I would bet that a touring pro could play one round at your course and know it better than you do. It’s their business to get familiar with a course as fast as they can so they know the most efficient way to move the ball from tee to green on every hole. These are some things you should know about your course, or any course you play.

After you have played a course one time, you should know which club you will tee off with on every hole and where you want to put the tee shot. The first time around, write down on the scorecard the club you used if that is the one you would use next time, otherwise the club you should have used.

When you get to a point in the fairway where you would like to have your tee shot end up, take a look back to the tee and then ahead on that line to find something in the distance you can use as an aiming marker from the tee. It might be a certain tree, or a neighboring building. On one course I play, the architect did a good job of hiding the fairway, so having a good idea of where to aim your tee shot is the only secure way of hitting it.
On par-5 holes, figure out what strokes to play, and to where, so that you have a money shot into the green, such as your 9-iron or an 85-yard pitch. On par-3 holes, especially the longer ones, see if there is a bail-out area to which you can safely play in order to avoid hazards and yet have a good chance for a chip and a putt.

Notice as you go around the course where you can get a good look at the pin position on greens that you have yet to play. One course I play frequently has an access road you can drive down that lets you see the pin placement on seven of the front nine greens.

Learn which hazards are in play for you and which ones you can ignore. Find places that are not hazards, but will nonetheless cost you strokes if you hit there. Sometimes bunkers are not meant to be hazards, but directional indicators. You’ll find bunkers like this on par 5s and long par 4s. You aim a shot at them or just off to the side in order to put your ball in a good position for the next shot.

On any hole, learn to which side of the green you can safely miss and which side is to be avoided. The usual reason is that it is easier to chip to the hole from one side than another, either because of the condition of the ground, or that the green is more or less receptive to a chip.

Learning the breaks on the greens takes more than a few rounds, but you should at least know if there are one or two greens that are faster or slower than the rest, and the general slope on every green.

Don’t make golf a game of chance. In one time around a course, no more than two, you can learn what a course will give and what it will take away. Seek the first, avoid the second. It’s that simple.

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I would bet you give away at least two strokes per side because you don’t play the game as well as you should. That’s not your shotmaking, but the decisions you make. Here are a few ways you can start lowering your handicap tomorrow, and it doesn’t take any practice time to do it. These are nine good ways to get back those wasted strokes.

1. Hitting recovery shots off the tee shot. – if your course has heavy rough or lots of trees, you can use up several shots every round just chipping the ball back into the fairway. On a course like this, leave your driver home.

2. Playing over water. – Bad things happen when you play over water if you don’t have to. Figure the longest club in your bag that you’re sure you can get in the air. If you have to hit a longer club than that to clear the water, go around or lay up.

3. Not seeing the golf course (until it’s too late). – For example chipping into slopes or soggy ground that you hadn’t noticed, ignoring pronounced slope around the cup, little things that are right there that you don’t see until after you hit the shot.

4. Hitting when you’re not sure. – If you feel anything about the shot you’re going to hit other than complete confidence, step away and gather yourself. If you don’t, you’ll find yourself saying in about four seconds, “Why did I hit that? I knew I wasn’t ready.”

5. Getting angry. – You’re not as good as your good shots, nor as bad as your bad ones. Accept what happens and move on.

6. Playing with the distance you want, not the distance you have. – If 155 yards with a 6-iron is a good shot for you, and you’re 153 yards from the pin, don’t hit the 6! Take out a 5-iron, grip down, and put a smooth swing on the ball. The extra club in your hand takes off the pressure and you’ll hit a better shot.

7. Two short shots in a row. – At the professional level, the short shot takes the place of the approach putt. At the amateur level, the short shot is meant to get the ball on the green. Getting the ball close to the pin is secondary. Whatever it takes, get your first short shot on the green, two-putt close at least.

8. Not aiming your greenside chips. – When the ball is close enough to the green that you truly can give it a run at the hole, line up the shot like you would an approach putt. This avoids hitting your chip hole-high but four feet to the left and gives you a chance to leave the ball tap-in close or even sink it.

