Liko81

Your OP made me cringe; scenarios just like you describe, where I get in a bad rut of unpredictable, not-normal shots off the tee that I then feel I have to made excellent shots to recover from, are half the reason I'm still a 30-cap. The other half happens between ~75 yards and the edge of the green, and these weaknesses in the pitching/chipping game compound any problems through the green by not giving me good chances to save the hole with a measured recovery strategy and a realistic up-and-down. The meltdown happens at least once a round for me, usually at that point in the round when I start getting tired but not so tired that I take it seriously. This usually happens about halfway through the back 9, typically and very unfortunately right after some of the best shots I'll make that round, as my play thus far has helped to dial in my swing just before all that walking and swinging starts getting to me. By succumbing to overconfidence and trying to power through early fatigue, I start badly slicing drives, topping 3-woods or turfing pitches, and you simply can't do that multiple times on a single hole and save par or even double-bogey. How I react depends on the round thus far. Usually if the rest of the round is business as usual, where I've parred a couple holes and had some decent shots, but have already made enough mistakes one or two at a time that I was over 50 at the turn anyway, I'll just laugh it off and move on. If I've been doing really well (relatively speaking) up until then, maybe turning at 45 and really having my game together up until this meltdown, and now I've totally screwed myself out of a real chance at double-digits, I don't tend to take it as well. By the same token, if the blowup is unexpectedly early in the round and I'm staring down a double-digit hole score on my card for the rest of the day, it's usually bad. Those are the days I want to give up the game for good. Even if my performance dramatically improves after the meltdown, the fun of any remaining holes is gone once it gets into my head that the meltdown has ended my game. A couple rounds back, it happened on the very first hole; massive slice off the first tee into the adjacent fairway, followed by spending the next 6 shots very stupidly trying to punch through or bomb over a very thick treeline while aiming at the green instead of an open stretch of fairway. Add in two strokes made at two different wrong balls and I was throwing clubs further than my ball was going long before I made the green. Did it matter that I parred the next two holes and ripped the cover off right down the center on the first par-5 of the day? Not in the slightest. My day was done, except for all the walking and swinging required over the other 6500 yards of the course. That mentality, that the round is over anytime before you hole out on the 18th, is what must be avoided at nearly all costs, because it very easily and quickly leads to "what am I still doing out here", and from there to "why did I bother to show up at all". Not healthy, and not conducive to any further improvement. As far as how you shake off a bad hole so it doesn't turn into a bad round, I don't have a cure-all, but here's what I try to follow assuming I can keep a cool head in the first place. Reflect on the hole for exactly as long as it takes to get you to the next one. A mistake ignored is a mistake repeated, so you can't just block it from your mind, but you shouldn't still be thinking about the previous hole as you're addressing your ball on the tee for the next one. Take the time to identify what went wrong and how to do better about it, without dwelling on it for three holes. Be honest with yourself in identifying the problems. In the 30 seconds to a minute between holing out and teeing off, ask yourself not only what went wrong initially to take you off a par performance for the hole, but how you compounded on that to make it a meltdown. A bad tee shot, even a total duffer move like a whiff, top or turf, does not guarantee a bad hole score. What will do that is what you do next, either trying to save the hole with what would have to be the best shot you've ever made, or going on the tilt and letting frustration take over. Don't just identify what happened to put you in a tight spot, acknowledge what you did to make it worse and take par off the table. Then, try to erase the hole from your mind, but not your scorecard. You're going to recover from that bad hole by getting back to your usual game, not Jordan Spieth's. It will be in the back of your mind that if you just birdie this next hole you can dig yourself back out. Ignore that impulse, especially if you've never birdied this hole in your life. You'll swing harder (and thus sloppier), and you'll make riskier decisions that will more likely put you further behind than pay off. Play boring golf for at least the next couple of holes. Just as in the previous point, you recover by getting back to what you do normally, not to what you see the pros doing. Unless you're a Tour pro yourself, you're very unlikely to have practiced as much as they have, or to be playing for as much as they are. Play each shot in the way that's most likely to get you the lowest score you can make, not the way that could in some convoluted circumstance get you a par or birdie. Your goal is to settle back down and get yourself back off any "tilt" you may have picked up on the bad hole. If you repeat an earlier mistake, pay attention and start making real adjustments. Slicing one drive out of bounds could have been a fluke. Slicing two out of bounds in a row is a personal problem; you're letting something slip in your technique, and you need to pay attention to what you're doing. Review everything you did on that shot; did you tee it at its usual height? Did you address it in the usual way? Are you taking your usual swing? The answer to one of these will be "no", unless your "usual" drive slices that badly (in which case you should be at the range instead of on the course, changing what's "usual" to produce a playable shot). You may need to fall back to a lower-power but more predictable "control drive", the one that only goes 220 yards instead of 250, but that you can keep straight. Don't forget to have fun. For 99.99% of golfers in the world, fun is all you get out of this game. Even for the 0.01% of golfers that play for money, if they're not having any fun playing golf, they don't last very long on the Tour. If the game really is not enjoyable to you in the long run, go do something you like more. If it used to be fun, but isn't anymore, do some deep reflecting as to why that is. Choice of course, playing partners, personal expectations, off-course pressures weighing in, etc.

