5 Strategies Pros Use To Avoid Double Bogeys l The Game Plan l Golf Digest

Double Bogeys. Blowup Holes. We all have them. They’re the fastest—and most frustrating—way to wreck a scorecard. The good news? They’re also one of the easiest mistakes to avoid. Every golfer, from beginner to low handicapper, struggles with them at some point. Learning how to avoid double bogeys is one of the easiest ways to instantly lower your golf scores.

In this episode of The Game Plan, Golf Digest Senior Editor Luke Kerr-Dineen dives into the data to share 5 smart strategies professional golfers use to avoid double bogeys—and they work just as well for amateur golfers. From three-putt prevention to smart aiming tips, bail-out strategies, and course management fundamentals, this video is packed with golf tips that will help you play smarter, make fewer mistakes, and lower your handicap.

If you’re searching for:
– How to avoid blow-up holes
– Pro Level Course management tips
– Golf strategy for mid-handicappers
– How to stop making double bogeys
– Lower golf scores without changing your swing

…then this is the golf instruction video for you. Avoid Double Bogeys. Play smarter golf. Think like a pro and keep those big numbers off your scorecard.

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Host: Luke Kerr-Dineen
Producer & Video Editor: Ben Walton
Research Producer: Jamie Kennedy
Executive Producer: Christian Iooss

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:18 Why Doubles Hurt So Much
2:10 Strategy 1
4:45 The 10% Rule
5:28 Strategy 2
7:03 Strategy 3
8:28 Strategy 4
11:58 Strategy 5
14:02 Verdict

