as Arccos, but is a great alternative.

Option #2: Manual tracking

Several apps allow you to track all of your shots manually and then review strokes gained data within the dashboard. While this can be cumbersome and exhausting to some golfers, it is a great option if you are highly disciplined and dedicated to improving your golf game.

Here are a few to check out:

• My Round Pro
• PinPoint Golf
• Decade Golf: This is more of a system than an app. While it does have an app, this is a premium service you pay for to help learn better golf strategy based on strokes gained data.

Concluding Thoughts: How does strokes gained benefit YOU?

By now, you probably understand how strokes gained work, but may not see the benefit to your game yet.

I'll leave you with a few ideas of how you can use this to improve your game:

• It tells you what to practice —Unlike traditional stats, strokes gained clearly shows you what parts of your game stink
• You can manage expectations better —Have you ever gotten mad at yourself for missing a 10-footer? I know I have. But what if I told you that even the pros only make 40% of these? Feels a bit better right?
• It tells you where to aim —If you're hitting driver on a par 4 with OB right and rough left, strokes gained tells you that you might want to aim left of the fairway . For most golfers, the penalty for being in the rough is significantly less than the penalty of going out of bounds.

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Strokes gained putting is a golf statistic used by the PGA Tour that provides an objective measure of putting skill across golfers, courses, and tournaments.

Strokes gained off the tee is an objective way to measure a golfer's driving ability. In this post, I'll explain how it is calculated and why it matters.

Strokes gained around the green is an objective way to measure a golfer's chipping. In this post, I'll explain how it is calculated and why it matters.

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Explaining Strokes Gained

• BY Chris Nickel
• Jul 1st 2021
• Read all comments

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Strokes Gained sits on the shelf of golf terms labeled often-used, rarely defined. You hear it on TV broadcasts, in golf media and increasingly in manufacturers’ marketing literature.

But what does it mean? It’s a question we get fairly often at MyGolfSpy so let’s flesh it out a bit. Considering the two words absent any context, “strokes” and “gained” seem innocuous enough.

It’s not like we’re talking about axiomatic systems or oblate spheroids. But ask your regular foursome to define “Strokes Gained” and I’ll wager a steak dinner you’re more likely to get blank stares rather than a correct answer.

WELL, WE’RE WAITING …

Strokes Gained is the brainchild of Columbia business professor Mark Broadie. It’s the definitive performance statistic in the field, a welcome replacement for silo statistics such as putts-per-round and percentage of fairways hit.

Chiefly, Strokes Gained is a statistic that communicates the performance of a golf shot relative to a benchmark. Put another way, Strokes Gained doesn’t tell you how good (or bad) a shot is. It quantifies how good (or bad) each shot is based on a defined context.

If this sounds familiar, we’ve touched on the subject before .

For example, a tee shot that travels 250 yards down the fairway on a 450-yard par-4 doesn’t have the same value for every golfer. If you’re a PGA TOUR pro, this shot might have a negative Strokes Gained value because, on average, PGA TOUR players hit the ball further. This leaves a shorter approach shot which, on balance, generates a lower average score.

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However, for the average 18-handicap player, such a tee shot would produce a positive Strokes Gained measurement because the average driving distance for higher-handicap players is a fair bit less than 250 yards.

Here’s another one. Let’s say you’re comparing your putting to the PGA TOUR average, where 7’10” represents the distance at which a golfer has a 50/50 chance of making a putt. Let’s also assume that it takes an average of 1.5 strokes for a PGA TOUR pro to hole out from this distance. Therefore, if you have the same distance putt and make it, you gain 0.5 strokes. The formula is simple. It’s the average number of strokes—the actual number of strokes. In this case, that’s 1.5-1 = 0.5. If you don’t make the first putt but make the second one, the Strokes Gained on that shot would be -0.5 (1.5-2).

Also, because Strokes Gained produces a value for every shot, golfers can look at the aggregate values for various parts of the game, such as: Driving, approach, tee-to-green, putting, etc.

APPLICATION

Strokes Gained is a pretty straightforward concept once you get the idea that a golf shot can’t be defined as “good” or “bad” without some sort of context. It’s like asking whether $400 is a lot of money. For a dozen golf balls? Absolutely. For a round of golf at Augusta National? Probably not.