I personally shun the practice greens even on the course I'm playing that day, for much the same reason. Every course I've played regularly has the practice green very near the clubhouse, and so the greens team is under extra pressure to make that one look good, even at the expense of that green not being indicative of the ones you'll find out on the course. As a result, the course greens are always significantly faster than what I've gotten into my head and hands warming up, so I usually spend my first few holes at least chasing overputts and/or being gun-shy. I will practice putting on putting greens on days I'm not playing, to practice reading, relative putt power etc, and in that case any green will do. If the weather's not conducive to being outside for an hour or two hitting balls, I'll putt on my living room area rug, which has a feel not unlike my average course green, so the adjustments I have to make on the day tend to be smaller.

Nadir is technically correct but fairly arcane; I've never heard anyone refer to the lowest point of the golf swing as the nadir. I used the term "apex' because in racing it refers to the inside point of the racing line in a turn at which you're closest to the curb. The orientation of hands to clubhead at impact does make a difference. However, the naive solution to being told you're leading the club with the hands is to release your wrists earlier, and done even a little too early this results in "casting" the club which wastes most of the power of the downswing. So, you have to be real careful telling someone who's keeping his wrists too stiff to "release more".

The basic change in feel of choking down on the club versus cutting it down will be in the thickness of the grip; you won't have that nice thick taper in the back of your lead hand, so it'll feel like you're grabbing the shaft of the club. In turn that may unconsciously cause you to add pressure to your grip which can case other problems. You can compensate a little by adding some cloth athletic tape to the grip to bulk it up further down so it feels similar. IIRC that won't be a legal club on the course but it'll be fine for the driving range to see if you like it. Any self-respecting golf store will have impact tape strips for your clubfaces on-hand, so you can see how much more or less consistent you might be with a full-length grip versus choking down.

I should have said "bottom of swing". If I had good pictures or diagrams of what I'm talking about I'd post them, but bear with me. In a "straight" swing path (sometimes called "in-to-in") and no torso shift front or back, the club would bottom out right in the center of your stance where you grounded it when you addressed the ball, and then curve inside a touch as the clubhead rises back up (so with no weight transfer and the ball teed forward this would pull-fade the shot to varying degrees). With proper weight transfer shifting your torso forward so your lead shoulder is at or just behind your front foot right at impact, everything lines back up again (hopefully), except you're still hitting the ball at or just past the bottom of your swing so there's limited up-angle to the clubhead's travel. This approach lowers launch and increases spin. With an "inside approach", aka an "inside-out" overall swing path, the club now bottoms out to the right of the center of your stance; you've essentially "rotated" the entire plane of swing toward your right (for a right-handed golfer). Now, the club has longer to travel from the bottom of the swing to get to a ball teed at the same position in your stance, so it can rise more and be travelling more upward at impact. The fact that the club will also be facing outward at the bottom of the swing is compensated for by the curve of the swing path over the ground and the rotation of the club as your hands "turn over" into your follow-through, so at impact, both the direction the clubhead is moving and the direction it's facing will be lined up with the desired flight path, but the clubhead will be moving more upward, increasing launch angle and decreasing spin, which for most golfers will produce a more ideal driver flight (and thus better distance). In a situation where the flight path was straight and on-line but the launch was too high and the spin too low, my diagnosis was a ball teed too far forward, so it's being hit upward too much. If that can't be corrected by bringing the ball back enough without causing other things to come way out of alignment, what I was imagining was a golfer with an "inside to inside" swing, who's been told to tee too far forward and hit "out" at it. They've incorrectly learned to compensate for the resulting pull-slice with extreme, early weight transfer to force the swing path more to the outside and square it up again, so they feel like they're hitting "out" like they've been told. For a golfer like this, replacing "swing out at it" with "swing on an inside to out path" will help them properly turn their swing path outward away from them, which would allow them to bring the ball back inside their lead foot, use less weight transfer, bring the launch down and the spin up. However, it could be the exact opposite case; the golfer could have a natural in-to-out swing path that's enough to push the ball when teed on the instep, so they've teed further out to line it up and now they're swinging too far up on it. For a golfer like this, my advice to bring the swing plane even further around to their trailing side is bad advice; what they need to do is "bring everything more to center"; bring the ball back in their stance, but then bring their swing plane around toward the front, moving the bottom of the swing forward in their stance so they're hitting up on it less.

