Recreational golfers throw away shots every round by not being prepared to play the course. Every shot has options. Choosing the wrong option or the wrong club causes you to play extra strokes that didn’t need to be taken.

The best way to prevent this from happening is to make a plan, before you get to the course, for how you’re going to play each hole, for better or for worse. The fewer on-the-spot decisions you make the better.

Base your plan around the shots that you hit well. Plan your round to hit those shots as often as you can. Your plan should consist of the club you’re going to tee off with and where you’re going to hit the ball, and the club you’re going to use from the fairway and where you’re going to hit it, that is, favoring which side of the green. That might not be the side where the pin is if the price for missing on that side is too high. That’s Plan A.

You also need a Plan B, which you pull out if Plan A doesn’t work. When you’re in trouble is not the time to be thinking. Know ahead of time what you’re going to do if you tee off into the trees on the right on #10. Know which club you’re going to use and what shot you’re going to hit to get the ball back into play. You might have two options prepared, one for when there’s a way to advance the ball, and another for when you just have to punch out. Either way, know what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it before you ever get to the course.

All eighteen holes should be thought out in advance like this. Plan B is not that hard to figure out, because if you play a course often enough, you know where your misses go and where they don’t go.

If you’re playing a course for the first time, you can’t make plans, so rely heavily on your best shots. Hit them as often as you can and see what happens. As you do, plot out the course by writing down which clubs you would like to use next time and where the safe spots to hit to are. Mark these spots with a felt pen on the course map on the back of the scorecard.

If making detailed plans is not your thing, at least keep a notebook in your bag with a list of clubs you use off the tee, hole by hole, of every course you play. That in itself puts you way ahead of the game.

Better Recreational Golf  has more good playing tips. check it out.