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.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

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.

Handicap golfers get into trouble by hitting shots with clubs they can’t handle well. I’m thinking of the longer clubs, the driver and the long irons/hybrids. Because these clubs have a straighter face, sidespin is accentuated, exacerbating your slice or hook. Because you’re aiming at targets fairly far away, identical errors in accuracy are magnified relative to shorter clubs.

The longer swing makes it harder to contact the ball squarely. It’s harder to get the ball in the air, too. There are too many ways to go wrong. You will therefore save yourself strokes if you follow this rule:

If you aren’t breaking 100 (28 over par), the 5-iron (32 degrees of loft) is your big gun. Break 90 regularly and you can move up to a 2-iron/hybrid. Drivers are for golfers who break 80.

By following this rule, the ball will be in the fairway much more often because you will be hitting straighter shots. Trade occasional distance for habitual accuracy, and you will get to the green in fewer strokes than you do now.

Yes, you won’t be shooting for par on every hole, but since you’re a handicap golfer anyway, par is not always your expectation. What you will remove from your scorecard are the doubles and triples.

You will also learn more about playing the game because your ball will more often be in a position for you to play a hole by attacking it rather than by recovering from wayward shots.

I know the driver is loads of fun and it feels great and you impress your buddies when you nail a long one. But if you want to shoot a lower score than they do, this might be the way to go.

See also Ten Easy Ways to Play Better Golf

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

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.

If you would analyze every round you play, stroke by stroke, I would bet you give away two strokes per side for no good reason. It doesn’t have anything to with how well you hit the ball, but with how well you play the game. 

Recovery shots off the tee shot – if your course has heavy rough or lots of trees, you can waste several shots per round just chipping the ball back into the fairway. If you play a tight course, leave your driver home. What you give up in distance is more than offset by keeping the ball in play.

Trying to get it all back with one shot – Say you dumped your drive in a fairway bunker. The green is in sight, but you have to hit a clean shot to get it there. Better to hit out with a shorter club to up near the green, which is an easier shot, so a good chip can give you a par putt. Playing from a hazard as if you were playing from the fairway invites a large score unless you know the shot well.

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 hazard, go around or lay up, unless the course gives you no other option. 

Hitting your driver too often – go the the range and set yourself up in a spot where there are landmarks in the distance that mark about a 40-yard-wide fairway. Get warmed up with a short iron, then hit a drive into your “fairway.” Take your time, hit one driver, and a few short irons before the next drive. If you got fewer than seven drivers inside the boundaries you picked out, your driver is costing you strokes. 

Hitting when you’re not ready – You have to feel that the shot you’re about to hit can only have the best possible outcome. The thrill of anticipation must cover you. If you feel anything about this shot that is off, like something is different, but you don’t know what it is, that’s the little voice telling you to step away because you’re not set up to hit a good shot. Listen to that little voice, for if you don’t, you will find yourself saying in about four seconds, “I knew I wasn’t ready. Why didn’t I step away?”

Playing with the distance you want, not the distance you have – It is true that golf is a distance game. The longer you can hit the ball the easier it is to play well, but you only have the distance you have. That’s the distance to play with. If 155 yards with a 6-iron is a good shot for you, and you’re 153 yards from the pin, don’t hit six! Take out the five and put a smooth swing on the ball. With the six, you’re thinking that you have to hit it just right. The extra club in your hand takes the pressure off and you’ll hit a better shot. Use the right club to get the distance you need, not your swing.

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 a secondary consideration. Whatever it takes, get your first short shot on the green, two-putt close at least. That fourth shot you have to take because your first short shot didn’t get on really hurts.

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, aim yourself first. Stand behind the ball to find the line on the ground from the pin to your ball. Align yourself to this line and play away. This avoids hitting your chip hole-high but four feet to the left. If you had taken the time to align the shot, you could have had a tap-in or given the ball a chance to go in.

Ignoring contours around the hole – These are the ones to pay attention to. Where will the ball go when it gets six feet from the hole? When the ball gets that near to the hole, it won’t be rolling very fast, and will thus be greatly influenced by contours. 

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com.

Most golfers try to hit the ball a long way whenever they see the room to. The trouble is, that strategy leads as often as not to poor shots that wouldn’t have gained much even if they were successful. Instead, try planning the way you play a golf hole by doing the math.

There’s a hole on my home course that is 502 yards long, par 5, with a narrow fairway, and a creek that crosses the fairway about 175 yards from the tee. There is a tree on each side of the fairway, next to the creek, that frames the tee shot and tightens it up even more. There’s a lot of room to go wrong with the tee shot, but you can find a way out if you just do a few math problems.

First of all, there are only 175 yards to clear the creek, so take a club that you can hit 190 yards and use that one off the tee. Odds are you hit that club much straighter than your driver, so you will likely end up in the fairway, across the creek, with 312 yards to the green. Divide that yardage by 2. If you hit two shots that are 156 yards long, you’ll be on the green.

