The Half Shot

Very,very useful this one. Should you find yourself quite close to the green, and especially in the wind, the last thing you want to do is mess about with those wedges, if the green is uphill and slopes back to you and the wind is in your face, you can get a monstrous amount of backspin; try to overcompensate by going long, and how often have you gone past the slope and seen your ball kick off the back fringe ! The solution is to play a half-shot, actually very useful with every club in the bag, but I tend to do it with the 9 iron. A half shot is where you let go of the meter anywhere from 8 o'clock up to 11 o'clock. Although this then means your timing will be out and you'll often miss the snap, its not so disastrous usually because you arent hitting the full distance. The shot comes into its own with short clubs into the wind, and these are often the hardest to judge because of their high trajectory, so hitting them in low ( which is what happens when you hit a half shot) can dramatically reduce the effect of the wind. Also, another good use, particularly with the long clubs is getting out of tree trouble, when a normal high trajectory wont clear trees, a half-hit long iron can do the trick and can go quite a long way, and sometimes this is done in conjunction with delofting the club to make it go lower still. I include a diagram for a 9 iron, and we'll see if we can get some general rules for what point on the swing meter corresponds to what distance for any club in the bag.

You can see clearly that there are 15 pips between 6 and 12 o'clock on the meter. Pip 0 is under the 6 o'clock snap line and Pip 16 is under the 12 o'clock snap line. What this means is that for a normal shot you have 16 pips to aim at, the normal full shot being 16 pips (12 o'clock). The most obvious thing to note is that halfway ( 8 pips at 9 o'clock ) is NOT the same as half-distance ! In actual fact it works out at about 1/3 of full distance. Half distance actually lies between pips 10 and 11. It would be daft to try and remember these, so what you should do is remember the trend for 8 and 12 pips ( half and three-quarter swing )...

8 PIPS = ~ 33% of full club distance
12 PIPS =~66% of full club distance

Again, this is not totally accurate, but you dont want to have a raft of things to remember, just a few simple rules, and this rule will be good enough to use, especially as you'll find it very hard to hit exactly the right number of pips. All you need to do for inbetween distances is roughly interpolate those fractions, so halfway between 33% and 66% is 50%...for this distance go halfway between 8 and 12 pips, which is 10 pips.As I mentioned earlier, this type of shot is most useful into a strong wind when you have a short iron in your hand,and we'll look at that in the wind section. For your information, I tested the percentages shown in the table to see if a 3iron had the same breakdown as a 9iron, and it does so the percentages shown for each pip should work for each club. You want to avoid longer clubs though as the distance jump from pip to pip is obviously much bigger.

Pips	% Distance	Pips	% Distance
8	33%	12	67%
9	43%	13	73%
10	50%	14	83%
11	59%	15	92%
		16	100%