The short game features many shots with many swings with many clubs. All the possible combinations leave golfers unsure of what to do when facing any given shot. This uncertainty leads to playing the same shot in different ways with no reason other than “it didn’t work last time, so I’ll try something different this time.” A reliable short game needs a firmer foundation than that.

Let me suggest a short game plan that takes the uncertainty out of your club selection, often the critical factor in hitting a successful short shot. There are two ways you can look at club selection, and I am going to call them the the iron method and the putter method.

The iron method follows the logic that a set of irons contains clubs that have different lofts which enable a player to hit the ball different distances with the same swing. Likewise, if the stroke you use for a particular short shot can be kept the same every time, distance can be controlled by using the loft of different clubs. The iron method eliminates the stroke as a variable.

The putter method is the opposite. It’s based on the notion that you putt with only one putter, regardless of the length of the putt. You control the distance of the shot by varying the length of the stroke, or its firmness, or some combination of the two. Applying this logic to the short game, you would use the same club every time and vary your stroke to hit the ball the required distance. The putter method eliminates the club as a variable.

Dividing the short game into four basic shots, (the greenside chip, the chip from past greenside to twenty-five yards, the short pitch from twenty-five to fifty yards, and the standard pitch from beyond fifty yards), you can hit each one using the iron method or the putter method. It is up to you to decide which approach you want to take, then learn to hit each shot with a particular method and stick with it. Your local PGA pro can help you with this.

You will play better golf if you can reduce the number of decisions you have to make as you play. The less thinking you have to do, the better.

The fun of the short game, as well as its frustration, is that you will never hit the same shot twice. There will always be a different lie, a different amount of fairway to cover, a different amount of green, different contours, different green speeds, all of which add up to having to use your imagination to a degree if you want to get the ball close to the hole. That means being aware of the variables of short shots and being able to control them. Then you can add a little of this or take off a little of that to tailor your shot to the precise situation in which you find yourself.

There are only five variables affecting the shot: loft, angle of approach, club path, clubface alignment, and clubhead speed. The parts of the shot that these variables affect are distance, direction, trajectory, and spin. The art of the short game is in controlling those variables.

Loft affects how high the ball flies in the air and how far it rolls after it lands. A high-flying ball, for example, gets over obstacles and stops quickly when it lands. All that counts is loft at impact. Vary loft with the club selected, by de-lofting the clubhead at address, opening or closing the clubface at address, varying ball position at address, and by varying the angle of approach.

Angle of approach is the angle to the ground the the club makes as it meets the ball. The clubhead can be moving parallel to the ground, or coming down at any selected angle. The closer to parallel the clubhead is traveling at contact, the higher the ball will fly because the effective loft of the club is greater. Angle of approach also affects the amount of spin that is applied to the ball. This variable is best controlled by ball position at address. The closer to your right foot the ball is, the steeper the club will come into the ball. A more or less wristy swing will also affect this angle.

Club path governs the direction the ball will go after it is truck. It is not the only influence, though. There is a complicated relationship with the clubface alignment that is the true determinant of this direction. The ball will tend more toward where the clubface is pointing than where the club is being swung. An open or closed clubface, best set up at address, also puts sidespin on the ball, affecting where the ball rolls after it lands.

Clubhead speed determines how far the ball will go after it has been struck. Also, the faster the clubhead is moving, the more spin that is applied to the ball. Swing speed can be varied by changing the tempo of the swing, changing its length, how the club is released through impact, or by gripping up or down to change the length of the club.

The alterations you make in the shot to affect these variables interact. When you make two alterations, they can work in an additive way or negate each other. Be aware of that when you test these alterations around the practice green. Pay attention as well to the degree of alteration needed to achieve a desired result. Remember that the test is how distance, direction, trajectory, and spin are affected.

A final variable is the ball itself. A Tour ball accepts more spin and is more responsive to variations in the stroke. It will also accept more spin in a full shot, so if you curve the ball to a pronounced degree when you swing, a Tour ball might not be the best choice in spite of its value around the green.