That was actually the point of the article I got the chart from; that most golfers were launching too low, using too much club for their ability and/or not hitting up on it enough. Lots of golfers swinging in the 80s and 90s are launching well below their optimal angle. I'm not sure I trust the flightscope numbers, though; the launch angles seem really high and the distances much shorter than what GPS says I'm hitting on the course for an average swing speed of around 97mph.

Noodles for me, ever since I stopped showing up with a bag o' shags. Buck a ball and I love the feel. I also like the NXTs, they're just a little pricey still. I'll have to check out those Zips.

Me? Maybe 4 GIRs a round. The approach will usually be close enough to pitch or bump on, but up-and-up-and-downs are common in my game, whether that's a chip and two-putt or a "bong hit" (skulling the pitch so it "burns the green") followed by another chip back on and one or two putts. At least once a round, I'll totally melt down within about 10 yards of the edge of the green. So yeah, the short game's hurting me.

I'm not sure. What I meant was to work on a more "inside-out swing"; downswing closer to the body and through swing heading out away, which brings the plane of the swing around the front of your body and moves the apex toward the back of your stance. Like I said, I'm not even sure a launch and spin combination of this kind is even possible if you're hitting square, centered and in line with a legal club. Popping the ball that high with that little backspin would require hitting high on the clubface of a very low-lofted driver adjusted for maximum launch angle, aiming at a ball teed well forward of your left foot and a clubhead-depth or more off the ground. Hitting that far forward, straight? I just can't picture it.

Yeah, I get that, and the <80yd game is where I lose the most strokes, so there's something to be said for spending my next few buckets in the sand trap of the range instead of firing off most of them from the driving bay. But after some more time with a more modern wedge, I'm still convinced I'm missing out, so I'm still looking, and I might as well look for a wedge that will last me in both durability and playability. "Lightly used" wedges are very rare locally; I've scoured the used racks at a few different stores and everything I've seen looks like it's been soaked in salt water and then used to hit off pebbled concrete, repeatedly. I've used 2ndSwing.com before and I trust them; only trouble is they don't list info on bounce or loft, and on SM4s neither were on the club so if I want to be sure what I'm getting I have to spend $10 extra for SM5s. I looked at Edel wedges; nice, but dayum. Even used on 2ndSwing they're running $300 a club.

