Explosion holes

[saskriders]

How can I get rid of those 2 or 3 really bad holes per round. I am shooting low 90's right now, but fell I could be shooting high 80's (never broken 90) if I could get rid of these bad holes. Most holes I will bogey with par every 3 or 4 holes, and sometimes a birdie or two. I rarely double bogey, but usually I screw up chances to crush my record with terrible holes. For example, last week I shot 47 for 9 holes (par 36) with a 7 (triple) and a 8 (quadruple).

[carpediem4300]

Its all mental, most of it anyways i finfd,...I can have 3 good holes then 4 atrocious holes, but as soon as I stop caring i start shooting good again.

Lower your expectations i would say, its helping me at present to become more consistent

[ezmorningrebel]

can you pinpoint what is causing your blow up holes or is something different each time?

eliminating penalty strokes for OB/lost ball is the first place i would look.

[LankyLefty]

I call them the "Oh Shit Holes".... getting rid of them is how you get form 90 to 80 at least for me it is anyway. Ill be going along jsut fine then go +11 over 3 holes and finish at +18 or 19.... its quite frustrateing.

[blackxpress]

First off, do as I say and not as I do. I still have blow up holes on occasion but not that many. The most important thing I've done to eliminate those ugly holes is concentrate on keeping the ball in play. Off the tee I hit the longest club I know I can hit straight, which is rarely my driver. The only time I hit my driver is on long par 4 holes with wide fairways and wide open par 5s when I might have a chance of reaching in 2. I tee off with my 5 iron a lot. I can hit it straight 180 yds if I get all of it. If I'm really grooving my swing and want a little extra distance I might hit my 3i. It'll go 200. 180 - 200 in the fairway beats OB every time. The other way to minimize blow up holes is by taking my medicine if I do happen to hit it into trouble. If I hit the ball into the trees I'll usually chip it back into the fairway instead of what I used to do which was try to hit some kind of heroic shot like Tiger or Phil might try. It works for them most of them time but it ends up getting me in more trouble. Phil might be able to hit the stinger off the pine needles, thread it between all the branches and stuff it 5 ft. from the cup. I'm more likely to bounce it off a tree trunk and end up in more trouble than I was in to begin with. Just concede a stroke, put it back in play and move on. Finally, if you hit a bad shot shake it off. Take a couple of deep breaths and regain your composure before you address your next shot. I used to let one bad shot lead to another. I try not to do that anymore.

[turtleback]

Follow Raymond Floyd's first rule of being in trouble:  Don't be in trouble on the next shot.

IOW, it is more important to get your ball back into play than it is to try to hit the perfect (and risky) recovery shot.  You aren't Tiger and you aren't Seve.  Take your medicine, even if it means a double bogey.

Now if I could just follow it myself.  LOL

[inthecup]

I agree. No hero shots. Chip out of trouble. If you can not reach reliably lay up even to a double. Started breaking through 90 this month. After that short game can save you. Miss green pitch close putt it in.

[darkhunter139]

I am shooting very low 100's now and have broke into the 90s once.  I also feel like blowup holes are one of my biggest problems right now.  The other day I started off with a +5 on the first hole and finished the front 9 with a 50.  Its very frustrating! I feel your pain.

[tmf9]

Hey man don't feel bad a couple weeks ago I was one over through 12 holes until I one-uped Kevin Na with a 17 ..happens to everyone.

[bkoguy07]

Originally Posted by tmf9

Hey man don't feel bad a couple weeks ago I was one over through 12 holes until I one-uped Kevin Na with a 17..happens to everyone.

