When faced with an uphill or downhill shot, you need to adjust your club selection. Assuming that you know your regular distances, the rule of thumb is to add or subtract one club for each ten yards of elevation.

A second consideration: On severe uphill shots, make sure the club has enough loft to clear the sides of the hill. You may correctly judge distance, but a low flying ball that slams into a steep uphill slope can put you in an awkward spot. In that case, laying up may be in order.

There’s a short par 4 at a local course that—were it flat—would easily be reachable for many with a five wood or long iron. The green, however, sits on a plateau some thirty yards above the fairway. Worse, the sides of the slope are nearly vertical and covered with knee high weeds. In this case, taking an additional club make no sense whatsoever. You’ll get the distance, but the shot won’t have the height to clear the hill. For most, a driver would simply result in the ball bounding into that ball-swallowing, impossibly steep slope.

Conversely, on downhill shots, make sure that you don’t generate too much loft. A shot sailing downhill will result in additional carry and roll, but also create the effect of additional loft, with the ball plummeting straight of the sky and stopping quickly. On steep downhill shots, a three quarters shot with a lower lofted club may be in order.

About This Series:

Here’s the problem: Even with all the improvements, the one thing we haven’t been able to improve is the golf intelligence of the players. Most hackers—and more than a few better players—just play dumb golf. So here’s a series on playing smarter golf. I’ve been collecting mental game golf tips for years in a series of notebooks, on my palm pilot and in various computer files. They’ve helped my game. I know they’ll help yours

This tip is an excerpt from The Five Inch Course: Thinking Your Way To Better Golf. The complete book is available in Kindle format at Amazon.com.

Play Away From Trouble

A sure way to get your score down is to avoid the disastrous holes—and that means avoiding trouble altogether.

On every hole, on every shot, take a second to identify the worst potential trouble, and then plan your shot accordingly. It’s not just about where you want the ball to go on a perfectly played shot; just as important is where the ball MIGHT go if you miss.

Play away from the trouble. Taking an extra shot to avoid a hazard is better than landing in one and potentially wasting several more to get out. “No guts, no glory” is for people who don’t want to break 90 consistently, let alone 80.

Bunkers and water are obvious dangers. But so are branches, side hill lies, and deep rough. Sometimes the danger is just a shot you would prefer not to make. I hate 60 yard three quarter wedges, so I consider that range a danger area.

Hazards are all relative. Chancing a bunker by playing left is better than bringing water into play on the right. If bunkers are well groomed and consistent, it may even in some situations be preferable to be in one. At one local par 3, there’s a hole where I aim right at the greenside bunker. If I miss the green, I want to be in that bunker. A miss anywhere else results in a ball buried on a slope in deep, wedge swallowing rough.

If there’s no obvious danger on the shot you’re making, think about the danger you may be setting up for the next. While there’s absolutely no chance that you’ll reach the bunker to the right of the green, landing on that side makes it necessary on the next swing to play over a hazard that could catch your ball and force extra shots. Avoid this by playing to the left, where the fairway runs to the green.

As is the case with most of these tips, though, you need to maintain discipline—something that even the pros have a hard time doing. In the 2010 PGA Championship, broadcaster Johnny Miller criticized Bubba Watson for choosing to play a huge looping shot designed to bring his ball in over a hazard to the green. Watson failed to execute and the ball landed in the hazard, costing him an extra shot and ultimately the championship. Miller pointed out that if Watson had played ten yards less fade, the hazard would not have come into play, reducing the damage of a shot poorly played under pressure.

This tip is an excerpt from The Five Inch Course: Thinking Your Way To Better Golf. The complete book is available in Kindle format at Amazon.com.

The conservative play rarely is the most exciting, but for higher handicappers, it’s usually the route to lower scores. While it’s true that great reward sometimes lies at the end of a risky shot, it isn’t true often enough. More generally, bad decisions and poor shots compound, and a sure bogey turns into a round destroying triple.

So leave the swashbuckling to Phil Mickelson and play for the sure thing.

Sometimes the decision is obvious. One recurring situation has a player with his ball behind a tree line. Here, there often are two clear choices: take a risk and try to advance the ball through a narrow gap, or choose the safer chip sideways (or even backwards) through a larger opening. Playing the safer chip absolutely will add a shot to his total, but it also will eliminate the possibility of hitting a tree and bouncing the ball further into the woods, thus ballooning the score.

Another is the ball-in-a-steep-bunker scenario. Playing it forward to the green is possible, but risks clipping the top and forcing the same play over (and over, and over). A choice that could ultimately result in a lower score would be to play back out of the less steep front, and then forward to the green.

Other situations are less obvious, and thus more problematic. Fairway shots to an open green often defy analysis. If all options seem equal, choose the play that makes the following shot less risky.

Around the green, a friend of mine has a couple of rules for conservative play: “Never chip when you can putt. Never pitch when you can chip. Never take a full swing when you can pitch.” Given an open path to the hole, Paul will putt the ball to the green from as far away as forty yards.

