Reading Greens the Right Way

One of the golf swing secrets of golfing and lower scores are reading a green or putt which is imagining, visualizing, picturing, guessing, or foreseeing the line on which your ball will roll once you have struck it. Some putts will be straight, but most of them will break. Some will break very slightly and some will have a bigger break either way.

By reading greens you are looking at two things primarily namely speed and the curving influence. A level green is a pure speed type of putt. When the ball does something funny near the hole, you sometimes say “Why didn’t I see that?”

Aberrations near the hole are caused by the hole erupting when the hole is cut without a plywood platform (Cutting Plate) to cut through and then extract the plug. Another problem is all the previous players in the field who put their feet next to the hole when they bent over to pick up their ball. We won’t even talk about the spike marks left by players near the hole. Most of the this trouble is in the two feet around the cup. When you putt the close ones, you have to hit through the trouble to hit the back of the cup, and if you go by the hole two feet, you know you can make that return.

So, your concentration should really be in the vicinity of 2 – 10 feet of the cup. If I have a twenty footer putt, you will be hitting through the break for the first 30% of the putt at least, even with a slight curve. Then the curve elements start to take effect.

Slow greens and fast greens react differently. The same putt can change with speed on any day. So you have to practice and observe the complete roll of the ball, not just the last feet to the hole. Even when you don’t make that putt, information is stored on your walking hard drive. The more you do it, the more experience you will gain on putting and reading greens. Start looking closely when other players are putting and read from their putts on how fast the greens is and what breaks there might be. Have a good look from different angles while someone else is busy putting and this way you will save some time when its’ your turn without missing out on reading the green properly. As you walk on the greens, try to develop a feeling for how soft or hard the greens are. This will help you in mastering the speed of the greens early in you round. The more you deliberately concentrate on this, the more accustomed you will get with it.

I can tell you that good putters are using their shoulders and not their wiggling wrists to putt. It’s a more reproduce able motion and a much simpler formula for putting. Whacking at the ball with the wrists will make some putts, but over time it’s tougher than the pure pendulum stroke of the better and more experienced player. Why do you think more players are considering the belly putter or the broomstick putter? It’s to take the wrists out of the equation when putting.

Over reading a green may actually be counterproductive, since it will leave you from questioning the putt as you are making the stroke. Whether you are a beginner in golf or a more complete golfer, seeing the line of the putt from both sides of the hole will help you in a complex putt, since some subtleties cannot be seen from just one side of the cup. Additionally though too many players forget to look at the cut of the green, this can really affect the roll of the ball towards the cup.

Spends some time on the practice green before you play a new course, for this will help you to quickly get a feeling for how fast the greens might be for that course and what type of grass they have on that golf course. Once you reached the first green, spend close attention to the putts from all the players in your group, this will help to set to the pace for the rest of your round.

Happy Practice and Remember Good Practice makes perfect and permanent.


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Chris Redelinghuys