Say that’s two 6-irons. You would also rather not hit something as long a a 6-iron into a green if you can help it, so instead of two 6-irons, hit a 5 and a 7. Or a 4 and an 8. Do you see how this works? All this hole asks you to do is cover 502 yards in three shots. How you do that is up to you. There is more than one way to cover that distance, some of them easy ways, and they don’t all start off with a driver.

By the way, the next time you step onto the tee of a 312-yard par 4, you know now that you don’t really need to tee off with your driver, don’t you?

Here’s another example. You tee off from a 386-yard par 4 that runs uphill, and flub the drive. That happens. You’re 260 yards from the green now, so out comes the fairway wood. Think about this for a moment. You’re still two shots away from the green because you can’t hit your fairway wood that far. So divide the distance by 2 and you get two 130-yard shots — two easy 8-irons. Maybe a 7-iron and a 9-iron, or a 6 and a pitching wedge.

Do the math to take high-risk shot out of your hands, especially when there is no real payoff for hitting them well. If you’re worried about what your playing partners will think about you if you keep the longer clubs in the bag, don’t be. You’ll get more respect from them because you’ll be the lone golfer of their acquaintance who actually thinks.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

Everybody knows that the easiest way to get a good score is to hit the green in regulation. Let me suggest to you an equipment strategy that will help you do that.

I would imagine that you have one club which you like to hit more than any of the others. Whenever you pull this club out of the bag, you know good things are going to happen. If you’re smart about it, you will hit that club as often as you can.

Let’s say it’s your 6-iron, and that you get 160 yards out of it. If that’s how far you are from the green, you’ll hit it, of course, but if you’re 150 yards away, you can grip down and hit from that distance, too. Say it’s a par 5, you’re 260 yards from the green, and you’re playing your second shot. Why not hit the 6? That will put you 100 yards away, which is an easy pitching wedge into the green. And so on.

You should follow a strategy of putting yourself in a position to hit that favorite club as often as possible. Use that one club to get your ball around the course.

Now what if you had four clubs like this, not just one? Four clubs that you knew you could rely on, that you never had to worry about? That would make the game really simple to play. It’s the way I play. I practice almost exclusively with my driver, 4-hybrid, 7-iron, and pitching wedge. I try to set up the hole so I can hit one of those three clubs into the green as often as possible.

The 4 goes 180 yards, which covers the longest second shots on a par 4 that I’ll have, the 7 goes 150 yards, and the wedge goes 120. That’s three clubs to cover a 60-yard interval, each of which is a good friend. It’s not that hard to take off distance, so that if I have 160 yards to the hole, I’ll still hit the 4. How about 155? OK, I’ll use a 6-iron, but for most of the yardages inside that 60-yard interval, it’s one of those three clubs.

There’s one hole on my home course where this strategy expands and pays off in spades. It’s 423 yards long, par 4, dogleg right, with water right and OB left. The landing area for the drive is very narrow. The golfers I play with are happy to walk off the green with a 5, and a 4 is as good as a birdie.

I tee off with a 4 into the fairway, short of where the fairway narrows between the water and OB. I play my second shot with the 4 over the corner of the water hazard and am left with about 35 yards to the pin. I chip on and have a par putt. What could be simpler and safer?

I have committed my game to this four-club strategy and it works great. I have found a way to get the ball into the hole in as few strokes as possible by narrowing down the shots I have to hit to just a select few that I hit very well. Earlier this year I took these four clubs, along with a 2-hybrid, a 54-degree wedge, and a putter, to a course I hadn’t played before, and shot 81. Not bad.

See also How to Master the Short Game

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com.

I’ve written before about analyzing your round stroke by stroke in order to learn how to make better shot selection decisions, and to identify which strokes need work next time you go the range. Here’s my latest round analyzed, with par in parentheses.

1. (4) 2H, 9i, sand, putt, putt. Hit the 9i thin, first iron shot of the day is always difficult. Think about the destination, not the task.

2. (4) Driver, 8i, putt, putt.

3. (3) 8i, chip (30 yds.), putt, putt, putt. First putt went way past the hole. The greens are faster than they look.

4. (5) 4H, 4H, 7i, putt, putt. Par 5, no need to try for too much off the tee.

5. (5) 2H, 2H, 6i, chip (30 yds), putt. Hit both the 2H pretty poorly. 8i chip didn’t get in the air enough – clipped a mound. ~35-foot putt.

6. (3) 9i, chip (10 yds), putt, putt. Pin in front, eased off on the 9 too much. Get on the green, beyond the flag is OK.  Hit the chip more firmly. As with the 9i, past the flag is OK.

7. (4) 6i (there’s a ravine you have to lay up to), 3i, chip, putt, putt.

8. (3) 7i right, putt, putt.

9. (5) 2H right, 4H (sand), 9i right, chip left (15 yds), putt, putt. 9i – alignment issue that would keep showing up for a few more holes; chip – align, align, align!

10. (4) Driver right, 9i, putt, putt.

11. (5) 2H right, 4H, PW, putt, putt.

12. (4) Driver, 4H, 4H, chip (30 yds), putt, putt. Hit the driver and the first 4H very thin. The chip was way to tentative.