Nice, but shouldnt you just take an 8 at your handicap and move on?  Anyways, how'd you do that lol

[B-Con]

I've been in the same boat recently. I only broke 90 last month (and stayed under for the last three rounds), but before that I was constantly carding 91s and 92s with one or two blow-up holes each. Sure enough when I broke 90 it was because I avoided those. For me, it came down to 1) avoiding water hazards (local course has 8/18 holes with forced carries of some sort) 2) getting onto the green from within 30 yards, and 3) hitting good shots out of trouble. Bad holes usually started with a bad drive, so I had to be able to hit a second shot that could get me on the fairway and move a bit of distance too -- usually a long iron or hybrid with a short 1/3 swing was precise enough to get between trees and still get a 100 to 140 yards of progress toward the hole. I also got an idea for how high/fast my shots climbed, so that I'd know if I could hit over a treeline or not. That let me hit into/past the trees and still get back out on the next shot. I think that hitting a long chip out of trees as a recovery shot is under-rated. Yeah, you probably shouldn't be a hero. But if you can chip out with a wedge or short iron, you can take a slightly longer chip with a longer club and get an extra 100 yards of distance. That simple recovery shot has saved me about a stroke a game. Practice precisely controlled long chip shots with long irons or hybrids and you can still get 1/2 to 2/3 the distance your ideal full swing would've gotten you. Hitting greens from nearby is crucial. Blow-up holes for me usually involved a pitch or chip that got skulled, hit fat, or otherwise completely wasted. A 30-yard pitch that lands just short of the green and forces me to chip on and two-putt is just infuriating. Chips that go across the green and force you to chip coming back just make life miserable. Those short shots have to find the green every time. It gives you a nice buffer of 30 yards around the green that, once you're in, you know it's only 3 shots to go at most. Water hazards and OB rack up strokes like nothing else. It's easy to start carding doubles with penalties. If you hit OB off the teebox, all of a sudden if you play your standard bogey it turns into a triple bogey. Worse yet, your playing that hole under pressure and you might make another mistake. That's unacceptable. You have, have, have to get off the teebox and onto playable, solid ground. You can't avoid blow-up holes without doing that. That's a necessary, but by itself not sufficient, for eliminating blow-up holes. Lastly, consistency is key. Most of your holes are somewhat consistent (I think playing bogey golf is kind of the beginning of consistency), but it's hard to card an 8 without hitting some truly terrible shots. Those shots show you that your ball-striking isn't as consistent as you'd like it to be. As cliche as it sounds, you need to avoid hitting really crappy shots. :-D I practiced with my short irons and hybrids constantly for a long time to get to a point where I was comfortable with them. I'm still not great with them, but I rarely out-right waste a shot with them (I reserve completely wasted shots for long irons and the driver ;-) ). You need to not hit shots that you were better off not even hitting. Finding a subset of clubs to really work with and get comfortable with would probably be helpful. Because if you're not completely throwing away strokes on a hole, it's hard to get anything over a double bogey. Try this: Every time you card anything over a bogey, subtract bogey from your score and label the resulting number as how many strokes you wasted. (Bogey obviously isn't the perfect standard, but at our level it usually means that all our shots had to count.) Once you know how many strokes were wasted, list which shots you took that got you basically no gain. Eg, for a par 4 on which you card a 7 you have 2 wasted shots. Perhaps one of those was a failed attempt to hit out of the trees and another was a skulled chip that went right across the green. Take a couple rounds and compare which shots were your completely wasted shots for each hole. The scenarios that come up the most are the ones that you need to work on.

[tmf9]

Originally Posted by bkoguy07

Nice, but shouldnt you just take an 8 at your handicap and move on?  Anyways, how'd you do that lol

3 tee shot OB and the 4th tee shot was pulled into an opposite fairway lol.  Idk what the hell happened i was hitting the ball fine before and after that hole, my swing just left me momentarily.

[Shorty]

Youn have the same problem that all golfers have, shooting around the 90s.  It is universal. Y

There wouldn't be a golfer anywhere who, if you said to them:

Think of the last 100 rounds you've had. For each round, replace your three worst holes with bogey. How did you go?

Every player would suddenly have turned 93s into 85s

"Advice" like hitting fairways and avoiding hazards is ridiculous. That's obvious. Bogeys are fine. You have to avoid turning the doubles into triples and quads by being sensible. Take your medicine.  Also, realise that if you have a 7, a three somewhere along the lline makes the two holes average a 5. 18 x 5 = 90.

