How To Turn A Shot With A 50/50 Chance Of Success Into An 80/20 Win

Imagine you’re stood over a shot on the course and the chances of success are the flip of a coin, no more than a 50/50 punt of achieving a positive outcome. That’s the reality of a surprisingly high number of scenarios.

Shot Scope has identified five of the most common and costly, and below Top 50 Coach Adam Harnett shares his top tips to help you improve your odds of hitting a good shot and improving your scores.

The specific situations are ability-dependent, but all the advice will help you become a better golfer, whatever your handicap.

1. Hitting the fairway with driver or three-wood

It might surprise you to learn that single figure handicaps have a 50/50 chance of hitting the fairway with driver or three-wood. You need to know where the danger is on the hole to choose the correct club and improve your chances of hitting the fairway.

It might be beneficial to hit three-wood if you’re playing to a specific yardage on a dog-leg, ensuring you can’t reach a penal hazard like a fairway bunker or water, or aiming for a much wider part of the fairway. But if there’s nothing like that, I’d definitely be pulling the driver out as being further down the hole is proven to lead to a lower score.

A great practice game to monitor and improve your driving accuracy is the goal-post game. When you’re on the driving range, pick two targets like flags or trees that are roughly a fairway width apart and record how many balls out of 14 (the typical number of drives in a round) you hit through those goal-posts.

This helps you replicate the real-life scenario while practicing, builds consequence to your shots and helps you track and analyse your performance and trends, such as missing on a particular side. Understanding your shot shape and dispersion will help your on-course strategy, and identifying weaknesses will help you target your technical improvements.

2. Hitting the green from 100-150 yards

The average scratch golfer has a 50/50 chance of hitting the green from 100-150 yards and one of the biggest reasons for this is being too aggressive at the flag.

It’s really important to know your dispersion and miss tendencies. If your miss is left, you shouldn’t aim at a flag tucked left – likewise, a tucked right flag if your miss is right – because you can leave yourself short-sided. Give yourself enough margin for error with where you’re aiming that your common miss and outer dispersion still finds the green.

When you get into the shorter area of this zone at around 100 yards, club selection is important. For example, I could hit my 56° wedge that distance, but it would take a full swing, and then too much spin becomes a problem, especially in the wind. Spin control is really important, especially for a scratch golfer, so I’d go to my 50° gap wedge and use a three-quarter swing that should make me way more accurate with my distance control.

3. Coming Up Short

A typical 25-handicapper has a 50/50 chance of missing the green short from 100 yards, and a 20-handicapper has a 50/50 chance of missing short from 150 yards. It’s important to know your yardages with each club – and select your club based on the average carry rather than your absolute best. 100 yards is a really good reference point.

If you’ve got a club and shot that you know goes 100 yards you can work up and down from that pretty easily. I also like to use a practice game on the course to encourage you to avoid missing short. If you miss short of the green it’s a bogey, if you’re on the green but short of the flag it’s a par and if you’re on the green and past the flag it’s a birdie.

This really helps you change your mindset when it comes to hitting the ball to and past the flag, and tracking your performance is really helpful.

4. Missing the green from 75-100 yards

The average 10-handicapper has a 50/50 chance of hitting the green from 75-100 yards. You can easily improve these numbers with some structure around how you hit different distances in this range, because it normally isn’t a full stock shot.

A lot of golfers like to use a clockface method with your left arm (for right-handers) going back to 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock and 11 o’clock in the backswing. As Ben Hogan once said, “show me a man who hits full wedge shots, I want to play him for money.”

Keep the same tempo with each of these backswings and the ball will travel three different distances. If you do this with all your wedges – and introduce more backswing and grip positions if needed – you will build a matrix of different shots (carry distance and trajectory) that you can easily implement for those tricky in-between distances.

5. Holing out from 3-6 feet

Golfers with a handicap in the 20s have a 50/50 chance of holing a 3-6ft putt. Former Ryder Cup player David Howell was one of the best putters of all time, and I like to recommend a compass point drill he used.

Place tees at three, four, five and six feet from the hole, at north, south, east and west. The aim of the game is to hole a putt from each tee and then move back a foot, working on one compass point at a time. I would advise you to go through your normal pre-shout routine for every putt, rather than just firing the putts off quickly.

You can hit every putt and score it as a total out of 16, or do it as a completion game so you have to go back to the start when you miss one. Either way, it adds pressure to your practice so you’re feeling the same things stood over these putts as you would be out on the golf course.

You want the putts to be pretty flat so it isn’t too hard, but introducing some slope will also help you learn about how much slope affects putts of different lengths and speeds when holing-out.