While teeing further up and further forward does tend to produce better distance, to a point, it's all relative to a bunch of variables that the OP hasn't shared (including his average drive distance). This is why other members suggested hitting a few with a launch monitor. The TL;DR version is that there is an optimum launch angle and amount of backspin for a player's swing speed, and the swing path of a driver, or almost any club, is not a straight line over the ground. So, teeing it higher and more forward may help you, and in fact that's more likely than not for anyone swinging under 100mph with anything less than a 12* driver face, but if you're close to the ideal already it could actually reduce distance, and it could also give you a wicked slice that will require swing path and mechanics adjustments to bring back into line, which could in turn sap your clubhead speed and leave you back where you started. Breaking this down to a troubleshooting questionnaire; stop when the suggestion after your answer to any question is bolded: Is your drive carry distance in yards better than 2.6 times your clubhead speed in mph? (80mph -> 210yd, 90 -> 235, 100 -> 260 etc) Yes - Keep doing what you're doing. The best carry distance you're going to get with a PGA-legal driver over flat terrain is maybe a touch over 2.7 times swing speed (so a 90mph swing would average ~245 yards carry, plus 5-15% rollout), and that's essentially perfection. Your distance will improve as your swing speed improves, and you can make small tweaks to swing or equipment to help. Re-evaluate if your swing speed and/or distance change significantly. No - OK, we need some work, keep reading. How's your flight path after launch? (assuming you try for a straight drive) Significant (>10% of carry distance) - Fix your swing alignment. Even if you can compensate for it on the course by opening or closing your stance, you're losing quite a bit of carry with either a draw or fade of this degree. Straight or minor draw/fade (<10% of carry) - OK, that's not the problem (though if you're at the threshold of a 10% fade you might want to work on it), keep going. What is your clubhead speed? (for a younger male golfer) <80mph - Keep practicing with the driver you have; increasing your swing speed simply by making your swing smoother while keeping a relatively straight shot will do the most for your distance at this stage. >80 - We can work with that. Young male golfers with a smooth swing should have no trouble hitting 90 and more athletic swingers can hit 100 or more, but 80mph with a straight ball flight says you're familiar with the swing. Next question. What is your "Smash Factor" with your driver? (Ball launch speed divided by clubhead speed; you'll need to determine this at a range or test bay using a launch monitor, hitting your normal game ball with your own driver) <1.4 - Something is terribly wrong with your technique or your equipment. Either you lied on one of the previous questions and you're swinging slow or very wild, or else your driver is very old, damaged or defective, or your game ball is way too soft and you're wasting energy squishing it. Try a higher-compression ball and have a clubsmith check your driver. 1.4-1.44 - Work on your ball striking. Your driver and ball are probably doing the best they can to transfer energy, but you need to make better contact to consistently hit the sweet spot, and/or increase swing speed to really get the driver's trampoline face going. You might double-check your equipment and fit, but this range of smash factor is consistent with slow or sloppy driving. 1.44-1.5 - This is about average, up to very good if you're striping it better than 1.48. Keep going. >1.5 - You're cheating. The maximum theoretical smash factor possible for a club and ball conforming to PGA rules is 1.5, and that's essentially from a perfect hit with a perfect club at >125mph. PGA/LPGA Tour pros average 1.49. Find your approximate ball launch speed in the below table (to convert from mph to km/h, multiply by 1.6), Ball Speed (km/h) Launch Angle (deg) Back Spin (rpm) 286 9.5 to 11 2450 to 2650 272 12 to 13.5 2750 to 3200 256 12.5 to 14 3000 to 3300 240 13 to 15 3300 to 3550 224 14 to 16 3500 to 3800 208 15 to 17 3750 to 3900 192 15.5 to 17.5 3750 to 3900 176 15.5 to 17.5 3800 to 4050 160 16 to 18.5 3900 to 4200 How does your launch angle compare to the range in the table? Launch is too low - Bring the ball forward in your stance and tee it higher, until launch angle is in the proper window, or you can no longer make solid contact or keep the flight straight. Then move on to the next question. Launch is OK - Sweet, we're good here. Move on to the next part. Launch is too high - Bring the ball back in your stance and tee it lower, until launch angle is in the proper window or you can no longer hit it square, centered and/or straight, and then move to the next part. With launch angle corrected as much as you need or can control, how are the new launch numbers? Launch still low, Spin low - Too strong a club. If your launch is still straight, in line and centered off the clubface, but you just can't get it up in the air nor get any spin without losing control of one of those things, you are probably using a club with too little loft for your swing. Try a higher-lofted club and/or a more flexible shaft. Launch still low, Spin OK or High - You're hitting it like an iron. You still have the ball teed too far back, delofting the face and adding extra backspin with the downward motion. If you can't hit it straight with the tee any further forward in your stance, you need to work on developing a driver swing that bottoms out further forward in your stance, using more weight transfer and/or bringing your swing plane around more in front of you. Once you've straightened your shots out with a more forward stance, check the numbers again. Launch OK, Spin Low - Teed too far forward. You're hitting up on the ball so much that you're taking out too much backspin. Move the ball back in your stance and tee it lower, then hit a few and ask yourself this same question. If you can't increase the spin enough before launch drops too low, then you need more loft. Launch OK, Spin OK - You're doing it right. If everything's square, in-line and centered, and both launch numbers are in the proper range, then as of this moment after any adjustments made, you're doing everything right in your stance, address and swing to give yourself maximum distance for your swing speed. Grats. If it's not enough, increasing swing speed will be the best solution. Launch OK, Spin High - Teed too far back. You're hitting the ball at or behind the bottom of your swing, and the downward motion coupled with the loft is giving you too much backspin for a ballooning shot. Move the ball forward in your stance and raise the tee a little, then try some more and check the numbers. If you can't get the spin numbers down before launch goes too high, you're probably using too weak a club and need less loft. Launch still high, Spin OK or High - You need a stronger club. Your swing is probably OK, maybe a little far back, but that's because you need less loft and/or a stiffer shaft to bring down the amount of "help" the club is giving you. Try a lower-lofted driver with adjustments to your address as necessary until the launch angle is in the zone, then check the spin numbers. Launch still high, Spin low - This is golf, not cricket. This is unlikely to be possible with ordinary golf equipment and a swing that produces a straight shot, but if you're achieving this, you're either getting handsy and casting the club, or you're hitting so far out and up on it that you must be taking a full step forward in your follow-through. If you can't control the shot any further back in the stance, you probably have what would be a severe outside-in swing that you're compensating for with extreme weight transfer and launching your hands forward and out. Work on drills to pull the swing plane back around to your trailing side and then try this test again.

