Improvising is a decision you make badly

The standing consensus in course management is unremarkable and well supported by anyone who has taught the game: golfers who arrive at a hole with a plan make fewer of the errors that turn a bogey into a seven. The plan does not have to be clever. It has to exist before the adrenaline does.

The reason is timing. On the tee you are dealing with playing partners, a group waiting behind, whatever happened on the previous green, and a scorecard you have started doing arithmetic on. That is not a good environment for a judgement call about whether the driver is worth it. You will default to habit, or to what the last person hit, or to the shot you fancy.

Decide it in the car park and you are not deciding anything on the tee. You are just executing. That is a smaller job.

What a hole plan actually contains

Three things, and nothing more. Where you are aiming. Which side you are prepared to miss. And the point at which you stop trying to reach and start trying to leave yourself something.

The aim line is the easy one, and most golfers already have a vague version of it. The miss side is the one that gets skipped, and it is the one that saves shots — because you will miss, and there is almost always a good half and a bad half. Water short right, out of bounds long left, bunkers guarding one side of a green: the hole usually tells you which way to be wrong.

The lay-up point is the least glamorous and most valuable. Knowing in advance that you are not going for the green in two on the long fifth stops you having the argument with yourself while standing over a three wood.

Do it on paper, once, then reuse it

If you play the same course most weeks you only ever have to do this properly once. Sit down with the card, or with the yardage guide, and write a line per hole. Aim, miss, lay-up. Eighteen lines. It takes about twenty minutes and it will still be right in three years, allowing for tee positions and wind.

At an unfamiliar course you do the same thing in the ten minutes before you go out, and you accept it will be cruder. Even a crude plan — three wood on the tight ones, no shots at tucked pins — outperforms discovering each hole as you stand on it.

Keep it written down. A plan you are holding in your head at the fourteenth is not a plan, it is a memory, and memory goes first when the score is close.

The plan is a defence against yourself

The real work a game plan does is not tactical. It is behavioural. It removes the moment where you are standing on the tee, one over, thinking that this is the hole where you get it back.

We have covered elsewhere in this series why the hero shot is a bad bet and why the safe play is often the aggressive one on the scorecard. A pre-round plan is simply how you make yourself take that advice when it matters, rather than agreeing with it in an armchair and ignoring it at the twelfth. You are not trusting your judgement under pressure. You are trusting a decision you made when you were calm.

Note that this is consensus rather than a measured effect — nobody is putting a number on how many strokes a plan saves, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does.

The marginal gain

A minute a hole, done once, at a table, with a pen. That is the whole intervention. No lesson, no equipment, no change to how you swing the club.

What you get back is the shots you currently give away improvising: the driver hit at a hole that never wanted one, the miss taken on the wrong side, the three wood at a green you were never reaching. None of those are execution failures. They are planning failures, dressed up as bad luck.

Write the eighteen lines. Then spend the round doing what the piece of paper says.

Coming next

Distance realism · ego

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