You have almost certainly never holed out a full round of golf in your life. Everybody picks up the short ones, and everybody then writes down the total as though they made them all. Put in what you conceded yourself and this works out — using real make rates by distance and handicap — the number you should have been telling people. Runs entirely in your browser.
This free gimme calculator applies real make rates by distance and handicap to the putts you picked up and returns the score you genuinely shot.
The Gimme Audit is a free online golf score calculator that corrects for the putts you never actually holed. It applies tour make rates by distance — 96% from three feet, 88% from four, 77% from five — scaled for your handicap, and adds back the strokes you would statistically have dropped. If you want to check what you really shot now, you need your score and an honest count of your concessions. If you are understanding putting make rates by distance, the full table is published below, and the answer surprises most golfers: a conceded five footer is close to a coin toss.
The number you told everyone in the bar.
Sets how often you would actually have holed them.
Count every putt you did not actually hole, including the ones nobody formally gave you. Be honest about the length — a "two-footer" is usually three and a half.
Your corrected score is the one that should have gone on the card. Send it straight into the Handicap Lie Detector and see whether the number you tell people still holds up.
Feed corrected score to Handicap Detector →The instinct is that conceding five putts a round means your score is five shots light. It is not, and pretending otherwise makes the whole exercise easy to dismiss. Most short putts get holed. The damage lives almost entirely in the long ones — the "that's good" from four or five feet that you would genuinely miss about half the time.
Tour make rates are the baseline: roughly 96% from three feet, 88% from four, 77% from five and 66% from six. Amateurs are worse, but not uniformly worse — a twenty-handicapper is nearly as good as a professional from two feet and dramatically worse from five. So the model scales the miss rate, not the make rate. That keeps tap-ins near certain, degrades the longer putts properly, and can never produce a make rate above 100%.
For each putt you picked up, the cost is simply the chance you would have missed it. A conceded five-footer for a mid-handicapper is worth about half a stroke. A conceded two-footer is worth about four hundredths of one. Add them up and that is the number that should have been on the card.
Under the Rules, concessions only exist in match play. A stroke play score containing putts you did not hole is not a valid score, which means it is also not a valid score for handicap purposes. Nobody is suggesting you putt out a six-incher in a Sunday fourball. But if you are going to quote the number, it is worth knowing what the number actually is.
This depends entirely on you being truthful about length, and golfers are famously bad at that. The putt you remember as two feet was very often four. If anything, run it again with every bucket bumped up one and see what happens — that version is usually closer to the truth.
Corrected your score? Run it through the Handicap Lie Detector to see what your real index is, use the Round Autopsy to find where the rest of the shots went, or take the Tilt Meter and work out what your temper is costing you.
A gimme is a short putt conceded by your playing partners, so you pick the ball up rather than hole it. Concessions are legal in match play, where an opponent may concede a stroke at any time. In stroke play they are not permitted at all, so any score containing gimmes is not a valid stroke play score.
More than they think. Tour professionals hole roughly 96 percent from three feet, 88 percent from four and 77 percent from five. A mid handicap amateur is closer to 83 percent from four feet and only about 52 percent from five, which means a conceded five footer is close to a coin toss.
No. A score containing conceded putts is not acceptable for handicap purposes in stroke play formats, because you did not complete the hole. In match play you record a most likely score for the hole, which should include the putt you would probably have needed.
Less than people assume, because most conceded putts would have been holed anyway. Five gimmes in the two to five foot range costs a mid handicapper roughly one and a half strokes. The damage comes from conceding longer putts, where a single conceded five footer is worth about half a stroke on its own.