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I watched almost the entire broadcast of the Waste Management Open from TPC Scottsdale this weekend. That much golf made a strong impression on me in one regard. When a player had to chip onto the green from about 5-20 yards, he would, far more often than not, get the ball in the air just enough to land it on the green for it run the rest of the way to the hole. Only in a few cases where there was no other choice did anyone fly the ball up to the hole so it could land and stop. Even Phil played chip and run.

I noticed, too, this last summer when I went to the LPGA’s Safeway Classic in Portland. Everyone was running the ball up to the hole if the option was there.

It wasn’t hard to see why, after a time. They’re not trying to get the ball close to the hole. They want it to go in. A rolling ball has a much greater chance of doing that than a ball that comes out of the sky and bounces a few times. They want their chips to approach the hole, instead, like a putt.

Now throwing the ball up there with a lofted wedge and having it land two feet away is impressive. You get lots of “Nice shot!” comments from your playing partners. The pros, even though they could stop it two feet away all day, clearly don’t think they can make a living with that shot, so they don’t use it unless they have to. Neither, I suspect, should you.

Part of the problem is that we have the idea that pros do all their chipping with a lob wedge or a sand wedge, so that’s what we want to do, too. Maybe a few of them do, but that’s not what I saw on TV. I saw them use just enough club to get the ball in the air and many times you could easily tell that they were using 7-irons, 8-irons.

If you’re a flyer, even though you’re good enough to get up and down, consider that you might be eliminating the chance of the “up” being the only stroke you need to make. There are lots of things about professional golf concerning the swing that many of us will never be able to do because of the vast differences in physical talents and abilities between them and us, but anybody can play the short game the way they do. And running the ball is how they play it.

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Someone posted a thread on a golf forum that I read asking why he should work on his short game. The responses were pretty much to the point, which is, that no one has a flawless long game, and your short game will keep your mistakes in the LG department from hurting you.

It’s true that to play your best, at any level, you have to be able to hit the ball. A wicked short game won’t help you if you waste strokes getting the ball up to the green. It’s somewhat like a distance runner who has a blazing kick at the end of the race, but who lacks the endurance to stay in contact with the lead so his kick will matter.

May I repeat, this is not a chicken-or-the-egg problem. You’ll never score well unless you learn to hit the ball. Here’s a story which does not contradict that maxim, but illustrates clearly how the short game fits into scoring.

About eight years ago, I played golf with a guy, in his fifties, about 5’6″, 150, not a big guy, who also had a withered left arm. He hit the ball straight, but not very far.

His short game looked pretty good, too. Every shot he hit around the green ended up close to the hole. It was like his ball had an iron core and there was a magnet in the hole.

I was paying more attention to my game than his, but when I did, I noticed he was always getting a par. When the round was over, he had shot a 73, without hitting any shot from the tee or fairway that was noticeably spectacular.

I asked him about this, and he told me that he got this condition with his arm when he was a child, and he knew he would never become a long hitter. To score, he would have to have an outstanding short game. And that’s what he had.

Now he wasn’t having to get up and down on every hole. He did hit greens. It’s just that when he missed, he still got his par. His short game allowed him to get the most out of what his long game could deliver. That is what the short game does for you. That is why you should practice your short game.

Good enough for a player with a physical handicap, good enough for all of us, too.

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Say you’re in the fairway about 140 yards from the pin, which is tucked behind a bunker on the left. You have two choices. You can play for the center of the green, or you can draw the ball into the pin. There isn’t much else you can try. And generally, a straight shot to the center will never be a bad choice.

When you’re ten yards off the green and the entrance is clear, it’s different. Would you run the ball to the pin all the way along the ground? Fly the ball all the way and stop it dead? Fly it in and let it run a little? Fly the ball to the edge of the green and have it run the rest of the way? And if you have all these shots at your disposal, which one should you hit?

This decision can be paralyzing if you don’t have a system, a method, figured out in advance. When you play is the time to play. Work out your options some other time.

This is what I would suggest.

First, check the lie. Fluffy lie, all options are open. Tight lie, chip.

Second, assuming the lie is favorable, check the ball-edge of green-pin distances. If ball to edge of green is greater than edge of green to pin, fly the ball. How far? To halfway between the edge of the green and the pin. Let the ball run out the rest of the way.

