RichardPick

In 1985, probably Mt Doug High? My high school didn't have guys' volleyball, which was hugely frustrating

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There are a couple of online Strokes Gained Putting calculators.  All you need to enter is the first putt distance and the number of putts for each hole.  The baseline is the PGA Tour averages from Broadie's book.  In general, Strokes Gained (really Lost) putting are typically something like 25% of the strokes lost overall.  Since an average pro might be a +6 handicap, take your own handicap, add 6, and take 25% of that total.  That's where you would expect to be if you're an average putter for your handicap level.  I'm about a 6 handicap now, so if I take my handicap, add 6, and take 25%, the result is 3.  So when my Strokes Gained (actually Lost) Putting is 3 or less, I've had a good day.  If you keep track over time, you can tell whether your putting is good or bad as compared to the rest of your game.  Then you can decide whether to work on it, or on something else.  Most people love to work on their strengths, and hate working on their weaknesses, but its a lot more productive to do just the opposite.

I created this thread so that anyone who needed to improve their putting could get some insight and help.
To your point, part of the thought process for anyone reading should be "how do I know if I need to improve my putting?"
For me, specifically, I think I need to improve my putting because:
Arccos putting handicap 25.7 (overall handicap 16, approach handicap 5) 37.7 putts per round, 2.1 per hole, 2.3 per GIR (arccos) I've had 3 3 putt bogies from 6 feet or less in my last 3 rounds (arccos) I've actually carded 0 birdies in 3 rounds with a 37% GIR (thats 0/20 getting them to drop when it counts with the flat stick) I 3+ putt on 22.2% of holes, and 1 putt on 13% of holes (arccos) I've never seriously or 'with intent' tried to learn or practiced putting. I think I could move my handicap by 3-4 if I turned putting from a weakness into a strength.

I bought a 36" ruler which is 1-1/8" wide, which initially I thought was a mistake 🤪. To roll the ball off the end, your start line has to be +/- 0.5 degrees which would sink putts in the 15-20 foot range. My goal is to roll 10 consecutive putts off the end of the ruler, it will show your miss tendency and whether a putter is a good fit really quick (the weakest performers got sold this winter). I believe it took 2-3 weeks when I first bought the ruler before I made 10 in a row, my record is 25. Now I make 10 in a row most days that I set time aside to putt, almost never on the first try though. Most effective training aid I have ever bought, I make significantly more 5-10 footers now.
This is also a good way to add some pressure into your practice, I missed a lot of putts on ball 9 and 10. It improved my short putting significantly more than the Putt Out system, but I still use that mat to put the ruler on. 
For long putts, work on 40, 20, and 60 footers in that order and get a sense of backstroke length for those distances to reduce 3 putts. Mix in ladder drills trying to land as many balls as you can between 2 distances and keep score for your highest total - again, to add pressure. 
The last aspect is improving wedge play around the greens (10-40 yards) so you get more putts within 6' to get up and down. 

SO - the ruler "test" is pretty revealing... It now makes complete sense why I miss almost all of my birdie putts.
I have a 2" wide x 48" club fitting ruler, and it's a real challenge to get from one end to the other without spilling off the side. This seems like a very sound place to start.
I'm guessing the ExPutt sim will smack you in the face with the same reality, just delivered in a prettier, more high tech way :). It'll be interesting to follow along w the forum reviewers on that one.

Nice to set goals, but make sure they are achievable. Those putting stats are not achievable! 
If you want to break par, it does not take more birdies, it takes less bogeys. 

One other comment on this, about managing expectations. When I started using percentage of miss to measure my success, I found that I had been getting upset about the wrong shots! Plenty of the shots I used to think were bad were actually pretty good, and a lot of the shots I thought were acceptable were quite bad! It really did change my expectations and goals.


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Golf is hard and Tour highlights don’t give a realistic idea just how hard it is. Consider putting: right around 8’ is typically the break point on the PGA Tour for making 50% of putts. But even then, the very best putters on Tour are averaging just over 80’ of made putts per round. The bottom of the Tour is closer to 65’. Some quick math suggests, then, that the average made putt on Tour is between 3.5 and 4.5’. And yet how many of us start acting as though we’ve been forced to contend with a cosmic injustice when we miss a few six footers in a round?
What I want to do is use data to help myself objectively manage my expectations on the course. It’s one thing to realize that I can’t reasonably expect to stick every approach shot next to the stick. But what is reasonable for approach shots? When the frustration starts to rise, what measurable criteria can I use to talk to myself instead of listening to myself?
Like a lot of golfers, I first encountered the idea of “percent error” in a golf shot from short game coach Dave Pelz’s Short Game Bible. In his book, he talks about following Tour players on the course and manually charting their shots relative to their targets. The simple idea of percent error is to take the distance by which the shot missed the intended target and divide it by the shot length.
As a simple example, a 150-yard shot that finishes 45 feet (15 yards) from the hole is a 10 percent error shot. What Pelz argues in his book is that short game shots have a higher percent error and so that improvement on the short game should produce more immediate results in improved scoring. That isn’t my focus here.
Rather, I want to consider percent error as a way of managing expectations on the golf course.
For my part, I’ve found it fascinating to do Skills Assessments on my SkyTrak launch monitor. After each shot, the software not only tells you how far from the hole you were, but it turns that result into a handicap equivalent. I’ve been surprised at how “poor” a shot can be and still qualify as a scratch shot.
Thanks to ShotLink, the raw proximity data for Tour pros for various shots is already available. Consider this awesome chart from some of my favorite Twitter follows, Lou Stagner and Scott Fawcett:

