How It Works

Data Driven Golf compares strokes gained to your target handicap — not only PGA Tour pros or scratch golfers. That makes the numbers meaningful for mid- and high-handicap players and lets you see where your game is actually losing strokes.

What is strokes gained?

Traditional stats like fairways hit and greens in regulation don't tell you how good each shot was. Strokes gained (SG) answers a simpler question: how many strokes did this shot save or cost compared to the expected result from that position?

• Positive SG — better than expected
• Negative SG — worse than expected

Example: a 20-foot putt on the green typically takes 2 strokes to hole for an amateur. Make it in one and you gain +1.0 SG. Three-putt and you lose 1.0 SG.

Why compare to a target handicap?

Classic strokes gained was invented for the PGA Tour. The "expected" number of strokes from any lie/distance is what a tour pro would average. That's a problem for amateurs — a 12-handicap hitting 150 yards to 20 feet is a great shot; for a pro, it's slightly below average.

Data Driven Golf scales the expected-shot table to your target handicap. A 10-handicap playing well sees positive SG; the same shot at a pro benchmark would read negative. The picture of where your game actually stands becomes much clearer, and practice priorities become obvious.

The formulas

Target score (USGA)

Per-round calibration scalar

For every round, we solve for the scalar that makes the expected total land on your target score:

Custom expected strokes per shot

Strokes gained per shot

Penalty shots use SG = Expected Before − Expected After(drop) − (1 + penaltyCount), which supports stroke-and-distance, lateral drops, and two-stroke E-5 drops.

Reference data

The baseline comes from 500,000+ tour and amateur shots across every lie type and distance. Two reference tables anchor the math — PGA Tour expected strokes and scratch-golfer expected strokes — and the per-round scalar interpolates between them to land on your target handicap.

Coverage:

• Tee (par 3 and par 4/5): 100–550 yards
• Fairway, rough, deep rough, sand: 5–550 yards
• Recovery (trees / behind obstacle): 10–550 yards
• Green: 1–90 feet

Strokes gained categories

How to use the numbers

After 3–5 rounds, one category usually stands out as your biggest loss. That's where your practice time gets the highest return. See the Features page for how this shows up in the stats tab (rolling trends, SG by distance, top shots).