The PGA TOUR produces Strokes Gained values for every shot for every player in every tournament. As expected, the context for all this information is other PGA TOUR players. Bryson DeChambeau leads the Tour in both average driving distance (323.5 yards) and Strokes Gained driving (1.142 strokes/round). However, Rory McIllory, who is second in driving distance (318.7 yards) is eighth in Strokes Gained driving (0.636 strokes/round).

But for the rest of us, performance management platforms such as Shot Scope and Arccos now offer Strokes Gained analysis for their users. Earlier this year, Shot Scope announced it would add Strokes Gained data to its platform in three phases, a process that now is complete. From a competitive standpoint, it’s an important achievement for Shot Scope, given that Arccos launched its Caddie Strokes Gained Analytics in August 2020.

The primary benefit of individual performance tracking systems is the ability to benchmark against improvement goals. For example, let’s say you’re a 15-handicap golfer and you want to know what it would take to get down to a single-digit handicap. Strokes Gained will tell you how each segment of your game measures up. That way, you can see how close (or far) you are relative to that goal.

If you want to dig deeper, Shot Scope produces Strokes Gained analysis based on a variety of criteria such as distance and hole designation (par-3, par-4, par-5). For example, the data might show you struggle more with tee shots on par-4s that are more than 425 yards. Or that you gain strokes on par-3s compared to other golfers of the same handicap.

Whatever the case, the point is that if you’re looking to improve, it’s vital to start with the right information. Strokes Gained helps achieve that.

Because every golfer has different strengths and weaknesses, objective data can help you understand where the greatest opportunity for improvement exists.

ADVANCED COURSE WORK

Part of the excitement (for some of us, anyway) around the Strokes Gained framework is all the potential quantitative rabbit holes. It’s a free-flowing, brainstorming session that produces musings such as …

Given enough data, could we assess shot performance based on the time of year? Grass type? Course conditions? Time of play? Tournament venue? Rough versus fairway? And so on.

And given a large enough sample size, who knows? Maybe Strokes Gained will help you select your next Member-Guest partner.

If you’re into this type of stuff, check out Shot Scope’s FREE Strokes Gained E-book .

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• about the author
• latest posts

Chris Nickel

Chris is a self-diagnosed equipment and golf junkie with a penchant for top-shelf ice cream. When he's not coaching the local high school team, he's probably on the range or trying to keep up with his wife and seven beautiful daughters. Chris is based out of Fort Collins, CO and his neighbors believe long brown boxes are simply part of his porch decor. "Isn't it funny? The truth just sounds different."

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3 years ago

Great article, Chris. I bought Mark Broadie’s book in May to get a better understanding of the foundation of strokes gained (Insightful read, but very dry). As an Arccos user, the strokes gained component has helped me dial in my short game, taking the data to my instructor and working through scenarios where I find myself losing strokes.

Tom Gregory

A very in-depth look into “Strokes Gained”, which you did Chris, so very well…In a good write-up, you used few words to describe a  complicated division of “Statistical Analysis” (my minor in college), Actuarial Science/Economics at Northwest Mo. State…I was always amazed at what a small correct ie. true sample can predict and therefore produce a very accurate formula for getting the best results in insurance, golf, and almost anything you apply it to… Great Formula, but at 74 years of age, I try to stay away from Statists, since my swing speed is down to 89 mph, but I still hold a single-digit Handicap.  Kudos to your writing skill!   

Very well done, Mr. Chris. We got more than a nickel’s worth, to tell the truth Incidentally, you get grammar strokes gained if: The quick and dirty tip is to use “farther” for physical distance and “further” for metaphorical, or figurative, distance. It’s easy to remember because “farther” has the word “far” in it, and “far” obviously relates to physical distance..

Chris: excellent article and explanation of Strokes Gained. Your explanation squares with my understanding of the concept for players on tour or in competition. I even get how Arccos can provide SG information to the average golfer based on the large population they collect data from. Where I struggle with the Strokes Gained concept is how MGS has adjusted the methodology for your Most Wanted testing (i.e. the recent Most Wanted Players Iron). It seems that the tester sample size is small in those tests, and there are variables like turf interaction that don’t seem to be a consideration. Like the previous poster Sydney, I’d appreciate a follow-up on how MGS has adjusted the Stokes Gained concept for grading and rating equipment. Thanks in advance.

