Par 3 Golf Strategy | Picking Landing Spots

⛳ Understanding your shot dispersion is more important than aiming directly at the flag for better golf strategy.

🚩 Golfers with higher scores should aim further from trouble spots and adjust their targets based on their wider shot dispersion.

📊 Tracking your shot patterns with a coach or launch monitor can help you choose smarter targets and improve your scores.

💡 Aiming for the back edge of the green can help higher-handicap golfers avoid hazards and increase their chances of hitting the green.

🧠 Half of playing better golf is knowing your shot pattern and when to avoid aiming at the flag.

00:00:06all right i'm here on number 11 at colorado golf club this is an awesome par 3 to learn some core strategy so the shot's about 170 yards and here's where i see a lot of people go wrong you're probably making these same mistakes first it's okay to look at the flag and know that that's eventually your target but understanding your shot patterns which you can do with the help of a coach or hang out in the golf tech long enough and you'll understand where your

00:00:27shots go left or right or the dispersion short or long that's the most important piece of this so while i've got 170 yards to that flag the stuff that i should start looking at is the trouble around the green so short left there's a bunker short right there's a bunker short right there's water but you notice i haven't mentioned anything about past the flag yet so that should be the first indication of that's really where you're trying to hit this to make sure that you

00:00:50don't make one of those big numbers so i'm going to take a club instead of aiming at 170 i'm going to try to hit this shot closer to 180. at worse i hit this really nice and it's 30 feet past the hole and i've got a birdie putt uh the best case scenario might be that i miss hit that just a little bit and then that 180 shot i'm trying to hit turns into 170 which a lot of you might be doing as well instead of aiming right at that flag at 170 yards miss hitting it and ended up in the water

00:01:16pull drawing one into that bunker or any combination of all the trouble that's short of that green so a good place to start is usually on the left side of the tee box and then i'm aiming just barely left of the flag and trying to hit it just a little bit long as well so using the ideas of looking at the treble around it understanding your shot patterns that will give you the third point which is where you need to aim these shots all right so the average shot dispersion

00:01:40here is the same width as the green so you've got 18 yards from the edge there all the way over to the right edge most rightward over there it starts getting narrower the closer that you get so this is a good spot to land and if i were a 70s shooter this would be my target that's not always going to be the case but that's the case for this one meanwhile as you get worse at golf like the 80s shooters their dispersion gets to be 27 yards wide and since you don't want to hit it

00:02:06to the right of the green and trickle one down in the bunker you need to go a little bit further this way uh probably even approaching like this rake that you see in the bunker so my target might be right about here about six seven eight yards further to the left than say a 70 shooter should be this will put most of my dispersion somewhere just barely creeping into this bunker but i wouldn't go further right on most shots pretty much all of them to the right edge of that green story gets

00:02:32even crazier though as you get to shooting in the 90s now your dispersion is 100 bigger than someone who shoots in the 70s so that's a good piece of advice if you shoot in the 90s what you really need to first do is tighten up your dispersion left and right to get closer to the 70s but with a 90 shooter 36 yards wide is the dispersion on a shot like this from 170 so now you've got the edge of that bunker all the way to the edge of the green that ball could go anywhere in there on this particular

00:02:59shot so if i were you to avoid hitting it into the water from the tee box i might aim right at that finger right there in the bunker i know that sounds crazy that's not what you're doing right now but that's probably one of the reasons that you shoot in the 90s from the back t aiming there fifty percent of your shots are going to be really good on the green the other 50 might start trickling back into this bunker but it's going to avoid any of those that are end up in the

00:03:24water down there now up here this little circle of the green is an interesting little spot too so this is the depth of the shock so it's more important to get the short and long versions of this right so if i come up a little bit short i'm in that bunker if i hit it over the screen i don't really have much of an avenue to chip from so if this is the middle of the green right here there's depth to talk about 70 shooter is 10 yards short or long from this spot on average and basically almost every

00:03:52single shot they're gonna hit's in there so if this pin is back here it doesn't matter if it's favoring the left side from the t or a little bit more to the right this is the spot where you're trying to actually hit that shot now the tricky part is that as you get worse at golf obviously you're going to have a little wider dispersion on the depth side so even when you get up into the 80s at best and i mean this like at best your dispersion doubles on the depth view so while it starts to

00:04:19get a little bit wider left and right the depth starts to become more problematic so actually as you get worse now you need a different target you could end up 20 yards short or 20 yards long a really good shot is uh is going to be problematic with the advice i'm going to give you but here it is you're an 80 shooter 90 shooter your target needs to be right back here the back edge of the screen that way if you mishit one like you do quite often because that's why you're shooting the

00:04:4590s you can still catch the front edge of that green if you hit the best shot of the day or maybe the best shot of your life yeah that's more likely to end up back here but you know how many of those you're going to hit during a round your score will go down if you start aiming at the back edge of the screen so knowing the dispersion of the depth and the width just had two shots and neither one of those would you try to aim at the flag so an easy way to know your shot

00:05:08dispersion is just to hit a bunch of shots you can do this on your own hit 10 shots with all of your clubs take the median distance of those 10 shots and you've got a way to just challenge yourself so you can do that on a driving range any place but if you have access to launch monitor even better launch monitor with a coach you can learn what your shot dispersions are with each club pretty quickly and then that's really the way to get better so half of playing better golf is just

00:05:32hitting better shots if you're shooting the 90s that'll increase the the availability that you can actually aim at the flag but the other 50 or maybe even more is actually understanding your shot pattern and knowing when you should be aiming right there or instead of at this flag and the same thing that we did with that front flag so learn your shot patterns either by yourself with a coach it's going to help you play better

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