PuttingPuttingAim: To provide you with an insight into my putting thoughts, and to help you gain confidence on the greens. You must learn the pattern of your putts so you can "go to school" on your earlier efforts. Also to identify when you should be thinking of a one-putt and when you should be concentrating on making sure you only use two putts to get down.
I am hoping to add to this section by including a section with some screenshots of breaks on greens and the sort of break you should aim for, but for now I will deal with this most tricky of subjects in a hand-waving sort of way to outline the principles involved. Before I discuss the main sections which more or less follow the top tip headings below I can't stress enough how there are two main ways to improve your putting stats. The first, most obvious way is to improve your approach game so you arent left with long putts all the time, it stands to reason if your putts are all inside 10 or 15 feet you will make a lot of them, and if you are always 20 and 30 feet away you wont ( unless you are me, luckily blessed with a good putting game to compensate my horror snap of 1999). A lot (but not all) of the great scores are made by having short putts from a few feet for birdie on a regular basis....having said that you'll always have some long putts and some putts which break more than you can imagine, so you need to be prepared for those and in my opinion on most of the courses included in the Links world have greens where even long putts of 20-30 feet can be holed or got close a lot more often than not...if you are 40 feet out and more you'll find it very difficult to hole those regularly, and you'll find greens like Mauna Kea and Prairie Dunes to name two, are very curving, undulating greens where all putts are very hard...these are good places to practice once you're comfortable with your game, but I would advise staying to fairly flat greens where you can practice putts with a little break, but not too much. It's also a good idea to play a practice round with the same green settings you will be playing for real...use the drop option to put the ball where you want it rather than using the putting option in the practice screen, as you will be put where the PC wants you, with the drop option you can put the ball where you want.....so try a range of putts from 5,10,15,20,30 feet and a few long ones....this will not only help you with your judgement of pace and break, it will also show you where there are favourable flat spots on greens where putts will be easier and show you where there are horrible curves and bumps that you should avoid if possible...
First of all you should be aware of the chart below. Remember, as ever, these were taken on a flat green so you should practice and learn from how a slope will affect the speeds...downhill putts on hard/fast greens will go a long,long way and uphill putts into soft/slow greens will stick like treacle. Notice that although there are about 5 speed zones, you only need to worry about the "C" case shown below which covers normal/medium and equivalent and the two extremes "A" and "E"..the hard/fast and soft/slow cases....If you do need to remember how these speeds lineup, grade the green firmness and speed with a number from 1 to 3, where 3 is for hard or fast, 2 for normal or medium and 1 for soft or slow....add the 2 numbers up and you'll see that 2 points is soft/slow ( the only way to get 2 points)....the only way to get 6 points is hard/fast and there are three ways to make 4 points (n/m and s/f and h/s) so treat these about the same, similarly there are two combinations each for 3 points ( n/s and s/m) and 5 points (n/f and h/m).....now, before you start learning all these numbers and speeds let me tell you that I dont know them at all and I think I am a match for anyone on the green. What do I know ? I know the distance at 8 pips for normal/medium greens (20 feet) and I have learnt through experience where the distances are below 8 pips (9 o'clock)..I have a pretty good feel for where 30 and 40 feet is, beyond that it's all guesswork and feel, but then I rarely have a putt of that length....For hard,fast greens I will take about 50% extra for the distance, while for soft slow I take about 25-40% less, but I also use judgement and feel to adjust that for slopes as I mentioned earlier...The first thing you should learn then is the PACE of putts, this should come pretty quickly, but dont be surprised if you're a little off if you go from one extreme greenspeed to the other extreme in consecutive rounds...A good rule of thumb to use for putts going up or downhill is to divide the elevation in inches by two and add/subtract that in feet ( 6 inches uphill=add 3 feet)..again this is for a normal green speed...Hopefully before long you'll get to the stage where your putts are mainly getting to gimmie distance for a whole range of distances, greenspeeds and putting slopes....if you get to this point, believe me you are more than halfway there...you've eliminated the three putt already, which is one of the quickest ways to improve your confidence and better your scores.As always in this guide, my advice is to make notes if you hit a putt way short or long...if you can see straight away where you lost it ( left snap too late etc..) then dont worry about it, if you cant understand it, then make a note of all the factors and you'll learn where your error was ( usually comes from misjudging the effect of slopes on putt speed, or forgetting to adjust pace if your line sends your putt more uphill)
The standard putting chart for green speeds taken at the 9th hole at St.Andrews
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| The letters A-E define the main green "speeds"...the table to the right shows the main distances you should expect for the three main speeds. You should have an idea of the 8 and 16 pips distances for the three main speeds and you can then work out the distances for the speeds inbetween...my entire putting game is centred around the number 20 for 8 pips norm/med greens so you dont need to memorise all this to succeed on the greens ! |  |
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Right, I'll try to go through the min headings in the top tips section and elaborate slightly ( and I know how to elaborate haha!), but I can't stress enough how much of the putting game is practice, experience,feel and confidence that you know where a ball is going....do look out to see if you are one of the players that consistently underborrows ( not enough break) or overborrows...if you miss to the same side consistently then you should be able to re-assess your perception of break patterns..if you are all over the place left and right you probably arent going through the right procedure for "seeing" the break.....