I’m a data guy so my opinion might be skewed but I think anyone at any level can benefit from SG and the other magnitude of data that these systems provide. I often find that we have a good idea of where we failed after a round or what we need to work on but these systems give a definitive answer to that question and even more so track your improvements. It’s honestly a no brainer.

Who am I comparing myself to? And why? For me, if I keep a few basic stats I can understand my round and chart my performance over time without worrying about statistical mumbo jumbo. Hey, makes a great line on TV, so-and-so picked up 0.25 strokes versus the field. But who’s my “field”?

Michael Schmitz

It almost reads like strokes gained is looking to be the next handicapping system. The benchmark I care about is called Par. The club manufacturers can send me fitted clubs and I can test them and buy the ones that maximize my calculated strokes gained.

David Ambrose

I’m really enjoying the shots gained metric in Arccos. It allows you to see your game in a different light. It not only points out your weaknesses, but also can find hidden strengths you may not have considered. For example, I thought my putts would be really low since I always seem to be around the cup and rarely in. The stats showed I picked up the most strokes in that area and especially from lag distances. On the flip side, I thought my short approaches were pretty decent…yeah, not the case at all. :)

I bought the shotscope and am finding new information to be able to make me a better golfer. The only questions is if I can see in the app or in the desktop page the strokes gained of a single shot? I have looked for it over and over and haven´t found it.

I am not sure how I feel about this. In a broad sense applying metrics to a particular segment of the game like putting, may be a strategy I could embrace. Turning the game of golf into another use for my cell phone tracking data like a CPA might not be a strategy I can embrace. I would rather sign the card and head to the range to work on the days failures, then have a beer as opposed to printing out my spreadsheet and “analyzing” data against subjective personal “benchmarks”, It is easy to define a benchmark for a zero or plus handicap, much more subjective for high single digit and impossible for high handicappers. Just my opinion. Looks like a Bryson “want to be” flash in the pan scientific approach. Jury is still out on Bryson, I will take a wait and see on this one.

Dave Henderson

I agree that deep analysis after each round may have limited benefit but since I have started using Arccos I have learned a lot about my weaknesses. I am currently a 13 handicap benchmarking myself to a 9 because that is where I want to get to. As I look back over my last 10 rounds of data I see that tee shots and putting are killing me. I know where I need to spend the majority of my range time.

I think the primary issue that golfers are generally poor at self-assessment. And given enough data, you can benchmark against any performance level – So if you’re a 20 HCP and want to see how your game stacks up against the typical 15 HCP, you can do that. So, it’s not really a matter of opinion as much as it’s just the power of big data.

$400 to play ANY course is a lot of money……just saying

I think you’d get some strong dissention on this one. Assessing value, particularly at the extremes is rife with complications. That said, if you can snag me a time at Pine Valley, Cypress or Augusta for $400, I’m in!

You claimed that Strokes Gained is available for every tournament. If that’s true, I’d like to see the data from any of the last 20 Masters tournaments.

The PGA Tour does not run or have control over The Masters. The tournament is run and owned by the Augusta National Golf Club, which is located in August, Georgia. SO it seems ANGC is keeping their data like their membership…private

Cool thanks for this. I’ll give it a shot.

Thank you for this article! This is so helpful. One thing I am still missing though is what your performance is based off of. It is mentioned that it would vary between PGA players and a schlub like me, obviously, but how and who assigns the number in which your strokes are compared to? With the PGA it is pretty straight forward, but for a muni monster such as myself, how do I quantify my strokes gained on a particular round or rounds?

James – Good question. For platforms like Shot Scope, your benchmarks are other players that also use that system. And because it’s a feature of those systems, (unless you’re a PGA TOUR pro) you need to use one of those platforms to gain access to this info. If you have other questions, please reach out!