Playing conservatively is tough, though. It requires a great deal of mental discipline and the ability to shrug off your partners questioning your manhood.

About This Series:

Here’s the problem: Even with all the improvements, the one thing we haven’t been able to improve is the golf intelligence of the players. Most hackers—and more than a few better players—just play dumb golf. So here’s part one of a series on playing smarter golf. I’ve been collecting mental game golf tips for years in a series of notebooks, on my palm pilot and in various computer files. They’ve helped my game. I know they’ll help yours

This tip is an excerpt from The Five Inch Course: Thinking Your Way To Better Golf. The complete book is available in Kindle format at Amazon.com.

Unless you are physically unable, I think a strong argument can be made that you will play better golf when walking.

Aside from anecdotal evidence—every golfer in my circle of friends insists they play better on the hoof—there’s also scientific proof: A 2008 study by the Rose Center for Health and Sports Sciences in Denver found that players scored best when using push carts or playing with a caddie. Nine hole averages in the study averaged 40 with a push cart, 42 with a caddie, and 43 when riding.

That’s a six stroke difference over 18 holes. Here’s the potential: if you’re consistently shooting mid-90s when riding, you could regularly break into the 80s while walking.

I’ve got a number of unproven theories about why walking encourages better play. First, the constant physical activity—stretching the legs, swinging the arms and breathing deeply—will help to keep the muscles warm and loose. That’s just the prescription for better golf.

Second, a walking regimen can put you on the way to weight loss and physical fitness. Take a look at the best players the world right now. It’s not your father’s PGA Tour. Fitness is a part of nearly every player’s winning strategy. Walking eighteen holes over four hours can burn up to 1,800 calories and is the equivalent of 45 minutes of aerobics. Do that a couple times a week and you’ll be well on your way to turning things around.

Walking keeps you in the flow of the game. While walking, you move smoothly from shot to shot, taking in the distances as you go. There’s time to shake off the last shot, and start planning for the next. I count down club distances as I approach the ball to keep myself focused. 200 yards, 3 wood, five wood, seven wood, six iron, five ... right down to where I arrive at the ball.

The cart, on the other hand—especially with a partner—is a series of disconnected stops and starts, with the interruption of another player’s shots in between. In a cart, you can never get a true feel for the course’s distances.

Walking gives you a lot of information about course conditions that you’ll never glean whizzing about in a cart. You’ll feel the direction and strength of the breezes. Your feet will sense the conditions—not only hard and soft, but also how it changes across the holes. That kind of information is invaluable and you can’t get it in a cart.

Then there’s the less logical. I’ve got this rather mystical idea that walking keeps me “connected” to the land. I just have a better feel for a course on foot. And I am a lot happier when I can take the time to drink in the sunshine, breezes and scenery.

Of course, there’s a final caveat to all of this. If you’re hopelessly out of shape, walking at first could actually hurt your game. When you cross your personal anaerobic threshold, the buildup of lactic acid will make your muscles burn and cause a deterioration of the fine muscle skills. That’s a recipe for bad swings and the yips.

So if you haven’t been walking, build up to it. Try walking three holes while your partner drives. Then six, then nine. You’ll be crusing through eighteen before you know it.

About This Series:

Here’s the problem: Even with all the improvements, the one thing we haven’t been able to improve is the golf intelligence of the players. Most hackers—and more than a few better players—just play dumb golf. So here’s part one of a series on playing smarter golf. I’ve been collecting mental game golf tips for years in a series of notebooks, on my palm pilot and in various computer files. They’ve helped my game. I know they’ll help yours

This tip is an excerpt from The Five Inch Course: Thinking Your Way To Better Golf. The complete book is available in Kindle format at Amazon.com.

One way to work on your mental focus and to learn to score is competitive play. Real competition (not the fun-golf-outing-scramble-sort) forces players to learn to concentrate and to make every shot count. Real competitions make players abide by ALL of the rules so that they may better judge their true abilities.

While it is unlikely that the weekender ever will find himself (legitimately) competing for a spot in the US Open (or perhaps even a State Open) there still are a large number of opportunities offered by local and state golf associations. Many of these are flighted, or net competitions, so even higher handicappers can enjoy the pressure of competition. In Michigan, there’s a Bogey Golf Tour that tries to offer a competitive environment for golfers of a wide variety of skill levels.

Club championships are another way to get into a competitive mode. So are the more serious weekly leagues (ours not not at all serious). Barring any of this, you can try playing your own mind games. At various critical points, imagine that the hole is for the Claret Jug.

This tip is an excerpt from The Five Inch Course: Thinking Your Way To Better Golf. The complete book is available in Kindle format at Amazon.com.

It’s a problem that only a modern golfer could have: being bombarded by messages from the outside world while playing a game that requires focus, peace of mind and calm.

This week’s mental golf tip is a simple one: Turn off the cell phone and leave it in your bag. Or better yet, leave it in your car.

