Does your golf course have that hole? The one with the big reward for cutting the corner. You stand on the tee, see the line and can picture the short iron in. All you have to do is carry the trees, the bunkers or the OB.
Cutting the corner isn’t just about club selection. Yes, you need the carry, but you also need the ball flight and launch to make that line work. A dogleg left asks for something different from a right-to-left player than it does from someone who fades everything. And even when the numbers say you can do it, it’s a tough decision for a lot of players. Knowing you can and knowing you should are two different things.
I came across a recent study on this. It’s small but I found it interesting and worth sharing.
What is the study?
The study was published in Frontiers in Psychology in June. It’s titled Pre-shot strategy selection and scoring performance in golf. Researchers from Hainan Normal University and Macao Polytechnic University had 81 male university-age golfers play three dogleg holes on one course: a par-5 and two par-4s, one of them the hardest hole on the course.
The golfers had an average handicap of about 26 ranging from 8 to 49. Before each tee shot, every player told a researcher whether he planned to take the aggressive line over the corner or the conservative line around it. Then he played the hole and the researchers recorded his score. That’s 243 holes in total and the golfers went aggressive about 35 percent of the time.
What did they find?
The researchers didn’t just compare aggressive players to conservative players. They compared each golfer to himself.
When the same golfer went more aggressive than his own norm on a hole, he scored about half a stroke worse relative to par. The estimate was 0.51 strokes but the statistical range runs from about 0.1 to 0.9.
The data doesn’t say aggressive golfers score worse. It says that on these holes, going for it more than your own habit tended to cost strokes.
They also saw hints that weaker players paid a bigger price for going aggressive. The authors flag that as preliminary.
What I take from it
The study has its limits. It’s small, it covers three holes on one course, and strategy was declared before the shot, not tracked. It also can’t separate a bad decision from a bad swing so half a stroke isn’t a number to count on for your own game.
Here’s how I read it, though.
I think it comes down to a physical piece and a mental piece. If you know you have that shot in the bag, with the carry, the shape and the launch, then cutting the corner is a fine play. The trouble starts when you have to push it. That might mean reaching for a little more speed, trying a shape you don’t normally hit or going at a line because the hole is daring you to. That’s when the swing gets tighter, the miss gets bigger and the decision starts to feel a lot harder than it did in the fairway.
So how do you decide?
The authors don’t recommend one strategy for everyone. They suggest getting better at reading the hole: how wide the fairway is where you’d land, where the penalty areas are, the wind, the angle off the tee and your own typical ball flight. They also suggest checking where the ball ends up against the line you intended so your read gets more honest over time.
Before cuttting the corner on a dogleg, I’d want to know three things.
- Do I have the carry with my normal swing? Your normal swing, not your best one. Use a rangefinder or GPS to find the real number to the corner.
- Does my ball flight fit the line? Carry isn’t enough if your shot shape works against the hole.
- What happens if I miss? A miss into a bunker is a very different problem than a miss into the trees or OB.
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