Yesterday I went out to play nine holes and found when I got to the course that I had left my rangefinder at home. And this is a course that doesn’t have yardages on the sprinkler heads.

So after a few holes of getting my eye for distance adjusted, I found that I ended up taking more club than usual, thus hitting more greens instead of being short, and was passing the flag.

When you have a rangefinder, you try to match the yardage to the distances you hit your irons on paper, but that only works if the shot you actually hit goes that far. Most of the time it doesn’t.

Try it sometime. Leave your rangefinder at home and pick your club according to your eye. You might well get conservative in your club selection and end up picking the right club more often than you usually do.