Okay I see now. That is interesting. I mean, I know that if I can putt better and fix my banana drives, along with tightening up my long irons and short game, that I will see some improvement, but maybe seeing how many strokes lost in each of my four weaknesses will help me hone in on areas of improvement. I do agree with John Smith that defining benchmarks for double digit handicaps would be highly subjective.

Hi Chris, great article. May I ask how does MGS calculate strokes gained for the Most Wanted iron tests?

Great article Chris. May I ask how does MGS calculate strokes gained for the Most Wanted iron tests?

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The most important strokes gained statistics to win on the PGA Tour

The winning formula in golf has long been debated. Luckily, the advancement of statistics has helped golf fans develop a deeper understanding of what it takes to win on the PGA Tour.

Lou Stagner, stats guru of Decade Golf , illuminated how winners have done in the four key strokes gained statistics: off the tee, approach, around the green, and putting since the inception of strokes gained data in 2004.

Where do event winners rank in each strokes gained category? ??2004 to 2021 ??Individual stroke play events with a cut (464 total) How to interpret: ??38.1% of winners were ranked in the top 5 in putting ??38.8% of winners were ranked in the top 5 in approach play pic.twitter.com/KPMJQoyoNv — Lou Stagner (Golf Stat Pro) (@LouStagner) August 1, 2021

The results were eye-opening.

Iron play and putting were neck and neck as the two greatest indicators of success. Strokes gained off the tee was not massively far behind, but around the green play was only found to be about 34 percent as impactful as putting and approach in terms of winning golf tournaments.

The beauty of strokes gained statistics is that it helps us understand the game on a more in-depth level. If we’ve learned anything from Stagner’s study, the saying, “drive for show, putt for dough,” may need to be amended to include iron play in with putting as where the real money is made.

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Brooks koepka was asked if a 59 was possible at this year’s masters. his answer did not disappoint.

During Brooks Koepka’s pre-tournament press conference for this week’s Masters Tournament, the five-time major champion was asked a bit of a silly question and gave a brilliant response.

Q . It sounds like the course is already pretty dialed this week, but under softer or optimal scoring conditions do you think 59 is obtainable on this golf course?

BROOKS KOEPKA: Have you played here?

Q. Not yet.

BROOKS KOEPKA: I can tell by the question.

Q. What number is attainable in your mind? 63’s the low.

BROOKS KOEPKA: I mean, now, anything’s attainable. But, yeah, if you want to go play the members tees and maybe play like 15 holes, yeah, I could do that.

With the course record being 63, it’s somewhat unclear why the reporter thought a soft golf course would be enough to result in a score four shots better than the record.

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Viktor Hovland reveals surprise swing coach changeup ahead of 2024 Masters

In what’s already been a topsy-turvy season, Viktor Hovland is making another swing coach change.

While speaking at his pre-tournament press conference, for the Masters, the reigning Tour champion spoke openly about the struggles he’s been having with his swing.

Earlier this year, Hovland parted ways with his short game coach, Joe Mayo, after Mayo had helped him make significant strides around the greens. He then announced his new swing coach would be Grant Waite.

However, at the press conference, a new swing coach, Dana Dahlquist, was alongside the Norwegian.

“I’m still kind of looking for some opinions out there, but I feel like I’m on a good track right now and we’ll see where that takes us. It’s one of those things. I was playing great golf last year, but it’s not like I’m trying to change my golf swing.”

Hovland then spoke about the change to Dahlquist.

“I liked what he thought was the best strategy to get back to a lot of that movement from that time. I thought it made a lot of sense, and so we’ve been working together a bit now. Then we’ll see how it goes.”

The 26-year-old added that he didn’t feel his game was sustainable after his magnificent run during the FedEx Cup Playoffs.

“I had to find my way back to where I think I’m going to play my best golf. Even at the end of the last year, I still felt like, yeah, I was playing great, but I got a lot out of my game, and it didn’t necessarily feel sustainable. But it’s not like I consciously went in and said, hey, we’re going to change everything up.”

“There has been a bit too much back-and-forth. It has been difficult to see the way forward, what exactly is the answer, and what exactly I need to do. I feel that now I’ve decided that ‘this is right, this works.’ I have to get on with it. Then we’ll see how it goes. I feel things are going in the right direction, but it has been more difficult than we would have liked.”