You will never eliminate the odd bad shot, but you have to make that bad shot count as one, not 4.

[keb]

Check out Raymond Floyd's book "The Elements of Scoring."  It helped get me into the low 90's consistently.  I need to reread it and hopefully make another drop in my handicap index.

[saevel25]

well most blow up holes happen alot around the green, so dont get cute with the shot, get it on the green first as the top priority.

Learn how to hit a punch shot, i gotten good at this, i can hit a precise hole i want, with a low shot and gain yards and still be safe.

Know your trajectories, i can feel which clubs go at what height, so i make sure i can go under and over what ever i want.

If its a par 5 and you cant get there, punch out to a 3rd shot, or hit an iron. I got my dad and my uncle to do this, i told my dad, hey its 200 there you can try to smoke that 3wood or hit a club that goes 100, and then hit it again. He did that and ended up with par. If he hit that 3 wood from the rough, he could end up at 30 yards short, or in trouble elsewere. Though he's one of the best wood players i ever scene. He is deadly with woods and rescue clubs.

[LankyLefty]

Punch shot has gotten me outa some tough spots, useing hybrids to hit rollup shots the you sorta chip out into the fairway and let them roll out towards the green are another great recovery tool.

[B-Con]

"Advice" like hitting fairways and avoiding hazards is ridiculous. That's obvious. Bogeys are fine. You have to avoid turning the doubles into triples and quads by being sensible. Take your medicine.  Also, realise that if you have a 7, a three somewhere along the lline makes the two holes average a 5. 18 x 5 = 90.

You will never eliminate the odd bad shot, but you have to make that bad shot count as one, not 4.

For something that's obvious, it doesn't happen enough. When you can shoot in the low 90s consistently, you only have a couple blow-up holes per round. Those are often caused by penalties of some sort. Not always, but often. Most of us accumulate a couple penalties over 18 holes, and I can guarantee you they aren't on the holes where we get par. When it happens on the teebox, we're often somewhat [i]lucky[/i] to get double bogey. I've seen people play, hit three balls into the water, and conclude at the end of the round that they needed to spend more time putting. By all means, work on your putting, but if you only have one three-putt all round, you wasted one stroke there and 3 to 6 (depending on drop scenarios) on the water. For something that's obvious, it doesn't get fixed as religiously as it should be. Your assessment that hazards and badly missed fairways cause bogies isn't really true. Missing the fairway and hitting hazards isn't what causes bogeys (for the higher handicapper), it's just plain ball-striking. We can't hit the green from a clean lie with a 7-iron more than 40% of the time if our lives depended on it. Drives that hit the fairway are what give us bogeys, its drives into the trees, water, and OB that give us double-bogeys. We'll have bad shots occur often, but defines the bogey golfer, it's not really his demon. It's the major mistakes and penalties that take a decent effort of par + 1 and turn it into par + 3. Not all of those involve trees and hazards, but a lot do. The ones that don't are usually approach shots that completely miss (abnormally bad ball striking) and chips/pitches that completely miss the ideal landing area. Bogey golfers typically play "drive, approach, pitch, two-putt". There are a few pars and doubles in there just from expected chance given the inconsistency of our swings. It's hard to play that style from thick trees or hazards.

[saevel25]

Well not really that hard, if you know how to advance the ball as far as possible back into play.

Well for me, i hit a ball out of bounds, i hit a push drive, but i hit a 6 iron to about 30 feet and made par on the par 5.. The next hole, a par 5, i top my punch out, hit a good punch, pitched on and sank a 30 footer for par again. Two ways to get par, one a lost ball, another was just getting up and down.

Hagen made a living on this, 3 bad shots and one great shot and you can get par...

Really its a mental thing, to stay in focus. My blow up holes happen when i loose my concentration. When i get focuses and know i can make a shot, thats when good things happen.