General Putting tip on aiming : pretty obvious and probably known to all, but do make sure when you play the break you aim your pin at the hole and along a horizontal line through the cup, dont put your pin halfway to the cup, any break you think you are playing is actually twice as much by the time you ball gets to the hole, and dont put the pin past the hole, as this lessens the amount of break you are trying to aim for
I've covered the pace of putts already but you shouldn't ignore the importance of it..I say again.....get the pace right and not only will a three putt never happen, but your confidence will go up, and you'll make a lot more putts than you think....a lot of people use phrases like "Alice" and "never up, never in" but as the late,great Harvey Penick once said " I've never seen a ball that goes past the hole go in either!".....ok, playing the percentages you want the ball to reach the hole, but it is better to be a few inches short with an uphill tap-in than to have a 6 footer downhill breaking putt coming back for par...so be careful
It's going to take a long while for you to learn the break patterns I'll talk about later and I'm certainly not going to advise you to use the ludicrous method of counting step transitions across your balls path...what a load of old bollox that is, if the steps are few enough to count you can smack that putt in by eye and because you arent hung up on numbers of steps and inches of aim you'll have more feel to how the putt is going, and how to adjust the aim through snap if you get the pace wrong a little...I honestly believe the step-counting method is the biggest joke I have ever seen in Links, and I also believe you have to pay for that article now ?!....oh dear,oh dear.......
Right, an "obvious" lesson....the quicker the putt the more break to play, the slower the putt the less break...but where to start ? you have to imagine hitting the ball at the right pace for the greenspeed at the hole....now mentally imagine the path of the ball as it goes to the hole and imagine how it will move to one side or the other as the slope takes it....you are trying to build a mental picture of what that grid is showing you in terms of the green shape in 3D...I think most people should be able to manage to take a good guess as to how far to one side the ball will end up if you aim at the hole, and its easy to practice that by hitting some practice putts at the hole, aiming at the cup.....imagine the line first, then hit the putt, have the tracers on if you need and see if you were in the right ballpark...now for the controversial "thought"....for fast greens think SLOW, and for slow greens think FAST..what the hell do I mean by that ? well, because hard/fast greens mean you hit the ball much softer you have to adjust your mental picture of the ball going over the break but imagine it going SLOW ( you're hitting it soft remember)....the ball is going to "feel" every single one of the step transitions as it SLOWLY (in your mind) goes over the break....this is my way to ensure I take the maximum effect of each step transition ( the steps in the horizontal grid lines on the green) into account when I putt on hard/fast....so you hit it as soft as you can to get the ball to the hole but take maximum effect of the steps ( imagine a slight shift to one side for each step or two )....likewise for soft/slow putts you are going to be ramming them in hard because you need to hit them hard !..so this time as you imagine the line over the break you have to think of the ball going fast over the steps, so it wont have time to "feel" all the shifts....this is my way to adjust to the fact that hard/fast/downhill putts break more and uphill/soft/slow putts break less...and it seems to work ! Once you have gained the "inner game" to imagine where the ball will end up if aimed at the cup you have a start for where to aim the other side of the cup.. (this is not my way, but for beginners it's a good way to get used to seeing break), what you must be wary of is that the more break there is, the more pace you will need...why ? well if theres no break the green is flat....hit it dead weight..if there is a break then the green must be sloping one way or the other...you are clearly going to aim opposite to the direction of the break ( therefore the slope ) so adjusting for break is automatically the same as hitting your putt slightly uphill to the flat case ! (be careful here not to go mad...if you face a big downhill putt on hard/fast greens that breaks slightly to the left, the extra slope you are sending it up to the right will be insignificant compared to the general downhill trend of the putt ! so you have to be realistic as to the effect here, clearly uphill putts and slow greens will be more affected by this, they are the ones you'll need to add a few feet to if you are playing quite a break on them)