A lot has been written about the impropriety of phones on the course, and of the danger of having one go off while you’re in the middle of a swing. But I don’t think that’s the primary problem. I think the primary evil of cell phones on the course lies in informational distraction. The mere presence of the things and their incoming messages takes your mind away from golf.

I’ve ignored my own advice far too often. I’ll forget to switch the Blackberry to silent, and it will ding its new message notification. Then I begin wondering whether it’s junk email or important. Perhaps it’s a text message from my wife. Wondering distracts me from my game. So I check the message. Usually, it’s junk. But often enough, it’s something I need to attend to, so I begin thinking about that instead of the game. And by that point, I’m into a golfing death spiral.

Abandoning the Blackberry in my car is not really an option for me these days, since it also serves as my golf GPS. I just need to remember to switch it to the “all notifications off” mode.

This tip is an excerpt from The Five Inch Course: Thinking Your Way To Better Golf. The complete book is available in Kindle format at Amazon.com.

I used to tell my high school golf teams that there are two felony offenses in golf: being a slow player, and being a bad player. The key is not to commit both offenses at once. People will forgive a slow player if he’s hitting greens in regulation and sinking birdie putts. And they’ll forgive a bad player if he keeps the ball moving along.

Most weekenders aren’t hitting greens in regulation and sinking birdie putts.

Playing quickly accomplishes more than speeding up a five hour round. From observation of my golf teams and personal experience, I remain convinced that playing more quickly leads to better scores. All of those extra waggles, practice swings and whatnot serve only to break rhythm and clutter up the mind with swing thoughts and doubts. Far too often slower players are the victims of paralysis by analysis.

PGA Tour pros aren’t doing amateurs any favors, either. Far from being an example to emulate, the pro’s laborious pace of play is a trap for weekenders. And sometimes, it’s a trap for the pros themselves. Sergio Garcia’s game famously suffered a precipitous decline when he started gripping, regripping and waggling twenty and thirty times on each shot. Tiger Woods has been observed to deliberately slow down the pace of play to gain an advantage over a competitor who is closing in.

Playing quickly does not, however, mean that you should rush. It isn’t about speeding up your swing. And playing quickly does not require that you play carelessly. The secret is to play purposefully, with focus.

Playing quickly means being prepared to take your shot as soon as it’s your turn. Check your yardages and select your club while others are playing. At the same time, find your line and go through your preshot visualization routine. Then, when it’s your turn, take a practice swing, step up to the ball, align and go. Moving quickly through a short routine will prevent all sorts of contradictory and unhelpful thoughts from leaking into your brain. Get into a playing rhythm and stay there.

Practice swings should be limited to just one. Any more and you’re going to fall into the trap of playing “golf swing,” and not “golf.” The course is not the place for working out swing flaws. Play with the swing you have that day and work out your issues on the range.

A friend of mine is notorious in the golf league for his slow play. Jeff’s first practice swing never “feels right.” So he makes an adjustment, and that doesn’t “feel right.” Then another adjustment, and another practice swing; and another adjustment and another swing.  Finally, he declares “that was a good one” and steps up to the plate. He fiddles with his alignment, stance and grip, pumping his knees and waggling his club until finally it feels right, and unleashes a mighty blow—typically to little good effect.  What’s particularly funny about this sequence of events is that any knowledgeable golfer would observe that Jeff’s first swing typically is his best. It’s almost as if each successive practice and adjustment takes him further from his ideal swing.

There are a lot of Jeffs out there on the tee boxes and in the fairways.

Nowhere, though, does paralysis by analysis hit more golfers than on the greens. Following the lead of the Tour players, weekenders get into catcher’s crouches, Spiderman crawls, plumb-bob, stalk the hole, and generally agonize endlessly over the putt. And all the while, contradictory swing thoughts and doubts begin to seep into their brains. And how many have you seen that, having made an analysis worthy of a quantum physicist, can’t get themselves to pull the trigger?

I wonder as I watch yet another plumb bobber miss a short stroke: How is it that an eight year old can complete a pass to a moving receiver without thinking, and yet an adult golfer after looking at all the angles, analyzing the break and grain and practicing stoke after stroke can still miss a three footer?

I once heard a television golf analyst—I think it was Johnny Miller, but won’t swear to it—talk about a young golfer who was having a particularly good week putting. “He’s absolutely fearless,” Miller(?) said. “He just steps up and putts. He knows the ball is going in the hole.”

No endless deliberations, just take a look at the line, and make the stroke. It’s like throwing a ball into a catcher’s mitt. You don’t think. You just do.

One last bit of advice that teachers offers students taking multiple choice quizzes—and yet is relevant to golf. On every question, eliminate the ridiculous choice and then go with your first instinct. Don’t agonize over the choices. If you read wrong answers enough times, they will soon seem plausible.

Think about it.

This tip is an excerpt from The Five Inch Course: Thinking Your Way To Better Golf. The complete book is available in Kindle format at Amazon.com.