Interesting. My ideas for a 50-54-58 are pure speculation, I haven't hit any of these lofts in any grind even off the mat, so I'm paying attention to all the opinions. Your layout sounds similar to how I think I'd like to use a three-wedge set (essentially two gaps and a sand, instead of gap-sand-lob like pganapathy's layout), except I think I want an M grind on the 54 so I can use that club for flops. Your point about the K grind is taken; I have a 60* in an older Sunday bag set (Old Turbo Power, Callaway BB knockoffs), and the combination of the bounce and the extremely wide sole essentially made the thing unplayable with my more centered, sweeping pitch swing; by the time my swing bottomed out, the leading edge of that stupid thing was a quarter-ball off the deck. I'm still interested in hitting a K (it doesn't look nearly as bad as my old 60*) but I'll keep past experience in mind and make sure to try it from thinner lies. I was expecting to be able to get a 56-12K, keeping a 52-56 setup like I'm used to, but it simply doesn't exist in Vokey's conforming wedges; the only mention of a Vokey 56 K, any bounce angle, is a fairly old pre-CC model, and on paper there's a bit of a jump in bounce angle between the 14F and the 12S. Similarly, they don't put the M or S grind on 52* clubs, though the F grind on that one was very workable so I could probably deal. I'll definitely be taking WUTiger's advice and looking for a nearby Titleist Thursday event. Hopefully I'll find a venue with natural turf testing areas and a bunker so I can put them through all of their paces.

He probably should have gone into more detail as to why. Essentially, when playing your short irons, you want less or even no weight transfer, because the ball is further back in your stance; if you move your torso and shoulders forward you bring the swing path forward and risk topping the ball. This is especially true if you're pitching; lower swing speeds than your full swing allow more "yips", so the pitch swing is already prone to "swing depth" issues (topping/turfing). A common drill to teach this is to have the player put all their weight over the lead foot, with the second foot just for balance, and pitch from that position. If all your weight is already forward, you can't move your swing path, and you get more consistent pitching behavior and fewer mishits. The correct position of the ball, then, will no longer be slightly back of center, it'll be just behind your leading arch. This stance is not recommended on the course, however, and a better overall technique that accomplishes the same result on both the range and the links is simply to put your feet together for a pitch, or even for a gentle full windup. Then you simply place the ball in the same position relative to your torso that will get the club up "over" the ball at impact to avoid turfing, but not so far back that you're now topping. For me that's about in line with the big toe on my back foot.