Once you've gained some confidence and experience in terms of "seeing" the line ( and you MUST learn from this, watch every putt, if it goes in or not...where did you aim wrong, look again at the break...see now how the ball goes over it.....) then you will start to see when you have a "no-no" putt, which can be one of two main types....the first one is just a horrible big breaking putt with loads and loads of step transitions, several feet of slope from side to side and either over hills or way downhill, and the other type is the actual "impossible" type ( few, but they do exist honest) where you have a cup on a ridge and the break starts way to one side at first then way to the other further along....to beat the first bit of break you aim to the other side but of course once it reaches the later section the break is the other way and takes the ball away and I could draw a diagram of this, but just believe me, there ARE putts that,by the laws of physics and ball mechanics, are totally impossible to hole.Right, you've decided that this putt is a "no-no" ( not too difficult to realise in a matchplay situation if you need to hole it to win/halve the hole/match then you should always have a go, make sure you get the ball at least to the hole and you never know......)...this in itself is quite a skill to accept that you should be looking for a two-putt, but there are occasions when you'll have to do just that. What you need to do here is to identify the "safe-zone" for your second putt, so that your next putt will be hopefully pretty straight and uphill, unless of course you can get it to gimmie range ! Imagine a big slope from left to right on the green, where is the worst place to leave it ? short and left would clearly leave a horrible short putt with lots of break....you want to avoid five footers and less with lots of break as it is hard to make yourself aim so far wide of the hole on a short putt and then hit it with conviction...so, the sensible thing is to underborrow (play less break) and get the pace right so the ball dies to the right and under the hole at the end, ideally leaving a short straight uphill putt.On other putts you'll see that there may be a flat region short or long of the pin but a bad slope on the other side...simply adjust your target area to make sure you'll be in the flat spot for any comeback putt. In my estimation the identification of a no-no putt and the adjustment to allow for a two-putt is likely to gain you a stroke or two a round if the greens arent really flat, and thats just the same as a birdie or two ! Chasing impossible putts and three-putting as a result is something you dont have to do, at least apart from the odd occasion on very bad greens with a very long putt when we all take three from time to time.Leave your ego in the bag and remember if you three-putt you are adding one shot to the hole...with that in mind if you can two-putt a very tricky putt then you are making "birdie" compared to what you might do if you were more aggressive.
The next thing to bear in mind is that a putt is a combination of pace and line, you will often hear commentators on TV talking about people hitting through the break, and the same is true here..hit a putt harder and it will break less, hit it soft and it will take the maximum break ( see argument above )...now of course there are limits to this...too hard and the ball will bounce off the hole and not go in ( but will probably be a gimmie!), too soft and it wont get there, but you must understand a putt is made up of the two things, pace and line and if you have a "best" pace and line to use then there are several arcs to either side which will also drop, the ones hit harder but straighter and the ones softer and wider...you can use this to your advantage. How ? Have you ever played someone who seems really good, but they hit a few putts which are mis-snapped but go in? have you cursed ? blamed it on luck ? not necessarily my friends ! If you have picked a point on your meter for the pace and you've picked a line, then if you go past your pace, you can just miss your snap to keep the ball straighter, likewise if you go a bit short you can miss to allow more break, it's certainly a method I use,and the player I know most who used to do this was JayEss. There's nothing flukey about it if its done properly, ok, if you miss the pace by a lot, you've probably blown it, but by knowing that you can tweak the snap to adjust for that is a handy tip to be aware of, but as you'll see at the bottom..dont try this at championship level ( and it is this that has caused me to stop trying this so much, and I know Jay had problems with it)..so, if you overhit slightly, you can try to mis-snap to play less break and the opposite if you are a little shy....
The next tip is an extension of sorts to the previous one, and basically my philosophy is that when I've got an aim according to the break I will try to have the ball falling in ever so slightly off centre to the side opposite the break directly at the hole. Which means quite simply that once you've got your aim, look at the break right at the hole a few inches before it...this will tend to have a bit more of an effect because your ball is slowing up here, so by allowing an extra inch to the other side of the hole then I am allowing for this. By the way, I should also mention that a putt is like a normal shot in that if you miss the snap with the break the deviation will be great, if you miss slightly against it ( but not at champ!) then often that wont affect it, and the putt will be "held" along the line without straying off with the break...
