Fewer putts does not mean a better putter
- Putting
- Tour
- Statistics
"Players who average fewer putts are better putters." Look at the leaderboard with that in mind and something stops making sense.
The LPGA's leader in greens in regulation for 2026, Haeran Ryu (3rd in the world), ranks 133rd in putts per round.
That is not a fluke. Line up the data for the top 20 women in the world and a clear pattern appears: the higher a player's greens-in-regulation percentage, the more putts she takes per round.
As of: rankings from the Rolex Women's World Golf Rankings, statistics from the LPGA 2026 season (October 2026). Shiho Kuwaki (12th) and Minsol Kim (15th) have not met the LPGA's minimum rounds and have no record, so the figures below cover 18 players.
Greens in regulation and putts per round
| World rank | Player | GIR | (tour rank) | Putts/rd | (tour rank) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nelly Korda | 71.91% | 14th | 29.19 | 15th |
| 2 | Jeeno Thitikul | 75.14% | 2nd | 29.97 | 75th |
| 3 | Haeran Ryu | 79.04% | 1st | 30.49 | 133rd |
| 4 | Hyo Joo Kim | 66.99% | 86th | 28.41 | 2nd |
| 5 | Miyu Yamashita | 71.19% | 22nd | 28.87 | 6th |
| 6 | Ruoning Yin | 70.28% | 37th | 29.19 | 15th |
| 7 | Lottie Woad | 72.89% | 4th | 30.10 | 94th |
| 8 | Charley Hull | 69.22% | 52nd | 30.08 | 92nd |
| 9 | Sei Young Kim | 70.69% | 28th | 29.48 | 33rd |
| 10 | Hannah Green | 70.83% | 26th | 30.02 | 79th |
| 11 | Brooke M. Henderson | 70.14% | 39th | 30.13 | 99th |
| 13 | Lydia Ko | 68.66% | 59th | 29.30 | 23rd |
| 14 | Gaby Lopez | 69.39% | 50th | 29.29 | 22nd |
| 16 | Minjee Lee | 63.89% | 128th | 29.65 | 48th |
| 17 | Lauren Coughlin | 73.51% | 3rd | 30.73 | 146th |
| 18 | Mao Saigo | 70.02% | 41st | 30.36 | 122nd |
| 19 | Akie Iwai | 67.63% | 74th | 29.17 | 12th |
| 20 | Nasa Hataoka | 67.88% | 70th | 29.73 | 54th |
The correlation comes out clearly positive
Across the 18 players, the correlation between GIR and putts per round is r = +0.505. Positive. The more greens a player hits, the more putts she takes.
Fit a line through it and you get:
Every 1 point of GIR adds +0.092 putts per round
A ten-point difference in GIR is worth about 0.9 putts per round. That is not a difference in ability.
The reason is simple
On a green hit in regulation you almost always take two putts or more. Miss the green and you can chip it close and finish with one putt — close for par, not close for bogey, but either way just the one putt.
So hitting more greens structurally increases your putt count, and players who miss greens and get up and down look better on this statistic.
Putts per round reflects what kind of golf someone plays far more than how well they putt.
The extremes make it obvious
The top four in greens in regulation (figures are tour ranks)
| Player | GIR | Putts/rd |
|---|---|---|
| Haeran Ryu | 1st | 133rd |
| Jeeno Thitikul | 2nd | 75th |
| Lauren Coughlin | 3rd | 146th |
| Lottie Woad | 4th | 94th |
The top four in greens hit are all down the field in putts.
The three fewest putts (same column order)
| Player | GIR | Putts/rd |
|---|---|---|
| Hyo Joo Kim | 86th | 2nd |
| Miyu Yamashita | 22nd | 6th |
| Akie Iwai | 74th | 12th |
And the fewest-putt players mostly sit mid-pack or lower in greens hit. Hyo Joo Kim is 2nd in putts and 86th in GIR.
Which one puts these players at the top?
Averaging where the 18 sit within the full tour:
| Statistic | Mean tour rank |
|---|---|
| Greens in regulation | 40.9th |
| Putts per round | 59.4th |
The top of the world ranking is distinctly better at hitting greens than at putt count. Counted by how many are inside the tour's top 50: 12 for GIR, 9 for putts.
What lifts a world ranking is ball striking first. That said — as we just established — hitting more greens pushes putt count the wrong way, so this comparison is stacked against the putting side and should be read with that in mind.
Two players good at both
Only two of the eighteen are inside the tour's top 30 in both statistics:
- Nelly Korda (world no. 1) — 14th in GIR, 15th in putts
- Miyu Yamashita (world no. 5) — 22nd in GIR, 6th in putts
It is telling that the world number one is exactly the player holding both at a high level. These two measures pull against each other, and the player at the very top satisfies both at once.
So is there a pattern in the putters?
This was meant to be the heart of it: do the high-GIR players and the low-putt players choose different putters?
They don't — or rather, no pattern can be read. And why it can't is the more interesting part.
Here is what is known:
| Player | Profile | Putter |
|---|---|---|
| Lauren Coughlin | GIR 3rd / putts 146th | Ping PLD Oslo 4 (mallet) |
| Hyo Joo Kim | Putts 2nd / GIR 86th | Odyssey O-Works Tour R-Ball S (mallet) |
| Nelly Korda | Strong in both | TaylorMade NK prototype (mallet) |
| Lydia Ko | Putts 23rd | Scotty Cameron Phantom 12 Tour prototype (mallet) |
Players at opposite ends of these statistics are all on mallets, from different brands. There is nothing to extract.
The real reason no pattern appears
Players change putters constantly.
As club fitter Hitoshi Yoshikawa explains in this ALBA article, Miyu Yamashita used five different putters during 2023, the year she was the Japan Tour's money leader. In 2026 she was reported testing Odyssey's zero-torque Square 2 Square TRI-HOT Jailbird, having had the TaylorMade Spider Tour X as her gamer the year before.
And Haeran Ryu, the GIR leader, swapped putters in the middle of a major — the KPMG Women's PGA Championship — because she kept missing short ones.
A snapshot of "this player's putter this season" is really only a snapshot of that week. Counting brands from it and tying them to results does not produce a meaningful analysis.
How to read it
Putts per round, taken alone, does not measure putting skill. A higher GIR makes the number worse; missing greens and getting up and down makes it better.
The PGA Tour publishes SG: Putting, which removes exactly this bias. The LPGA does not, so here we read putt count alongside greens in regulation instead.
The same applies to your own rounds. Before deciding "my putting was bad today" from the putt count alone, look at how many greens you hit. On a day you hit a lot of greens, more putts is what should happen.
How much your own putt breaks, and how hard to hit it, you can work out with the Putt Break Calculator — enter the slope and the green speed and you get both as numbers.
Sources: Rolex Women's World Golf Rankings, LPGA official statistics (2026 season), ALBA Net on Miyu Yamashita's set-up (22 June 2026), and players' WITB coverage. The correlation and regression coefficients were computed by this site from the 18 players above.