If ball to edge of green is less than edge of green to pin, run the ball on. Have the ball land a few feet past the edge of the green, and use a club that will let it run the rest of the way.

The short game is simplified if you master a few basic shots and have a clear idea when to use each one. Standing over the ball, you want to be able to concentrate on hitting the shot, rather than wonder whether this is the right shot to hit.

Practice these shots, commit to their rules of use on the course. You might hit fewer shots right up next to the pin, but in the long run you will get the ball closer more often. In the meantime,

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You hear a lot about the scoring zone in golf, the place where your score really gets made (or not). Some people say it’s from 100 yards and in, there are books written about 60 yards and in. For the recreational golfer, it’s 25 yards and in.

If you play once a week and can only practice that often or even less, your scoring expectations from too far away from the hole can’t be too great. There isn’t enough time for you to learn how to get up and down from 50-100 yards consistently.

Apply yourself instead to learning how to get up and down from 25 paces from the pin or less. This, you can do. Those are the up-and-downs that can take bunches of strokes off your score. Here’s how to make them.

Let’s say you’re just off the green on the fringe. The grass is cut shorter than the fairway, but longer than the green, and the lie is tight (there isn’t much of a cushion of grass beneath the ball). The club to pull is your putter. Forget your 6-iron or your sand wedge, or whatever you chip with. It’s the putter that will put the ball tap-in close.

Arnold Palmer said that your best chip is as good as your worst putt. It’s true. Spend some time on the practice green finding out how much harder you have to hit the ball to get it through the fringe. Find out how much fringe you can reliably putt through before you do have to reach for that sand wedge.

Say you’re about 60 feet from the hole and too far off the green to putt. The club to use is the one that will get the ball about six feet onto the green and run the rest of the way. Spend a few practice sessions learning which clubs to hit with different ball-fringe and fringe-hole distance combinations. This is a better shot than flying the ball to the hole, since a rolling ball has a much better chance of going in the cup.

The third shot you should practice is a shot out of the rough. Use your sand wedge. The key here is to know where the bottom of the ball is, and make sure the sole of the club gets down to that point. When the ball is sitting well down in the rough, you have to go down and get it. But sometimes the ball sits up in the grass, and your club has to stay up where the ball is so that you don’t slide the club underneath it.

If you have these three shots down, you will start making pars right and left. There’s one other greenside shot I didn’t talk about isn’t there? The bunker shot. But since everyone says that’s the easiest shot in golf, you already know how to hit that one don’t you?

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The more practice the better. Who can argue with that? But I would suggest that when it comes to the short game, that means frequency, not duration.

The more times you go out to practice your short game, the better. That’s more times you’re exposing yourself to those shots anew, teaching yourself to get into the short game mode at will, as needed. Because you don’t know when you will be hitting short shots on the course.

Driver? By now you know exactly on which holes of your home course you’ll be using a driver. No surprises there. You know that on every green you’ll be putting.

You know you’ll be hitting an iron from the fairway. You have lots of time ahead of these shots to prepare your mind for hitting them. (And you should, by the way. As soon as you putt out, for example, you should be thinking “Driver swing,” and have your mind start giving your body the directions it needs to hit a good drive.)

The short game, though, is entirely unpredictable. You have no idea until it happens that you’ll have to chip onto the green. And then, you have no idea just what kind of shot you’ll have to hit until you finally get up to the ball.

That means you have much less time to gear your mind toward chipping in comparison to the other types of shots you hit. And that means you have to be able to turn on your short game mind on a moment’s notice.

So practice doing that. Drop a ball beside the practice green, chip it to the cup, putt it out, then go do something else. The ideal way to practice a short shot would be, if your practice facility is laid out like this, to hit a few long shots then walk over to the green, chip a ball , putt out, then walk back to the range. Just do that back and forth–range, green; range, green.

Give yourself one chance to hit that chip next to the hole. Hitting a dozen chips from the same place might teach you the technical aspects of the shot, but that doesn’t teach you the mind set you need to get that one shot close when you’re on the course.

Basic short game shots are easy to learn. Once you can hit them reasonably well, it all comes down to the state of your mind on the course when you have that one chance. Being comfortable and confident in that condition is what you need to practice to become a short game wizard.

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