Coming into the season, Hovland was one of the favorites to win the Masters. As the tournament approaches, it feels as if the young star has more questions than answers.

‘Everybody’s exchanging information all day long’ – Brooks Koepka addresses rules controversy from the 2023 Masters

One of the biggest stories of the 2023 Masters was when Brooks Koepka and his caddie, Ricky Elliot, were accused of letting Koepka’s playing partner, Gary Woodland, know which club he was hitting on the Par-5 15th.

The rules committee eventually decided that night that no rules were broken.

Koepka was asked about the situation once again on Tuesday during his pre-tournament press conference for the 2024 Masters.

“I mean, everybody’s exchanging information all day long,” he said. “Looking in guys’ bags, caddies are signaling all day long.”

“But who knew? I think I was just foreshadowing what was going to happen.”

Koepka went on to win the PGA Championship the following month, so his foreshadowing was alluding to his capturing the 5th major.

The five-time major champion went on to talk about why he performs so well in the biggest events.

“If you can’t get up for the biggest events, I think there’s something wrong with you.”

“It’s what I always dreamed of when I was a kid. When I was practicing at my dad’s course when I was younger it was always to win a major championship.”

“Even today, that’s what I first see, that’s what I think you’re judged by, your legacy, what you’re defined by. I can tell you exactly how many Jack, Tiger, Arnold, Tom, all these guys, how many majors they won. It’s tough to tell how many events they won, but I know that there’s one sure-fire way to figure out who is who is by major championships.”

If Koepka manages to win a green jacket, he will be a claret jug away from the career grand slam.

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Strokes Gained on the PGA Tour

The PGA Tour measures strokes gained in four different categories

In 2011, the PGA Tour introduced the Strokes Gained statistics, a method for measuring performance better than traditional statistics (greens in regulation, fairways hit...) because it compares a player's performance to the rest of the field and because it can isolate individual aspects of the game.

The PGA started measuring total Strokes Gained and also "Strokes Gained: putting", which measures the performance on the green of each player compared to the rest of the field.

Since 2016, the PGA has added a few more stats to understand how each player is performing compared to the rest of the field, which are:

• "Strokes Gained: off-the-tee " measures player performance off the tee on all par-4s and par-5s
• "Strokes Gained: Approach-the-Green " measures player performance on approach shots, which include all the shots that are not from the tee on par-4 and par-5 holes and are not included in "Strokes gained: around-the-green" and "Strokes gained: putting". This includes tee shots on par-3s.
• "Strokes Gained: Around-the-green " measures player performance on any shot within 30 yards of the edge of the green, but not on the green
• "Strokes Gained: Putting " measures how many strokes a player gains (or loses) on the greens

As you would expected, the sum of the four categories is the total number of Strokes Gained.

You can have your own Strokes Gained stats, just like any PGA tour player, if you track your scores using golfity . Just sign up , enter your data for a few rounds and you will know where to work to shave a few shots from your score!

More info: Strokes gained: How it works

Related posts:

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

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

golfity introduces customizable benchmarks, allowing golfers to compare their skills against PGA Tour players, scratch players and 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 handicaps, for a more relevant and encouraging analysis.

"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.

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

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2024 Masters one and done picks, DFS lineups, sleepers, fantasy golf projections, longshots by PGA expert

Mike mcclure locked in his expert pga golf picks, daily fantasy lineups, fantasy golf projections and sleepers for masters 2024 at augusta national.

The 2024 Masters gets underway on Thursday from Augusta National Golf Club at 10:30 a.m. ET, a two-and-a-half hour delay due to storms. No golfer around the world is playing better right now than World No. 1, Scottie Scheffler. The 2022 winner of this event, Scheffler won the elevated Arnold Palmer Invitational in March and again the following week at the Players Championship. He then nearly won for the third straight tournament, missing a putt on the 72nd hole to force a playoff at the Houston Open. The tee-to-green specialist gained 17 strokes on the field when he won here in 2022 and will try to continue his torrid run. Given his run of dominant play, should Scheffler be the top choice when constructing your 2024 Masters DFS picks, 2024 Masters fantasy golf rankings, and 2024 Masters one and done strategy? Before locking in your 2024 Masters one and done picks, Masters DFS lineups on DraftKings and FanDuel, and fantasy golf projections, you need to see what SportsLine DFS pro and PGA expert Mike McClure has to say . 

