What's an Edel Putter worth? About 1.6 putts per round

[KWGolfNerd]

My Edel putter story: 

Short version: Switching to an Edel putter saved me an average of 1.6 putts per round, based on a comparison of 10 years of hole by hole data, all taken from league play at my home course. Best golf money I have ever spent. 

Long version:

For Christmas 2014, my marvellous wife bought me an Edel Putter. My fitting was with Ryan at The Golf Lab in Toronto. Of note: instead of the mirror test, they do the whole thing using a SAM putt lab...which is brilliant. Super accurate, and I got to go home with some fancy charts and graphs showing the difference between my original Ping Craz-E, and the new Edel flatstick.

My initial putts showed that I lined up about 1.5 degrees closed, then my swing path goes about 2.5 degrees outward. Face angle relative to path stayed roughly constant at impact, so the net effect was about a 0.9 degree push to the right on every putt. As per Dave Pelz, that means either I miss a lot of putts to the right, or read my break a little more left than reality as a subconscious compensation. Probably a mix of both. Frankly for a 17 handicapper, 1 degree is decent: you can still catch the lip on a 10 foot putt with a 1 degree push (insert high school trigonometry). 

The bigger thing the stats showed was that my pace was all over the place. Median was 1710 (mm/sec) for the 15 foot putt, but I was very inconsistent: anywhere from 1500 to 1900. and the results showed it: several putts left short, others long. This was after 30 minutes of warm up on their indoor green.

Ryan fixed my pace in his first attempt: adding a 300g weight to the head end of the club, and suddenly I was stroking everything at a very consistent pace. The average was 1678, so almost the same as before, but the variance was tiny. Showed up in the putts as well as the stats. Damn near magic. Also really tightened up the impact dots on the club face.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Aim was less magical. We went through about 15 variants over 45 minutes. He was trying to trick my brain into aiming 2.4 degrees closed, which if I used my existing path, would end up perfect. However somewhere around the 2 degrees closed mark, something subconscious would kick in and my path would change. Interesting was: the shape of my path was nearly identical, but at some point the closed setup would trick me into starting that path outside, instead of down the line, undoing the gain.

In the end, we got it to around 1.9 degrees closed, with an ultimate effect of 0.5 degrees open at impact.

Before:

After:

Then the hardest part: waiting for my putter to arrive, and then waiting for our Canadian snow to melt.

Fast forward 10 months: how did the putter perform? I loved it from day one, but would it make a numerical difference in my scores?

Here's the cool part: I play in a Sunday Morning Golf League at the local muni. It's a social league, with handicaps ranging between 5-25, but we take the rules seriously, and of note: we've kept per-hole stats for every player going back for 25 years. That includes strokes and # of putts for every single hole. I bought my Craz-E in 2004, and used it every year since. The entire 2015 season was with the Edel:

Season	Avg Putts / round	League Ranking - Putts	Avg 3 putts / round	League Ranking - 3 Putts	Avg Gross
2004	32.89	8 / 11	2.22	10 / 11	98.17
2005	32.15	8 / 11	1.77	8 / 11	101.31
2006	32.60	7 / 11	1.80	8 / 11	96.25
2007	32.29	7 / 11	1.71	9 / 11	99.12
2008	32.12	5 / 12	1.41	6 / 12	99.18
2009	31.57	5 / 11	1.79	8 / 11	93.43
2010	32.50	7 / 11	1.17	5 / 11	95.17
2011	31.08	3 / 10	0.92	3 / 10	88.38
2012	32.33	8 / 12	1.56	7 / 12	90.00
2013	32.14	6 / 10	1.93	8 / 10	88.21
2014	32.17	5 / 12	1.83	6 / 12	90.61
2015	30.55	1 / 12	1.20	1 / 12	87.95

Avg putts per round with the Craz-E over 11 years was 32.17, this season was 30.55...an improvement of 1.62 putts per round. I reduced my 3-putt average from 1.65 to 1.20 disasters per round. And far more importantly: I went from being middle of the pack in our league, to being the number one putter. woo!

My league gross dropped from 90.61 in 2014 to 87.95...a one season improvement of 2.6 strokes. It looks like 1.6 of that is directly related to putting, but I believe (but can't prove) the rest comes from putting too. On a regular basis this year, if I found myself short sided or some other ugly situation, I would just gouge the ball out to the fat part of the green and be ultra confident I could two putt from anywhere. In the past I would try to get too fancy from bad spots trying to get it close, and end up double-chipping or worse. Good putting breeds confidence.

I love my Edel putter, and I'm seriously considering picking up an Edel wedge set this winter.

Appendix:
If you look, I also had a good putting year in 2011. That's actually an interesting comparison. That was the year I took an excellent 10-week short game + putting clinic at Whistle Bear golf club, and practised like crazy. Obviously it made a big impact that year, but I stopped practising and lost my sharpness. This year I had a lot of good intentions for regular practise, but it never happened.