And now, the famous double breaker....So far, I haven't said much about how do I come to an aim by looking at a green ( the good or bad news to come is I look at the green, slap my pin down and hit the putt almost straight away..good news if you think feel is something you can learn and pick up and are willing to work at, as I have proved it works, bad news if you are here looking for a magic formula that will work out the break for you !). Now I'm going to start with my favourite putt, the double breaker, which will soon be your fave putt! Many of you hate/fear/mistrust these babies..you shouldnt, they are among the easiest, and are the best place to start in your "learning" to recognise break patterns. For those that are confused a double break goes first one way and then the other ! Right, look at the two regions of break, look at the patterns of step transitions, very easy if its only a few, more tricky with loads but what you need to do is to start at the hole and work your way back in a straight line to your ball over the second region of break, now as you get closer to your ball and move into the other region of break start to mentally tick off the same amount of break you've figured for the other region ( you can also do this from your ball to the hole direction)...its rare for the two regions to be that different but even if they are just weigh up the amount of break in the most breaking section and then estimate how much break in the other section will cancel that out ( FIGURE HERE )....it sounds complex but it's really easy, you'll be surprised how you can look at the slope in one section and then say, ok, if we look at this part of the other section the breaks more or less cancel....now you are left with a little bit of break left over, simply pretend your putt is flat apart from that and aim as though that was the case, in more cases than not you'll be close and in the hole!, you'll also be surprised how many of those putts cancel out totally so you are aiming for the cup ! It's definitely a mistake to trace the ball path over a long putt that breaks two ways, much better to split it into the two break sections, look at the smaller of the two and mentally assign that a break amount, now look in the other section and tick off as much of it as you think will balance the break from your other section, then treat the putt as a slightly breaking putt according to whats left. Believe me when I say this will not only leas to more holed puts, but will really improve your "pattern recognition" I talk about later where you are mentally relating a certain pattern of step transitions / slopes to an amount of ball movement.As a test try some practice putts, look for double breaks then aim them at the hole, and watch how the two breaks cancel themselves out to a certain degree, if you're really dedicated look for putts that break more at the start than at the end...aim at the hole and see that the overall effect is a slight break which matches the start break ( thats bigger )..now drop your ball closer to the hole in a straight line and try again..you'll see that you are removing some of the initial break and your putt is closer to the hole..eventually you'll come to a spot where they balance totally and a putt aimed at the hole will go more or less in the hole..stop there and have another look at the two breaks involved..again to improve your recognition of what balances out...you'll also see if you now move past that point, the later section of break "wins" and now the ball finishes the other side of the hole !
Moving on, but in no particular order ( read it all and take your pick !) I should have reminded you that you should not worry about break past the hole or way to one side where your ball wont cross, sounds silly, but when I started I used to get confused and take notice of the break actually just past the cup, what a doofus!, and another warning..sometimes you have a slight break under your golfers feet, so if you are unsure, use the shot option to "drop" to look there and then be sure to press cancel otherwise you'll have a 1 shot penalty for dropping ! Generally I'd say tracers on are a good way to learn the line of putts, but it can also be good to look at the path of the ball without the tracers as you can see the steps in the grid as the ball moves over them and you can better see the slight shifts in the path of the ball as it crosses each section of break
I keep talking about these "break patterns" and truthfully you're on your own here, not because I dont want to help, but because I cant. This is the main course of putting and its also the most subjective and the one you have to learn yourself through experience, practice,playing and feel. It's just an extension of your imagining the ball path across the break, you will get to look at the steps across a putt and you'll know instinctively where to aim, and I never,ever use numbers here, like 7" left, I recognise the pattern and I put my aiming pin in a place where my brain associates that "amount" of break. Perhaps I shouldnt have been so rude about the step counting, because in essence this is what I'm doing mentally, I'm looking at the slopes indicated by the steps and "weighing" that in terms of an amount of aim to one side of the hole. You'll just have to take my word for it that over time you'll look at a putt and you'll "know" where to aim, they might not all drop but theyll all be close ! One of the first things you should "learn" by playing a lot is when you can keep the aim inside the cup, but off centre, thats an easy amount of break to "weigh" mentally and you'll see a lot of those putts and putts that you know will break a bit but not a lot, so you go just outside the cup, knowing the only way for the ball to go is toward the cup..because this is usually quite a flat putt, you should quickly pick up the skill of seeing the putts you should keep in the cup and the ones to be aimed just outside...these will then also be useful for the double breakers where you have balanced out two sections of break and you have a little left over. Try to think in terms of "amount" or "weight" of break, like a quantity, or lump that you can visualise and you should see that even for different looking putts the "weight" of the break is about the same. As you get more confident you'll learn to factor in speed and distance so if you have a couple of steps ( Ok, if theres a single figure number of steps your brain might count them sub-consciously) you'll know that for a short putt you can still stay in the hole but for longer putts, especially if the few steps are at the end you can aim at the edge of the hole, and let those few steps pull the ball in at the end as the speed is dying, or you can stay in the cup and hit firmer. The final point in this section is as with all the other sections, you must pay attention and learn from your previous attempts, not only so that you start to mentally understand where you misjudged so you dont repeat that, but also in the context of a round you will more than likely see a putt, and then see a very similar putt later on in the round, sometimes more than once ! If you holed the first try you have a pretty good read, if not, where did you miss and why ?..adjust the next one to compensate and bingo, you've gone to school on a putt from another hole ! ( it goes without saying in matchplay if you putt over the same line as your opponent to watch carefully whether their ball is hit inside the cup or to one side and try to go to school on it, but dont become so obsessed with their putt that you dont trust your own method....I say much better to watch the pace, and use that to your advantage, and leave the line to your own judgement)
As an etiquette thing I'd like to state that I dont think it's good for you to chip on the greens. Not only is it banned in some competitions, but is considered not sportsmanlike by many. Not only does it take away a good chance for you to practice a putt ( probably a long one) but it is bound to cause some resentment somewhere along the line. Unless you have to ( and remember on normal greens your putter can be made to go over 30 yards!) chip then I would say dont, but it's your call..but dont blame me when you are in a competition where you cant and you have a big long putt that you've never hit before and have no idea about the sort of pace you need.
