Introduction to contextual strokes gained

Since the emergence of the strokes gained statistics in 2011, the way that people look at evaluating golfers has changed dramatically. Before these stats started to become mainstream you could have a round of golf where you only had 28 putts and think, "wow, I had a great putting day", but upon deeper reflection, you realize that you just chipped the ball to 2 feet 6 or 7 times, and this skill isn't captured in the traditional, fairways, greens and putts statistics. In fact, your 28 putts could be more reflective of your iron striking and strategic play because you always hit the ball to spots that left you with easy chips. The strokes gained stats were the first attempt to capture this additional complexity of the game. Now there are any number of services, with the leader being Arccos, that try to help the average golfer gain additional insight into the way to play their best golf.

However, strokes gained is still a fundamentally flawed statistic. It generally fails to capture "course specific" strokes gained. An example of where this is important is when you have a 30 foot put on a two teired green and you hit your approach onto the upper tier while the pin is on the lower one. If the slope between the two tiers is large, it might be impossible to get the first putt within 20 or even 30 feet from the hole, but if you three putt, the conventional stokes gained method will not recognize this and take the stroke lost from your putting when it was really the approach shot that cost you. Another example is on holes where there is a forced layup off the tee, simply using traditional strokes gained tables will indicate that you should have hit the ball farther, without acknoledging that you would just end up in a hazard if you do so.

The goal of this web app is to allow people to take much more detailed record of their games and provide a more context aware strokes gained metric that will include strokes gained against yourself and strokes gained against your target handicap on the course that you are playing. Initially, inputting data into Chill Golf will just give basic strokes gained data, but as more data is collected on a course, more course variables can be analyzed, and more insights can be found.