IMO, blades have an advantage for a good ball striker over more "forgiving" technology in the following ways: They keep you sharp. When you can get away with a mishit on a game improvement iron, and get less feedback overall from the club about how you're hitting, your ball striking tends to get sloppy, and even the most forgiving iron in the market will eventually be unable to keep it straight and down the line. Blades tell you when you screw up, even if they have some technology to help you out a little with toe hits. Blades are more workable. Extreme cavity weighting is like having training wheels on a bike; they'll keep you upright, but they keep you upright. Game improvement irons can't tell the difference between an intentional fade to work the ball around a tree, and an accidental slice while aiming down a wide open fairway. The assumption made in the design and the target market of a GI is that any mishit is accidental. The engineering of a blade assumes you know what you're doing. Blades have better craftsmanship and factory QA. Better ball strikers tend to play more blade-like irons, and better players demand better quality in their equipment, so the manufacturers pay extra attention to detail in the design and construction of low-cap blade irons. 30-cap casual players just want to get the ball downrange, and they also tend to be more budget-minded since they don't play/practice every day, so GI heads tend to have looser manufacturing tolerances and less expensive shafts, the effects of which are largely buried in inconsistent swing mechanics of the average hacker. Most blades are forged, allowing greater tweaking by clubsmiths to your exact specs. Want your 9-iron 5 degrees stronger, or weaker? With a harder, more brittle cast club that's really asking a lot of the clubhead's ability to bend, but for a forged iron that was made by pounding on a blank block of iron, no big deal really. Blade doesn't necessarily mean blade anymore. When people think "blade", their grandfather's set from the '50s usually comes to mind; thick "muscleback" clubheads, weak lofts, dime-sized sweet spot, no sole, if you don't hit it absolutely perfectly you will pay. No longer, really. Irons built as "blades" for the low-cap, scratch and tour pro market still incorporate some of the innovations available in mid- and high-cap irons. Cavity-style weighting (usually called "cut-muscle") to increase MOI, a lower CG for higher launch, in turn allowing a stronger loft for better distance, a thinner face with elastomer tuning ports, and a thicker, rounder sole for better turf interaction. All of these innovations of the last 25 years or so can be found on the modern "blade" iron, just not anywhere near the degree that cast-head GI irons have them.

Understood; bag makeup is all about personal preference, if something doesn't work for you there's no sense giving it a slot. I would still recommend trying out a third wedge, like a 54. Yes it's close, but that allows for a difference in bounce which is important for different lies, and also in sole grind which allows other options. You might, for instance, pick a 54 with a grind that allows you to open the clubface, allowing lob and flop shots similar to what you could do with a 60* or higher. Voila, 4 wedges (including PW) just effectively became 5, adding two more weapons to your greenside game. If you don't think playing the open flop shot is in the cards for you, consider a low- to mid-bounce 60*, again giving you additional approach options you don't have now. In this case it would be the ability to hit your normal full swing as close as 40-60 yards, and to pitch instead of chip from rough with a tight pin position. Remember that your wedges and your putter account for 2/3 of your strokes, so making the right shot up close is the best way to drop your score. The more options you have inside 80 yards that you are confident in, the better the outcome.

Yes; if anything, I need to fill a gap that still exists between my PW (Ping G10, 46*) and the 52* in terms of distance. 50-54-58 is also appealing, especially since it would give me a choice of grinds as well as lofts. The downside is cost; that's $450 in clubs at retail, and the SM6 is still to new to have decent used prices.

