What is Strokes Gained?

Two golfers can both shoot 88 and have completely different rounds. One leaked strokes off the tee and scrambled well. The other drove it beautifully and three-putted half the back nine. Final score can't tell them apart: it's just a total. Strokes Gained is built to tell them apart.

Instead of only counting strokes, Strokes Gained compares each shot you hit against a baseline for golfers at your handicap level, hitting from the same distance and lie. Hit a shot better than that baseline and you "gain" a fraction of a stroke on the field. Hit it worse, and you lose one. Add every shot in the round up by category, and you get a breakdown of exactly where your round was won or lost, not just what you scored.

Why total score isn't enough

A score tells you the destination, not the route. If you don't know whether a bad round came from the tee, the approach, around the green, or on it, you're practising on a guess. Strokes Gained turns "I played badly" into "I lost 1.8 strokes on approach shots from 120-150 yards," something you can actually do something about.

How to see your own Strokes Gained

Strokes Gained can't be worked out after the fact from a scorecard alone. It needs to know where each shot was actually hit from. That's what Dink'It's GPS shot tracking is for: tap to log each shot's position and club as you play, free, no extra hardware. Once a round has shots tracked, Premium turns that into a full Strokes Gained breakdown by category, plus a trend line across every round you've tracked, so you can watch a weak category actually improve over a season, not just guess at it.