9. Not taking lessons. – Don’t hit from the rough very well? It’s not hard to do. Do uneven lies give you fits? They shouldn’t. Can’t hit the chip from 30 yards? Simplest shot there is. Get a list of shots that give you a hard time and have a pro show you how to hit them. I don’t understand why so many golfers I talk to won’t do this. I just don’t.

Please comment if you have any more ways for us to save shots like this.

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More than a few times you have a good day at the course, but because of a few bad holes you still don’t turn in a score that reflects your good play. “If only I hadn’t fallen apart on these three holes,” you say, but there is no “If only” in golf.

You own bad holes as well as good ones, and you own the reason why you have bad holes. Sometimes a bad shot puts you in a place that is hard to recover from, but how you think from there makes all the difference.

If a bad shot makes you lose a stroke, accept the penalty and don’t try to get the stroke back on your next shot. Instead, think only this one thought: “Since I can’t play into the green from here, what shot can I hit now that will give me a clear shot into the green with the one after it?” Too often what I see is golfers thinking: “How can I still get my par?”

While a par is still possible, you won’t get one by pursuing it. You will get one by hitting one sensible shot after another. That might lead to a par, or it might lead to a bogey or a double. It won’t lead to the triple or the quad, however.

Use one stroke to get out of trouble and play on from there. Trying to hit a trouble shot and a scoring shot at the same time is usually a formula for disaster.

One day I drove into deep weeds on a par 4. I could have advanced the ball, but the certain shot was to chop laterally back into the fairway. From there, my 8-iron third landed twelve feet from the pin and I made the putt for my par.

There are times when declaring an unplayable lie can be your best friend. I once hit a drive into a fairway bunker on a par 5. The ball was against the front edge of a steeply sloping wall. Getting the ball out of the bunker would have been a challenge, and getting it out and into the fairway would have been out of the question with my rudimentary skills in bunkers.

I declared an unplayable lie and dropped the ball in the back of the bunker under Rule 28, where I had a shot on the ball to send it down the fairway. I ended up with a 6 on the hole.

When you get into trouble, think about how many strokes it will safely take you, realistically, to get the ball in the hole, and play the rest of the hole that way. That should prevent those “if only” scores from showing up on your card.

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March 1 is only a few days away, and for those of us in the cold, wet North, that signals the start of the 2012 golf season. If you haven’t played much golf over the winter, your game might not be in mid-season form. Ease into the season by playing your first few rounds from the red tees. The shorter course has several advantages.

You won’t have to hit your driver so much, so you’ll be in the fairway more often, and you’ll be hitting shorter irons into the green. That takes pressure off your swing that it might not stand up to until you’ve been playing for a while. You should also start shooting lower scores fairly easily, scores that are near your best from the whites. Your subconscious mind is pretty literal. It only understands what happened. Qualifiers don’t register. So if you normally shoot in the high 80s and you score a legitimate 81 from the red tees, an image of yourself as a low-80s golfer starts getting built. That’s awfully good for your confidence, which is a key factor in playing your best golf.

A more subtle consequence of playing from the reds is that you will find yourself hitting shots that you don’t ordinarily hit, because the ball will be in places where you don’t normally hit it. If the designer placed the red tee boxes intelligently, you might find yourself playing a different course, avoiding obstacles that you never had to account for before. A shorter course means you might find yourself hitting 40-yard pitches into the green on a few par 5s instead of a full 9-iron.

So much for the men. Women reading this post won’t find this red tee idea too helpful, since they play from the red tees anyway. Ladies, what can you do, especially if the red tees are set too long for you to begin with? I would feel no qualms at all about walking forward enough to reduce the length of the hole by ten percent and teeing it up from there. That’s what the men are doing by playing from the reds, after all. If that’s a spot short of the closely-mown fairway grass, then keep walking up to the fairway and begin from there.

While we’re at it, everyone should use these opening rounds to find out which shots you need to concentrate on when you go to the range. What you have been working on this winter might not be the shots that trouble you on the course, especially around the green.

There’s no need to challenge your full set of golfing skills until you’re ready. Give yourself a positive start to the 2012 season that you can carry with you the entire way through.