You might consider a second hybrid overlapping the irons more. This is a better idea the closer your chosen 3h is to a 3w surrogate (long, low-spin distance). I overlap a 4i and 4h in my bag (my 3w has redeemed itself in recent range and course trips, so it stays for now), and I like the hybrid's behavior better when I get a clean but long fairway shot at the green. The higher launch and spin versus the iron gives me a club that can carry a 180-yard green and still stick (and that happens to be about the length of the longer two par-3s on my usual course). My 4i is more a utility hammer, punching out from under trees, picking the ball off bare packed dirt (usually also under trees) etc. Degree-wise, if you have a 46* PW then the 56 is a little more of a jump than between the 46 and 50, but then my own bag has 52* and 56* blade wedges following up a 46* GI pitching wedge, so what do I know about filling the gap. You might play around with a 50-54-58 arrangement on demo day, to see if a second fairway wedge with a different sole grind gives you any new useful options greenside. Last suggestion; mini driver. If your driving with a standard 460cc 1-wood is ok, but you can't hit a regular fairway wood to save your life, then a mini driver might work for you. TaylorMade's AeroBurner offering is lofted a touch more than a standard 3-wood (16*), but is deeper-faced than a true fairway wood for more hitting area and forgiveness. Off the deck, the slightly higher loft will allow hitting down into the ball more like an iron. You may have to look around to find one, but it's worth a try if, like you say, you need to bridge a distance gap between your driver and 3h.

This time last year I was scoring about 115. This year the average is closer to about 103. So, yes, I'm better, but for some reason it's even more frustrating to be this close to double digits than to be totally hopeless. I find myself looking at my scorecard at the end of the round and knowing it could have happened this time, if I'd just cleared that bunker the first time, didn't skull that approach pitch, hit that hybrid shot a little cleaner for distance, and didn't spend most of hole 5 on hole 6's fairway. When there are fewer things keeping you from a milestone, the fact they keep happening is that much more maddening.

I don't, and I don't think it would ever be a good idea for me. My swing is inconsistent enough without spending my range time hitting clubs with different head weights, swing weights and distances, then show up at dawn for tee time and have to readjust in about 15 minutes to my game sticks. Besides, my current irons are G10s; cast, almost 10 years old and bought used, so there's not a lot of motivation for me to try to save them by hitting anything older or more beat up. And when I get new irons, I'm going to be looking for a set with a little less forgiveness (Ping i-series, Mizuno JPX Pro etc) to force myself to dial in my ball striking, so the newer set will actually be my range set until I feel good enough with them to game them.

I voted yes, but it's as much about "me" conditions as course conditions. My swing speed is right on the cusp between a 10.5 regular and a 9.5 stiff. If I had the money for a custom fitted new driver at 9.5 regular, or an R15 or M1 adjustable, I'd be all over it. As it is, if it's windy, or I'm just feeling really "on" that day, I'll go with the stiffer driver to bring the launch angle down and add rollout, otherwise I play it safe with the reg-flex and higher launch. Other than that, I hem and haw over whether to bring my 3i and 4i in the course if I'm walking, or to save the weight and just play 12 sticks. I hardly ever hit these from the fairway, unless I just can't dial in my 3w or my 4h (usually at least one of these two will work for me any given day) and if I'm punching out from under a canopy, a half-swing 5 has been more reliable for me lately, if a bit shorter. I have two different 3-woods, but my older Burner 3 is all but traded in as we speak; my newer AeroBurner 3HL is about 20 yards longer and also easier to hit. The rest of my bag is indispensable, mainly cause I don't have anything else that will do the job. Part of me would love to have a selection of wedges to adjust for differing bunker and rough conditions and really dial in the short game; the other part of me knows that given 5 wedges, I'll probably gravitate toward 2 or maybe 3 that I'll use every round, whether the sand is fluffy or packed solid, or the roughs are dense tufts, thin bermuda or ratty tall fescue.

I had/have the opposite problem; a playable driver shot wasn't too hard for me, but I might only manage 1 decent 3w shot out of every 4 tries. My 4h was a little easier to hit once I started treating it like an iron, but that tiny hitting area on these clubs requires really good consistency and ball striking just to get the ball to move forward more than 10 yards at a time. At the same time, you have that "this is a distance club, better grip it and rip it" mentality, especially when you need a good shot to make up for a poor tee shot, and it takes discipline to back it off and focus on a controlled, straight shot.

