How to Fix a Slice

The slice is the defining shot of beginner golf. The ball starts left of where you aimed, climbs, and then bends hard right into whatever is over there. It is frustrating, it costs enormous distance, and roughly every new golfer does it.

The encouraging part is that the cause is simple and well understood, and two of the three most effective fixes are free. This page explains what is actually happening, what to change, and — honestly — what equipment can and cannot do about it.

Everything below is written for a right-handed golfer, for whom a slice curves right. Left-handed golfers slice to the left; reverse the directions and everything else applies unchanged.

What a slice actually is

Ball flight comes down to two things at the moment of impact: where the clubface is pointing, and the path the clubhead is traveling on. The ball starts roughly where the face points, and it curves away from the path.

A slice means the face is openrelative to the path — pointing right of the direction the club is moving. That difference puts sidespin on the ball, and sidespin curves it. The classic beginner version pairs an open face with an out-to-in path (the club moving from outside the target line to inside across the ball), which produces the signature start-left-curve-right shape.

Everything that follows is about closing that gap between face and path. You do not need to eliminate it entirely — a small, predictable fade is a perfectly good golf shot.

Fix one: the grip

This is the most common cause and the easiest to change. If your hands are rotated too far towards the target — a “weak” grip — the clubface cannot square up in time.

Look down at your lead hand at address. You should see two to three knuckles. If you can only see one, rotate both hands slightly away from the target until you can. That single change fixes a meaningful proportion of beginner slices on its own.

The full method, including where the club should sit in your fingers and how the hands should join, is in our guide to gripping a golf club. It takes five minutes to learn and a few weeks to feel normal.

Fix two: grip pressure

A separate problem from grip position, and it works against you in a particularly cruel way. Squeezing the club tightly tenses your forearms; tense forearms cannot rotate through impact; a face that does not rotate stays open. The tighter you hold on to stop the slice, the more you cause it.

Aim for about four or five out of ten. If you are gripping hard because you are worried the club will slip, a glove on your lead hand solves that directly, and prevents the blisters that come with over-gripping.

Fix three: alignment

This one is a trap, because it is self-reinforcing. You slice the ball right, so next time you aim further left to compensate. Aiming left encourages the club to travel further out-to-in across the ball, which puts more sidespin on it. The slice gets worse, so you aim further left again.

Break the loop by checking your alignment properly. Lay a club on the ground pointing at your target and set your feet parallel to it. It will feel like you are aiming miles right of where you have been aiming. That feeling is the problem revealing itself.

What equipment can honestly do

We sell golf equipment through the links on this site, so it is worth being precise here: equipment reduces a slice, it does not cure one. The cause is your face and path; a club can only make squaring the face slightly easier and reduce how much the resulting sidespin curves the ball.

Within that limit, three equipment choices do genuinely help.

Offset and draw-biased drivers.Offset sets the face slightly behind the shaft, buying you a fraction more time to rotate it square. Draw-biased weighting puts more mass towards the heel, which encourages the face to close. Both are real effects and both are common in beginner drivers — our drivers roundup covers which models have them.

More loft. Higher-launching shots carry more backspin relative to sidespin, which means they curve less. A 12-degree driver slices less than a 9-degree one for the same swing. This is also why your wedges go straight and your driver does not.

A softer, lower-spinning ball.A two-piece low-compression ball spins less on full shots than a premium multi-layer ball, so the curve is smaller. Modest, but free if you were buying balls anyway — and it is the ball type a beginner should be playing regardless, as our soft versus distance guide explains.

The pragmatic workaround

Here is the advice nobody in golf retail gives: while you are fixing the cause, stop hitting the club that magnifies it.

The driver has the longest shaft, the least loft and the highest clubhead speed of anything in your bag, which makes it the club that turns a small face-to-path mismatch into a fifty-yard curve. A hybrid or a 5-wood off the tee has a shorter shaft and much more loft, and will curve dramatically less.

You will lose some distance and gain a great many fairways, which is a trade that lowers scores immediately. Our driver versus hybrid comparison works through that decision in full.

What not to do

Do not aim further left. Covered above, and it is the most common self-inflicted worsening of a slice.

Do not try to swing harder. More clubhead speed applied to the same face-to-path mismatch produces more sidespin, not less. A slice hit hard curves further.

Do not buy a new driver first.Change the grip, check the alignment, soften the pressure. If the slice persists after a few weeks of that, then look at equipment — and consider an hour with a professional, which will diagnose your specific face-and-path combination faster than any amount of reading. We are enthusiasts writing from published information, not coaches, and a good teacher watching your actual swing beats this page comfortably.