13. (3) 6i, putt, putt, putt. First putt was downhill and to the right, played far too much break. Second putt from four feet played outside the hole and it stayed outside. Don’t give away the hole!

14. (5) 2H, 4H, PW, putt, putt.

15. (4) Driver (duck hook), 5H (sand), pitch, chip (20 yds), putt, putt. 5H – went for the green, should have played a 7i to the front of the green. Hit the pitch real fat – that happens.

16. (4) Driver, 3H right, sand, putt. I would have taken a bogey, but a ~30-foot putt went in.

17. (3) 7i, chip (6 yds), putt, putt. 7i was long, and a 6i chip out of the rough was tentative. Should have chipped with a PW, but should have hit an 8i off the tee, which I had thought of. Short would have still been on the green.

18. (4) Driver, 6i, putt, putt.

There are a normal amount of lucky shots and ones that I should have hit better, but the parts that stand out are the playing errors. On 1, I was worried about making clean contact. Just hit the ball. (More on that in a coming post.) On 6, I had enough club in my hand, but played it too fine. No. 9 -align the chip! This one finished hole high – exact distance, six feet to the left. On 13, I over-analyzed the first two putts. On 15, I chose the wrong shot out of the bunker. On 17, I chose a club to chip with that did not give me confidence.

Could you say that I gave away six shots because or poor thinking? Yes, you could. Also, those intermediate-length chips need work, too. They all ended up short. I might have gotten one stroke back, maybe two, by being better with that shot.

So you see that there are seven or eight shots that I could have saved, and there’s no reason why I can’t learn to get them. If this is a typical round for you as well, let’s both lower our score by thinking better so that all the work we do at the range finally pays off.

That chip on 16? I went to the range yesterday and figured out how to hit it with a gap wedge. Problem solved.

Perhaps, no, not perhaps, but really, your score could go down just by learning how to play the game and make better decisions. I’ve been writing these tips for two years now. If this is the only one you pay attention to, that would make me happy.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

Everybody wants to shoot lower scores without working that hard to do it. Why wouldn’t they? Most recreational golfers have busy lives that leave them barely enough time to play, and even less for practicing. Here are ten easy ways to shoot lower scores in the time you do have to play and practice.

1. Off the tee, play a game of Get the Ball In the Fairway. That means keep your driver in the bag unless you’re sure you can hit the fairway with it. Most of the time, you don’t need the extra distance the driver gives you. In fact, leave your driver home one day and see what happens when you’re hitting your second shot from the short grass more often that you might be doing now.

2. Work real hard at making good contact with your irons. If you do, straight shots follow. Hitting fat, and most recreational golfers do hit behind the ball, is the major cause of poor iron play, not slicing or hooking. Learn to hit the ball first, the ground second.

3. Your short game goal is to get the ball on the green and reasonably close to the hole. Don’t get cute. Just get the ball on the green with your first short shot so you can start putting.

4. Practice approach putting a lot. More 3-putt greens are caused by leaving the first putt too far away from the hole than by missing short putts.

5. Always feel good about the shot you’re about to hit, especially around the green. If you don’t, then pick another shot or a different club. Having full confidence in what you’re about to do is a critical golf skill.

6. Never give up on a hole. You can still make par even with a mediocre shot or two, or even one bad one.

7. Get real good at letting go of the past and not getting ahead of yourself. Never berate yourself when you hit a bad shot and never moan over having to play the next one from a less than ideal place. Never think farther ahead than the hole  you’re playing on.

8. Don’t think about the score until the round is over. If you’re playing poorly, thinking about your score makes things worse. If you’re playing well, you’ll cut yourself off from the frame of mind that got you there.

9. Don’t rush to judgement about which shot you are going to hit, or to where, or with which club. Take a few extra seconds to find the right option. If you do this with a calm mind, the right option for you will become clear.

10. If there’s a hole in your game, get a lesson to get it fixed. Most golf shots are easy once you know the secret. The pro will show you simple things in fifteen minutes you would never figure out in a million years.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com.

The scoring clubs are the ones you hit the scoring shots with. The scoring shots are the ones that make the biggest difference in getting the ball into the hole as quickly as possible.

The three most important clubs are the driver, wedge, and putter. (See The three most important clubs.) Let me add two more.

One is an advancement club. Say you’re in the fairway, but too far from the green to get on with the next stroke. Play an advancement shot.

This shot eats up yards, but with a club that isn’t hard to hit, and still gets you close enough to the green so you can have an easy shot to get on.

I like to use my 24-degree hybrid for this purpose. Say I’m 260 yards from the hole on a par 5. This club will leave me a medium-length pitch for my third.

Or if you want, 260 yards is two easy 8-irons. (See The mathematics of club selection.)

The second club I want to add is a chipping club. For garden-variety chips, essentially approach putts from off the green, use a 6-iron. It gets the ball on the green and running, which is how you chip the ball into the hole.

So you have five clubs: a club for the tee (not necessarily the driver), two clubs for shots around the green, a club to eat up distance from the fairway in a controlled manner, and a putter.

Get good with these clubs, and the shots they hit, and see how easy golf gets.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.