Right, thats about it for now, maybe I'll add some more tips and diagrams, but like I said, you aren't ever going to get a formula to solve your putts for you, this is one are where games played will really count, every putt you hit should teach you something, and the more you practice, and the more you actually take notice of your results, misses or otherwise, then the quicker you'll get to the stage where you plonk down your pin and hit your putts almost without thinking, which sounds daunting, but at the end of the day should encourage you, since so many of the top players putt by feel and experience, then it's a good bet that you can do it if you stick with it and learn from your experiences and games. If I can do it, you can do it......
Oh yeah, one more tip I added after...if you do decide to putt through the fringes, remember it takes a lot of pace off the shot so you'll need to hit it much harder than you think, and although you can putt out of the rough, I wouldnt advise it as you need to give it a real clout and then it can skip off the green on the other side.As an added bonus I have also just done a little table showing the effect of fringe on some putts at the 9th at St.Andrews, normal,medium greens, I would just add about 0.8 feet to the putt for every foot of fringe I am coming through, so a 30 foot putt through 15 feet of fringe I would play as (30+(0.8*15))=42 feet
| Pips | Green Distance |
Through Fringe 5 feet |
Through Fringe 10 feet |
Feet Lost Per 1 Foot of fringe |
| 16 | 87 | 83.5 | 81 | ~0.6-0.7 |
| 12 | 48 | 44 | 39 | ~0.8-0.9 |
| 8 | 21.5 | 17.5 | 14 | ~0.7-0.8 |
Top Tips: Learn the pace of putts first so your missed putts become gimmies
Add subtract the elevation of the putt in " divided by two.( 6 inches uphill...add 3ft to your putt distance)
Uphill putts and Softer/Slower greens take less break
Downhill putts and Harder/Faster greens take more break
Know when to take a two-putt, and when you can go for a one-putt
Learn to identify the "safe zone" for very long or very badly breaking putts
Understand a putt is a combination of pace and line, and more than one combination will get the ball in the cup
Use a slight mis-snap to compensate for an error in the pace of your putt
If you overhit a putt it will break less, if it gets to the hole "deadweight" it will take the maximum amount of break
Try to have the ball dropping in off-centre of the hole to compensate the break at the end
Learn to love double-breaks where you can "balance" break and play the small amount of break left
Focus on the break where your ball will be going, ignore break past the cup or well to the side !
Have the tracers on to learn the sort of path your ball will take over a break
Be careful of slight breaks under your golfers feet
Mentally "trace" the path of the ball if it were aimed at the hole...this gives you a start on the amount of break
Try to recognise break "patterns", ie how much did your ball move for a certain amount of "steps" (dont count them!)
Look for putts similar to ones you've had earlier and go to school on your previous efforts
Practice your approach shots to leave yourself shorter putts ! hahaha
Don't chip on the green unless you absolutely cant reach with the putter ( thats just my personal opinion )Championship note: As with everything else in champ level the snap is critical. For this reason it's a good idea to ignore the trick of missing the snap to adjust your line if the pace is wrong as the deviation is very large...you really must concentrate on the snap point as well as the pace or you'll end up missing even the straight putts, other than that champ putting is the same, but it's probably a good idea to be a little more cautious..because of the approach shots being harder your putts will be longer and it's easy to miss those anyway, but at champ level the return putt will be harder ! avoid 3-putts by playing long putts even more carefully and really focussing on the pace and hitting the "safezone" if possible, dont be rushing them at the hole and going several feet by, even if its flat as any putt more than a couple of feet will miss the cup if you miss the snap, and thats without any break at all !