TL;DRers read the bold text: Currently, beyond a 46* GI PW, I have two Warrior Golf wedges from a garage sale; one 52* wedge with practically no bounce at all, and a 56-12 sand wedge. They have served me well, and I haven't had to deal with Warrior Golf's iffy marketing which is a plus, but these wedges have a very prominent square heel which sharply limits the situations in which I can open the clubface for that nice high 20-yard pitch that sticks hard where you put it. I've gotten better at that open shot out of sand and thick grass lies, despite the equipment, but now I'd like a wedge that actually facilitates it, especially from slightly thinner lies than what I can currently get away with (most of the roughs here in Texas aren't so rough, really, unless you hit into the shade of a tree). So now the question. If I want a pretty direct replacement for my current gap, I'd pick the Vokey SM6 in a 52-08F configuration to play square approaches from the thin lies that are common here in Texas. If I do, then does a dedicated 56-12 sand wedge alongside a 52-08 gap make sense? Opening the gap wedge about 4-6 degrees, theoretically, will give me the steeper profiles that are traditional sand wedge territory, like 56-12 and 58-14. Hitting an example of the 52-08 in a bay gave me a wonderful range of behaviors, and even with the full sole the club opens up much more easily than my Warrior. The only trick is finding out exactly how much to open the club to get a particular loft (if that's even necessary). I would lose the slightly longer shaft of the traditional dedicated sand wedge, but that seems to be falling out of style anyway in favor of just digging your feet into the bunker to get under the ball. In any case, hitting fat in sand is something I have no problem doing; if anything I could use less shaft length on the sand wedge I have. Alternately, it appears that 56-12 is also a bit passe for sand wedges; Vokey only offers the wider sand-surfing K-grind on the 58-14 and 60-14, which I suppose should tell me something about the state of the art in bunker play. If this is the new normal, then I could get a 52-08F and a 58-14K as a pair. A 58 with that much bounce and sole would be kind of a one-trick pony given my pitching technique from anything firmer (I used to have a lob wedge with similar specs, and with my centered, sweeping pitch swing it was pretty much useless for anything less than a perfect tufted lie), but the way I play approach shots on the average round, I have no problem with a dedicated club for that particular trick. So to follow-up, is the 58-14K wedge a better match to a 52-08F?

That's one opinion. The poll shows about a 50-50 split between mental scoring and other methods, so without a breakdown by age I would hazard my own guess that yours is wrong. As far as ordering the choices, the current order is by complexity/cost of the solution; keeping track in your head is free and the simplest method, while a digital scorecard is usually the most expensive (taking into account the cost of the smartphone in addition to the free app run on it, in that case). I ordered the questions this way and not from simplest to most complex to encourage people to at least consider all options before saying you just keep track in your head. BTW, this thread was post #2 on this forum, and this post, #4, will be my last as the welcome I have received has been downright chilling. Thank you Zeph, newtogolf, Hazard Magnet, indykappa, and Dave for your helpful and at least neutrally-voiced posts. Fourputt and David in FL, shame on you; I don't know how you got to be forum leaders or what the title implies here, but this forum will die if its "leaders" continue to show the elitism and snobbishness evident in your response to such a simple question.

Good points. Perhaps it would be prudent to say that this would be my first full set of irons; the "Sunday bag" I currently play with is odd lofts only, and I find sometimes I miss having that 6 or 8, which to me means that it's time to invest in a full set. The long irons in the set I have are also graphite shafted (UST Comp 75; nothing fancy), and compared to steel-shafted demo clubs in the store I find it doesn't gain me any distance, so I'd rather have steel, for as much consistency as I can get. I have spent some time and money on lessons, and my ball striking and flight path are much better than when I started playing (which is also when I got these irons fitted to me). So, I feel that a new full set of irons that I can continue to improve with is in order. I will take a second look at the dot color now that I know what they mean. According to Ping's basic fitting tool, I'm right on the cusp between black and blue (so one step further upright), and between standard shaft length and an extra 1/4". These felt good, but pushed, which may mean they were a little flat, or it may just be the Indian and not the arrow (like I said, they straightened out by moving the ball an inch or two forward). Let's assume, for a minute, that the G10s ended up being a perfect fit (or could get that way with a minor tweak; Ping's own docs say the G10s can be adjusted up to five colors from their starting color). Good buy at $240, or would you still recommend looking for newer even if that means more money?

Just thought I'd throw this out. There are a lot of ways to keep track of the number of swings you've taken during play of a hole before marking it down on the scorecard; which one do you find works best for you?