What they've done here is broken down approach shots from the fairway in 5-yard increments. This chart already gives us some really eye-popping numbers. From 10 yards from the hole, on the fairway, Tour pros hit shots that finish within 3’ of the cup less than 50% of the time! I certainly would not have guessed that.
The downside of SkyTrak’s data and this chart for my purposes is that neither is easy to remember. When I laser the flag and find I’ve got a 150-yard shot, I’m unlikely going to remember that Tour average from this distance is a ball that finishes 25’ 3” from the hole.
What I hoped was to find a percent error number—hopefully, a nice round number—that I could keep in mind during a round to set expectations for a decent shot. So I took the Stanger/Fawcett data and calculated the percent error from each distance:

The first thing to note here is that, for Tour pros, their greatest relative accuracy is the 130–150 range, where most of them would be taking full swing PW. Outside that range, going closer and going further away, the percent error grows.
(It’s very important to note, though, that the absolute accuracy always increases as you get nearer the hole. Hitting a 130-yard shot to 22” feels better than hitting a 50-yard shot to 15”. In relative terms, the longer shot is more accurate. But on the green, one ball is still 7’ further away than the other, with a significantly smaller chance of being holed. In other words, don’t lay up to preferred distances.)
I’m hoping to keep updating this project. For my next move, I’m hoping to reach out to Arccos and Game Golf and Shot Scope, to see if they have any interested in sharing the average miss data at these distances by handicap. At this point, I’m inclined to think that a 10% error rule of thumb might be useful as a mid-handicap amateur, but I don’t have access to the data to prove that. Is that too much error compared to the Tour guys? Too little?
If anyone here knows if that information has been published and can point me to it, I’d be grateful.

Lots of people here oversell fittings. IMO lessons are usually more value added unless you’re already a single digit HI. A knowledgeable player, or a competent GG rep can put the right clubs in your hands for free, especially these days with many “stock” shaft options. The extra cost of a Club Champion fitting and custom shafts isn’t value added for most players - I know cause I just wasted $400+ on a driver shaft that’s worse for me than the OEM shaft the driver came with. The “experts” here told me it was my own fault for not contradicting Club Champion’s methodology and telling them how to do their job...

I feel like I just read this exact same thread on WRX like 20 minutes ago.

I have only one thing to add to the other answers.  Please please please learn how to find the rules online, download the app for your phone, and learn how to find things  in the rules.

Hello from Victoria, BC, Canada!
I've been playing off and on for 20 years, since turning 30, with no experience at all before that. No handicap, but I generally score 82-87 at my home course (Cedar Hill Golf Course, which is par 67: never broken 80, very rarely go over 90 anymore).
For me, golf's a chance at exercise, at indulging my obsessiveness, and at getting away from work and other obligations. Clears my head (even if it fills it, often, with frustration!).
I've been reading MGS for a long time, especially for gear reviews, and thought I should finally sign up. I don't know other Spies, and my golf circles are pretty small: I've got about a dozen guys I play with on occasion, mostly through my brother-in-law.
There are quite a few courses here, but there's not much variation: Cedar Hill is just under $50/round, but most are $90 or above. Drainage is a real issue here due to the amount of rain, but most courses have put a lot of effort into that over the last few years. The worst thing, this year, is that there are virtually no practice facilities for putting, which isn't something I'd realized before my home course closed their practice green.
Looking forward to the community here, and always looking for ways to putt less horrifyingly.

Welcome from the state to the south (and east)!  I'm actually in eastern Washington, so the dry side of the state.  Loved Victoria when I visited there many years ago.  I played on a volleyball team that lost in the finals to a Victoria team back in 1985.

Hello from Victoria, BC, Canada!
I've been playing off and on for 20 years, since turning 30, with no experience at all before that. No handicap, but I generally score 82-87 at my home course (Cedar Hill Golf Course, which is par 67: never broken 80, very rarely go over 90 anymore).
For me, golf's a chance at exercise, at indulging my obsessiveness, and at getting away from work and other obligations. Clears my head (even if it fills it, often, with frustration!).
I've been reading MGS for a long time, especially for gear reviews, and thought I should finally sign up. I don't know other Spies, and my golf circles are pretty small: I've got about a dozen guys I play with on occasion, mostly through my brother-in-law.
There are quite a few courses here, but there's not much variation: Cedar Hill is just under $50/round, but most are $90 or above. Drainage is a real issue here due to the amount of rain, but most courses have put a lot of effort into that over the last few years. The worst thing, this year, is that there are virtually no practice facilities for putting, which isn't something I'd realized before my home course closed their practice green.
Looking forward to the community here, and always looking for ways to putt less horrifyingly.