McClure is a DFS legend with over $2 million in career winnings, and he's been red-hot on his PGA picks dating back to the PGA Tour restart in June of 2020. McClure uses his proprietary simulation model to analyze the field and crush his  golf picks . He is up almost $9,500 on his best bets since the restart.  

McClure's model predicted Jon Rahm would finish on top of the leaderboard at the 2023 Sentry Tournament of Champions and The American Express. At the 2023 Masters, the model was all over Rahm's second career major victory heading into the weekend. It was the second straight Masters win for the model, which also nailed Scottie Scheffler winning in 2022. 

McClure has been on fire with his One and Done picks in 2024. At The American Express, he backed Justin Thomas, who finished in third place and took home $635,600. At the Genesis Invitational, McClure tabbed Patrick Cantlay, who finished in fourth place at the signature event, as his top OAD pick. At the Cognizant Classic, McClure's top one and done pick, Min Woo Lee, finished in a tie for second place. Finally, at the Arnold Palmer Invitation, another signature event, McClure recommended using Scheffler and Will Zalatoris. The result: Scheffler won the event by five strokes, and Zalatoris finished in fourth place. 

This same model has also nailed a whopping 10 majors entering the weekend. Anyone who has followed McClure's picks has seen massive returns.

Now, McClure has dialed in on the 2024 Masters golf tournament and just locked in his one and done picks, DFS projections and Fantasy Golf predictions. They are a must-see for any player looking for an edge. You can only see McClure's Masters 2024 one and done picks, DFS lineups and Fantasy Golf plays at SportsLine .

Top 2024 Masters One and Done picks

One of McClure's top One and Done picks for the Masters is Brooks Koepka. Though his recent form hasn't been overly impressive, with only one top-10 finish in 2024, Koepka is a 'big game hunter' who thrives in major tournaments. In his last five Masters Tournaments, the American has two second place finishes and a seventh.

The winner of last year's PGA Championship, Koepka has four wins and 12 top-10 finishes in his last 21 majors. With a green jacket because his most treasured goal going forward, Koepka is a viable play again at Augusta. McClure is once again confident in the five-time major champion's chances this week.  You can see who else to back at SportsLine .

Top 2024 Masters DFS picks, lineup advice

One golfer McClure is targeting in his 2024 Masters DFS lineups is Justin Thomas. The 15-time PGA Tour winner has long been considered one of the top ball-strikers and irons players in the world and has a proven track record of success in big events. Thomas has two career major championships and six top-25 finishes in eight career starts at Augusta National.

Thomas' ability to card birdies and eagles makes him standout among the field when building Masters DFS lineups. He enters Masters week ranked sixth on the PGA Tour in strokes gained on approach (0.795) and 12th in strokes gained tee-to-green (1.124). After a disappointing 2023 season, Thomas has bounced back with four top-12 finishes already in 2024.  You can see the rest of McClure's Masters DFS picks at SportsLine . 

Top 2024 Masters Fantasy Golf picks, projections

One of McClure's top fantasy golf picks is Scottie Scheffler. He's won eight times in the last 26 months and been No. 1 in the world for the last 47 weeks in a row (81 total). You'll pay a premium for Scheffler and he'll be highly rostered in Masters DFS tournaments as well as the first player off the board in any draft format, but that's a price you should be willing to play considering how dominant he's been of late.

Scheffler has two wins and a runner-up finish over his last three starts, which happens to coincide with a putter change that has helped make him nearly a tour-average putter. Considering that he's already the world's best ball-striker (2.798 strokes gained: tee-to-green per round), his game could be elevated. Scheffler has never finished worse than 19th in four starts at Augusta and the 2022 Masters champion is a +325 favorite (bet $100 to win $325) in the 2024 Masters odds.  You can see the rest of McClure's Masters fantasy golf picks at SportsLine . 

