How to Read a Golf Green

How to Read a Golf Green
Hello! On behalf of expertvillage.com, my name is Bryan Pemberton from the Reserve at Spanos Park. Today we are talking about putting and this is just another aspect on how we read greens and how we actually determine our intended line when making a putt. Most putts you will see on a putting green are all going to have some sort of break. Rarely will you have a putt that is actually straight to the hole. If you see this hole right here, we are actually going to see it breaks considerably from left to right. Again every putt is different but what we want to determine is how do we know how much that ball is going to actually turn from right to left, left to right. Again a lot of that is going to be experience but one way we can actually help ourselves in lining up our putter and this is what we call lining up the putter to the hole. What I want to teach you now is actually how we line the hole up to our putter. Again this is 2 different ways of looking at it. When you actually line your putter up, instead of actually determining your line by putting your putter on the ground, what I want you to do is actually look at the hole and you are going to actually bring a ball and imagine a ball going into the hole. We are going to bring it out of the cup, we are going to find the middle of the cup, we are going to bring the ball back out and we are going to imagine the line going all the way back to the putter. Once you get back to the putter, you are going to actually make your corrections based on that particular line right there. Back here in lining up the hole to our putter or intended line as opposed to lining up the putter to our intended line. What that means is we've determined that the middle of the cup now is right in here somewhere and we are going to imaging this line coming back out. Again you can't do this when you are actually playing but again you can imagine a line and that way when you are actually taking your putter and lining up your putter, you are going to actually line it up to the imaginary line that you've actually drawn. You are going to get it on that line. Again what you are going to find is 2 things; whether you read the green right or whether your execution to our putting stroke was right. Again if the putt is not on your intended line, you are going to know it was execution. If you actually hit it on your line and it doesn't go in, you know that you read the green wrong.