Putting Basics for Beginners

Ask a beginner what they want to improve and they will say their driver. Look at their scorecard and the strokes are on the green.

A typical round contains somewhere around 40 percent of its strokes on the putting surface, and for a new golfer that share is usually higher, because three-putts and the occasional four-putt are routine. Putting is also the only part of golf you can practice properly at home, on a carpet, in ten-minute stretches, without a range, a car journey or a bucket of balls.

No part of the game offers a better return on attention. Here is what actually matters.

The setup

Eyes over the ball

This is the one that fixes aim. Take your stance, hold a spare ball between your eyes, and drop it. It should land on or just inside the ball you are putting.

If it lands well outside, your eyes are outside the target line, and you will consistently aim right of where you think. If it lands well inside, you will aim left. Either way you are missing putts you struck perfectly, which is enormously frustrating and entirely fixable in thirty seconds.

A light grip

Hold the putter lightly. Palms facing each other, grip running up the lifelines of your hands rather than through your fingers, and no squeezing. Tension in the hands turns a stroke into a jab, and a jab has no distance control at all.

Many golfers find a thicker putter grip genuinely helps here, because it fills the hands and reduces the temptation to squeeze. The Rules specifically permit putter grips to be non-circular, which is why nearly all of them have a flat front for your thumbs.

Ball slightly forward

Just ahead of the middle of your stance, roughly under your lead eye. This lets the putter strike the ball fractionally after the low point of the stroke, which starts the ball rolling immediately rather than skidding for the first few inches. A rolling ball holds its line far better than a skidding one.

The stroke

Rock your shoulders. That is genuinely most of it.

The putting stroke should be driven by the shoulders moving like a pendulum, with the wrists quiet and the lower body still. The arms and putter hang from the shoulders and go along for the ride. If your wrists hinge during the stroke, you have added a moving part that changes the loft and speed at impact, and neither is possible to repeat.

Two checkpoints:

Tempo should be even.The same rhythm back and through. Most missed short putts are decelerated — taken back too far and then slowed into the ball.

Through-stroke at least as long as the backstroke. If you are taking the putter back a foot and following through six inches, you are decelerating. Shorten the backswing rather than forcing the follow-through.

Distance control is the whole game

This is the section that will save you the most shots, so it is worth reading twice.

Beginners obsess over line — whether the ball starts left or right of the hole. Line matters, but three-putts are almost never caused by line. From thirty feet, a putt that starts two feet off line still finishes near the hole. A putt that finishes eight feet short or ten feet past is a three-putt regardless of how perfect the line was.

Control distance with the length of the stroke, not with force. Keep the tempo identical and vary how far back you take the putter. A longer stroke at the same rhythm sends the ball further. This is far more repeatable than trying to hit the ball harder or softer, because rhythm is something your body can reproduce and variable force is not.

Reading a green, simply

Green reading looks mysterious and is mostly common sense applied in the right order.

Look at the whole green as you walk up. The overall slope is usually obvious from thirty yards away and surprisingly hard to see once you are standing next to the ball. Greens generally drain toward water and toward lower ground, and that drainage direction is your primary clue.

Then look at the last few feet. Crouch behind the ball and study the area immediately around the hole. The ball is traveling slowest there, so that is where it breaks most. A putt that looks straight for twenty feet and then falls away in the last three will miss on the low side unless you account for it.

Play more break than you think. Almost every amateur under-reads break, and a putt that misses on the low side had no chance of going in at any speed. A putt that misses high at least had a chance.

A ten-minute practice routine

This works on a carpet at home or on a practice green, and it targets the two things that matter.

Five minutes on short putts. From three feet, hole ten in a row. If you miss, start again. This builds the confidence that stops you steering three-footers, and it is the most direct scoring practice there is.

Five minutes on pace. From twenty or thirty feet, putt to a target with the aim of finishing within a three-foot circle rather than holing it. Count how many of ten finish inside the circle. That number, tracked over a few weeks, is a far better measure of your putting than how many you hole.

Ten minutes, three times a week, at home, in front of the television. It is not glamorous. It will lower your scores faster than anything else you could do with the same time.

A few rules worth knowing

You may mark, lift and clean your ball on the putting green, provided you mark its position first — a small coin behind the ball is standard. You may repair pitch marks and old hole plugs on your line. You may not test the surface by rolling a ball or scraping it.

The flagstick may now be left in the hole while you putt, and there is no penalty if your ball hits it. Whether to leave it in is entirely your choice. Our rules guide covers the handful of rules you actually need for a first round, and the etiquette guidecovers where to stand while somebody else putts — which matters more socially than any rule.