How to make Masters 2024 picks, long shot bets

McClure is also targeting targeting six other golfers with odds of 20-1 or longer who will make a strong run at the green jacket. You can find out who they are, and check out all of McClure's Masters picks and best bets at SportsLine .

Who will win the Masters 2024, and which golfers should you target for your PGA one and done picks, DFS lineups, and Fantasy Golf plays this week at Augusta National Golf Club? Visit SportsLine now to get Mike McClure's Masters 2024 one and done picks, DFS lineups and fantasy golf plays  -- and find out.

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Chris Kirk Betting Profile: Masters Tournament

Betting Profile

ORLANDO, FLORIDA - MARCH 08: Chris Kirk of the United States looks on before hitting a tee shot on the 14th hole during the second round of the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard at Arnold Palmer Bay Hill Golf Course on March 08, 2024 in Orlando, Florida. (Photo by Brennan Asplen/Getty Images)

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After he finished 23rd in this tournament in 2023, Chris Kirk has a different result in mind as he enters play in the 2024 Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia April 11-14.

The Masters Tournament & Course Info

• Date: April 11-14, 2024
• Location: Augusta, Georgia
• Course: Augusta National Golf Club
• Par: 72 / 7,555 yards
• Previous Winner: Jon Rahm

At the Masters Tournament

• Kirk has entered the Masters Tournament once recently (in 2023), posting a score of -1 and finishing 23rd.
• When Jon Rahm won this tournament in 2023, he finished with a driving average of 298.8 (24th in the field), 85.71% driving accuracy (fourth), and 28.75 putts per round (17th).

Kirk's Recent History at the Masters Tournament

Kirk's recent performances.

• In his last five tournaments, Kirk has an average finish of 31st.
• Out of the last five tournaments he's entered, he made the cut four times.
• Kirk has finished with a score lower than the tournament average in three of his last five tournaments.
• He has finished with an average score of -6 those four times he's made the cut.
• In terms of driving distance, Chris Kirk has averaged 294.4 yards in his past five starts.
• In his past five starts, Kirk is averaging -2.100 Strokes Gained: Putting.
• In his past five starts, Kirk is averaging 0.858 Strokes Gained: Total.

Kirk's Advanced Stats and Rankings

• Kirk has a Strokes Gained: Off the Tee average of 0.610 this season, which ranks 10th on TOUR. Meanwhile, his average driving distance (294.4 yards) ranks 113th.
• In terms of Strokes Gained: Approach, Kirk has a 0.366 mark (39th on TOUR).
• On the greens, Kirk has registered a -0.404 Strokes Gained: Putting mark this season, which places him 148th on TOUR. In addition, he ranks 35th with a putts-per-round average of 28.36, and he ranks seventh by breaking par 32.00% of the time.

Kirk's Best Finishes

• Kirk has taken part in eight tournaments this season, coming away with one win .
• In those eight events, he made the cut seven times.
• Currently, Kirk has 916 points, ranking him ninth in the FedExCup standings.

Kirk's Best Strokes Gained Performances

• This season, Kirk's best Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee performance came in January 2024 at the Sony Open in Hawaii, where he ranked fourth in the field with a mark of 4.248. He finished 18th in that event.
• Kirk's best Strokes Gained: Approach performance this season came in January 2024 at the Sony Open in Hawaii, where he ranked No. 1 in the field with a mark of 7.722. He finished 18th in that event.
• When it comes to Strokes Gained: Around-the-Green, Kirk put up his best effort this season at The Sentry, ranking No. 1 in the field at 3.533. In that tournament, he finished first.
• At The Sentry in January 2024, Kirk recorded a Strokes Gained: Putting mark of 3.601, which was his best so far this season. That ranked 11th in the field.
• Kirk delivered his best Strokes Gained: Total mark this season (10.459) at The Sentry (January 2024), which ranked him No. 1 in the field. He finished first in that event.

Kirk's Strokes Gained Rankings

Kirk's past results.

All stats in this article are accurate for Kirk as of the start of the Masters Tournament.

Note: The PGA TOUR has created this story via a machine-learning model using data from ShotLink , powered by CDW, in addition to player performance data. While we strive for accuracy and quality, please note that the information provided may not be entirely error-free.