How to Read a Green Quickly and Accurately
Sorry, you need to be a member to access this video.
You Are Just Seconds Away - Become a member here!
Already a member? Log in now
This is the best way to get an accurate read on a green quickly. You'll make more putts and it will speed up play.
all right now for the most important part of putting you've got such a simple stroke now now all we got to do is make sure we read the green right and reading greens depending on your philosophy of it can take forever if you're really trying to be really specific about every single little detail about things and it makes the game take forever I hate slow play so I want to show you how to read the green quickly and understand how to get the big picture of it and be able to get a really accurate read and make things really simple for yourself and not take a ton of time doing it so I'm gonna imagine that I'm walking up to this green as if I've just hit the ball onto the green and I'm trying to figure out the big picture what's the first thing that I'm gonna do is look for all the obvious stuff okay the first thing I see I've got a bunker over here to the right I'm gonna give you a little secret bunkers almost always have a raised lip on them not every single time but in general they do so you can generally assume that the ball will roll away from the lip of a bunker that's close to the green so this is one of the first things that's going to come to your mind and it could be a mound that you see to the side but bunkers are usually a giveaway and they tend to change and increase over time so the older the course is because people hitting shots out of the bunker they're excavating a ton of sand and it slowly raises the level of the slope and so that causes the ball to roll away because the hill continues to build up and get taller over time so we can imagine the watershed water coming down off of this slope and we know immediately as I'm going to this hole that the ball is gonna want to tend at least from this part of the green to roll down to the hole so that's my first thing I'm gonna look for the most obvious first big picture thing now it could be something like a drain off to the side so in this case we have a big slope off the back edge of this green now that doesn't necessarily mean the green is sloping this way but that's going to be the first thing I'm going to look at is something else that's really quick and obvious to see the putting green or the bunkers hills going this way I'm walking over here to where I see this slope off the back of the green because I want to feel it with my feet and what I'm noticing is as I walk down here my feet I feel like I'm walking downhill and if you're not sure about this turn around and walk the other way so in the real world we're doing this pretty quickly I can feel I'm walking slightly uphill and I definitely know that I'm walking uphill here because I've got this bunker hill the slope of the the shoulder of the bunker so now what I'm trying to do using these two big quick obvious things I've got drainage going over here I can see this area is really wet compared to the rest of this area so water is going to tend to flow in this direction it's coming off that shoulder of the bunker and it's rolling down this hill and now I can start to see as I stand back here that the green tends to have a general slope this way which makes sense because we've got all of these indicators telling us that the green is sloping this way so what I'm trying to do by doing these quick obvious things is help me quickly determine where what I call the zero line is and that is simply the place on the green beneath the hole that has the the the straightest uphill putt that's what zero line is so in this case I kind of waddle around here a little bit and it's going to be somewhere between the slope of this bunker hill because it's leaning this way and then the the entire cant of the green is going this way somewhere between those two angles I just got to feel it with my feet and see it with my eyes this is about a straight uphill putt from a straight uphill putt I can quickly determine what the putt's going to do at three o'clock what the putt's going to do at twelve o'clock and what the putt's going to do at nine o'clock so in this case as I walk over here I can see that the putt should be wanting to be a right to left putt if I walk to twelve o'clock it should be pretty much a straight downhill putt it depends obviously the further you get away from the green and the more undulation there is this is going to change a little bit what you're really trying to do is figure out what that last six to eight feet of the putt is going to do if we come over here because when it slows down that's when it's going to break the most as we come over here this should be a left to right putt and all of those those three things that I looked at confirmed that what I saw over here is in fact zero line and so now no matter where you are use this as a compass ring if I'm at 7 30 or eight o 'clock I know that this should be slightly uphill and left to right this is going to be along the fall line and left to right this is going to be downhill and left to right and so using that compass idea and finding zero line I can quickly read a green and have a really good idea of what this putt is going to do and this doesn't take very long in the real world you're going to be walking up here you say oh it's got some slope there some drainage over here you know I can walk over here because this has already told me where I should check first because I want to find zero line that's the whole point find zero line first so this is giving me an idea that this is really wet this is really sloped this is sloped zero line is probably over here confirm it with your eyes and what your feet feel yep zero walk around over here make sure that it's still what you see that that's still zero yep looks good 12 o'clock yep downhill putt and so on and you can do this in just literally seconds because this stuff will become second nature to find the the high high point of the green that's going to help you determine what the true low point of that putt is going to be for that pin placement so if you do that you combine this simple green reading technique of finding zero line the rocking your shoulders back and forth putting is going to be much easier for
E G
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Ronald
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
RON
Ronald
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Callie
Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
Diarmuid
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
John
Richard
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Paul
John
Caleb
Ryan
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
gary
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)