Every golfer has a theory about what's holding their game back. Maybe it's the driver that sprays right. Maybe it's those three-putts that creep in on the back nine. Maybe it's the chipping yips that surface whenever you're just off the green.
Here's the problem: most of us are wrong about where we actually lose strokes. And now we have the data to prove it.
Arccos — the shot-tracking platform used by hundreds of thousands of golfers worldwide — just released its 2025 year-in-review numbers. The scale is staggering: 259 million shots tracked across nearly 3 million rounds on 41,537 courses. That's not a sample. That's a census. And buried in the numbers are uncomfortable truths about where the average golfer's scorecard bleeds.
The Practice Range Lie
Walk into any driving range on a Saturday morning and count what people are hitting. Drivers. Fairway woods. Maybe a 7-iron to "warm up." The short game area, if there is one, sits mostly empty.
Now look at where strokes are actually lost for mid-handicap players: approach shots, short game, and putting. A typical 15-handicap might leak two to three strokes per round from approach play alone — not from skulled thin shots, but from routine 140-yard irons that miss the green by 20 feet in the wrong direction.
The Arccos data backs this up at scale. Of the 40 million-plus drives tracked in 2025, the average amateur found the fairway less than 50 percent of the time. That sounds bad until you realize that PGA Tour pros only average around 60 percent. The gap off the tee between you and Scottie Scheffler is real, but it's nowhere near as large as the gap from 150 yards in.
This is the central insight of strokes gained analysis, and it's been true since Mark Broadie first published his research over a decade ago: amateurs overvalue driving and undervalue everything from 150 yards to the hole.
What Strokes Gained Actually Tells You
If you're not familiar with strokes gained, here's the short version. Traditional stats — fairways hit, greens in regulation, putts per round — tell you what happened but not how much it mattered. Hitting 8 of 14 fairways sounds decent until you realize both misses went into penalty areas. Having 32 putts sounds high until you factor in that you only hit 6 greens, so most of those putts were long lag putts after chip-ons.
Strokes gained solves this by measuring every shot against a baseline: how many strokes does it typically take to hole out from this distance and lie? If the average for a 150-yard approach on the fairway is 2.95 strokes, and you hit it to 10 feet (where the average is 1.61 strokes), you gained 0.34 strokes on that single shot. Do this across every shot in your round, and you get a complete picture of where you're beating the baseline and where you're falling behind.
For pros, the PGA Tour has been using this since 2011. For amateurs, platforms like Arccos and Golfmetrics have brought the same analysis to everyday rounds — and the results consistently show the same pattern.
Where 15-Handicaps Actually Bleed
If you're a mid-handicapper trying to break into single digits, the data points to three areas that matter far more than your driver:
1. Approach Shots (The Biggest Leak)
This is the category that separates single-digit players from everyone else. It's not about pure misses — it's about dispersion. A 10-handicap from 150 yards might have a shot pattern that clusters within 30 feet of the target. A 20-handicap from the same distance might scatter across a 60-foot circle. Same swing, same effort, dramatically different results.
The fix isn't hitting more balls on the range. It's hitting the right balls. That means practicing with targets at specific distances, tracking your actual carry numbers (not what the club "should" go), and being honest about which clubs you can reliably hit to a defined target.
2. Short Game Inside 50 Yards
The Arccos data showed that golfers logged 6.6 million approach shots that met PGA Tour quality thresholds. That's impressive for individual shots, but it masks how much damage gets done between 10 and 50 yards — the awkward in-between shots that aren't a full swing and aren't a putt.
Most amateurs have two or three short-game shots in their toolbox. Tour players have a dozen. The difference shows up most on shots from 30 to 50 yards — the distance where amateurs chunk, blade, or decel their way to bogey while pros are routinely getting up and down.
3. Putting From 4 to 10 Feet
This is the range that quietly wrecks scorecards. According to Arccos putting data, amateur golfers make less than 40 percent of putts from 5-6 feet. Tour pros make over 70 percent from the same distance.
That gap is enormous in strokes-gained terms. Every missed 5-footer is essentially half a stroke lost. If you miss three of those per round — which a typical mid-handicapper does — that's 1.5 strokes gone before you even consider anything else.
And yet: when was the last time you spent 30 minutes on the practice green rolling nothing but 5-footers?
The Colorado Effect
One of the more entertaining findings from the Arccos data: Colorado golfers led the nation in average driving distance at 231.2 yards, followed by Utah (230.7) and Wyoming (228.2). The bottom of the list? Coastal and low-altitude states.
This isn't because Rocky Mountain golfers are stronger. It's altitude. A golf ball at 5,000 feet encounters roughly 15 percent less air resistance than at sea level. That translates to 8-12 extra yards on a driver, basically for free.
But here's the strategic takeaway that matters for everyone: your distances aren't fixed numbers. They change with altitude, temperature, humidity, and wind. The Arccos data revealed that golfers who used GPS and smart-club recommendations — adjusting for real-time conditions — improved their handicaps by an average of 5.71 strokes in their first year.
That number has nothing to do with swing mechanics. It's purely better decision-making: knowing your actual distances instead of your ego distances, and playing to them.
Building a Data-Driven Practice Plan
If you want to use strokes gained thinking without buying a shot-tracking system, here's a simple framework:
Track three things for five rounds:
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Approach proximity. After every approach shot over 100 yards, pace off (or estimate) how far you are from the hole. Write it down. After five rounds, you'll have your real average approach proximity — and it will almost certainly be worse than you think.
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Up-and-down percentage inside 30 yards. Count your opportunities and your conversions. Most mid-handicappers are somewhere around 30-35 percent. Getting to 45 percent is worth two or three strokes per round.
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Putts made from 4-8 feet. Track makes and misses in this range specifically. This is the money zone — the distance where you're expected to make it but often don't.
After five rounds, you'll have data on where your strokes are going. Then allocate your practice time accordingly. If your approach proximity is 45 feet and you're making 30 percent of your putts from 5 feet, the answer isn't more driver swings. It's spending two-thirds of your practice time on irons and putting.
The Uncomfortable Truth
The reason most golfers resist this kind of analysis is that it challenges their identity. We all want to be the long hitter. We all want to stripe drivers. Grinding 5-footers on a practice green for 45 minutes doesn't make for good Instagram content.
But the data from 259 million shots doesn't care about your self-image. It cares about where strokes are actually lost. And the answer, for the vast majority of amateur golfers, is the same: from 150 yards in.
The best part? That's also where improvement comes fastest. You can drop two or three strokes per round by getting marginally better at approach shots, routine chips, and short putts — without changing your swing, buying new equipment, or logging extra hours at the range.
You just have to be willing to practice what actually matters.