This here is why you’re not better at golf. It’s what’s holding you back from being the golfer that you want to be. These are your big numbers, your blowup holes, your double bogeies or worse, that crush your scores. It’s the fat in your game that’s waiting to be cut. And if you want to get better at this game, you need to know how to do it. Pros predictably are elite at this. And not just because they’re really good at golf, though obviously that does matter. It’s also because they adopt a couple of tactics in some key situations that stops the bleeding the second it starts. You can’t avoid bad shots in golf, but you can avoid blowup holes. So, that’s what this video is about. I went through tons of AROS data in research for this episode, and what I found was that 86% of all double bogeies, or worse, came from one of these five mistakes. When you make two or more of these mistakes on the same hole, that’s when the really big blowup holes happen. So, we’re going to break down each of those mistakes, then dive into some strategies that pros and other good players use to minimize those mistakes. It’s a game plan that the rest of us can use to turn those bad blowup holes into good bogeies. So, the funny thing about golf is that unlike other sports, good shots are actually relatively easy to come by. It’s kind of the thing that gets us all hooked on this game. I mean, I could throw pitches all day and never accidentally crank 105 mph fast ball, but if I hit 100 golf balls, you will see some tall level golf shots. The team at stats platform clipped actually measured this and found that golfers hit between 35% and 45% of elite level golf shots during a round. The problem for them isn’t their good shots, it’s their bad ones. If you look at the past 10 open championships, the winners have played 722 holes in wind and rain with pot bunkers lurking and everything else. And combined, these players have made just two double bogeies. And one of the ways they do this is by avoiding the most common mistake that leads to double bogeies, three putting. Now, this may seem obvious, but this is a classic compounding mistakes error. And we all kind of know these situations. Maybe you hit your drive out of play off the tee, which we’ll get to, took a drop, hit your next shot onto the green, and then three-parted for double. Or maybe you just missed the green in regulation, chipped on, and then three-parted. Based on your handicap, somewhere between 25 and 40% of double bogeies end in a three putt. Now, golfers tend to focus on the second putt as the reason why they three putted, which does make sense. If you miss a 5-footer, that is literally the reason you three putted. But more often, it’s the first putt that is doing the most damage in these situations. Golfers have an inherent bias against coming up short on putts. And this is especially true on par putts. They want to try to save par, but they get too aggressive and blow their first part, say 6 f feet by, and then they miss that one about 30% of the time coming back. Golf statistician Scott Faucet, who you’ll remember from previous game plan episodes, has been studying this, and he’s finding that golfers’s dispersion patterns on putts improves the less aggressive they get. The top 10 strokes game putter at Oakmont from outside 25 ft left 47% of their putts short. They also put 77% of their putts from outside 25 ft feet within 10% of the length of the putt. So if they were 30 ft, they got the putt within 3 ft of the hole. And but that’s important to understand that’s 3 ft long or 3 ft short. So you’ve got a 6ft window of speed tolerance. And the best putters always have the shortest second putt from outside 25 ft. That’s where you crush the competition because you eliminate three putts. And I promise you, you still will make putts. Those numbers resulted in a three putt rate of 10.4% versus the fields 17% from outside 25 ft. So instead of trying so hard to get your first putt past the hole, being okay with coming up short sometimes, even on those par putts that you really want to make, will generally leave you closer to the hole overall and with a fewer three putts because of it. It’s also not a coincidence that of the five players on tour who have the best double bogey avoidance rate since 2020, all five also ranked inside the top 10 on tour in approach putt proximity. They’re taking three putt doubles off the table, not because they’re amazing from short range, but because they’re not going crazy with their first putts. A good rule of thumb for this is to envision a circle around the hole that’s about 10% of the putts distance. So on a 30-footer, envision a three-foot circle around the hole. On a 50-footer, make it 5T. Don’t worry about coming up short or trying to make it. Just putt towards the circle. Even so, it’s a hard mistake to avoid as Scottish Sheffller showed last year at Royal True. Two back from the fringe. He got too aggressive and blew that part 6 ft by, then blew that six-footer 3 ft by, and then missed that. That double bogey ended his chances of winning the open. It can quite literally happen to the best of us. The next mistake we can all be better at avoiding is hitting multiple chips. About 20% of all double bogeies or worse result from having multiple chip shots. This is the classic leave one in the bunker or duff your first chip before getting your next one on the green. This one is a little tricky because there is a technical component to hitting bunker shots and chips, but generally speaking, pros like to keep the ball as low as possible to the ground around the greens. It’s why you’ll often see them hitting these low launch, high spinning chips with the ball very back in their stance. The open tends to highlight players who are really good at keeping the ball literally on the ground around the greens. Todd Hamilton won his open this way in 2004. And Justin Rose, who finished second last year, has kind of become the new master of this fairway wood putt chip thing. The reason why this works is because it’s so simple. You just make a putting stroke with a club that has a little bit more horsepower than a putter. And the truth is that even for pros, it’s getting too cute that often causes this multiple chip shot double bogey mistake. For a five handicap, Aros finds the average proximity between 25 and 50 yard greenside chips is about 23 feet. It’s closer to 30 ft from the sand. In other words, you’re coming out ahead if you leave yourself a say 20 footer on your next shot. Remind yourself of that and remember that there’s no shame in taking the simplest possible route to get there. You’ll encounter less disasters when you do. Another very common cause of big numbers is drives into penalty hazards off the tea. I won’t go too long on this one because we’ve done a few different videos about this which you can check out here, but hitting your ball into a penalty hazard off the tea is a huge cause of double bogeies. A scratch golfer makes a double when they find penalty trouble off the tea about 33% of the time. John Sherman, the founder of Practical Golf and whose book, The Four Foundations of Golf, is a really great read, has a pretty good rule of thumb about this, that when there’s a penalty hazard on one side of the hole, when the course gives you an out on the other side of the hole, just take it. With T-shots, I think, you know, taking some of the learnings from Mark Brody and obviously the work Scott Faucet’s doing, um, learning to aim away from trouble when the course gives you that out. Um, there are holes where there’s just trees and bunkers on one side and rough on the other. And you know, Brody showed very clearly in his book, if you simulate that hole over the long haul, aiming away from the trouble, while you might hit it in the left rough more often will give you a lower expected score on the hole just because you’re not going to be in recovery situations. Whether that’s OB, water, or bunkers, if the course gives you an out, take it. You don’t want to get into the habit of aiming into the rough or bunkers or trees on every hole. But penalty hazards are so damaging that you’ll come out ahead by simply aiming into the rough in these situations. This brings us to the fourth big cause of double bogeies and other big numbers. Hitting your drive into a recovery shot situation. Basically, your driver is in play, but it’s in a pretty bad position. Yet, you’ve still got something to work with. So, you’ve got a kind of judgment call to make. The funny thing about this situation is that the big mistake doesn’t come from the bad drive that got you in this situation, but rather from what happens next. Amateur golfers almost always try to make up for their bad drive on the previous shot with an extra good one on the next shot. The old gamblers fallacy. Just like hitting a par putt too aggressively and running it by, trying to make up for a bad shot on the next one is what turns a bad shot into a bad hole. As pros with our caddies, we constantly kind of do like an assessment. Are we actually good enough at this shot to make it kind of like a, you know, like a gamble? like amateurs, they don’t really think, you know, they play probably more aggressive than we do, you know, in comparison to their skill level. If you want to avoid that stuff, it’s boring, but it’s probably better to chip it out on the safe side of the green and just putt along, you know, but it’s going to be more boring for amateurs, but it’s it’s probably the truth. The reason why is that from a statistical strokes gain standpoint, the issue is that when you get too aggressive and it backfires, say from the trees, you’re using one shot to advance your ball less than one shot’s worth of distance, and you’re in a comparably bad position from where you started from. This is sort of what happened to Tommy Fleetwood when he was chasing down Shane Lowry’s lead at Port Rush in 2019. He got a touch too aggressive from a fairway bunker on the 14th hole and hit the lip. His ball ended up in some nearby fescue and still in a rather gnarly position. He hacked it out then hit it on and ended up making double. From a strokes gain perspective, Faucet says that in recovery shot situations, a 100yard pitch out, which is just a wedge for most golfers, is pretty much exactly one shots worth of distance. Now, you’re not always going to be able to hit your ball 100 yards when you’re in the trouble, but when you can, you should take it. And remember, it’s just not really worth the risk to gamble for much more than that. When I asked Luke Donald at the PGA Championship this year how he handles recovery shot situations, he said that he basically tries to zigzag his way through the hole. You know, if you’re out of position, then you’re really trying to put yourself into a place where you feel like you can get up and down. That’s when you start thinking about, okay, two, three shots ahead where I like, okay, this pin is here. If I can get it to right side of the green, I’m chipping up the hill, you know, something like that. One zig out of trouble, one zag back into a good position on the green. So, the really good players very rarely hit what I would call two bad shots in a row. if they hit that shot into the trees, they don’t compound it with a with a dumb error or, you know, if they shortsides themselves on the green, you know, they’re getting it on the putting surface, the better you get. It’s not that you don’t hit bad shots, it’s that you don’t follow them up with another one. And part of that is skill. There’s no question. It’s part of like the quality of your golf swing, but also part of that is your mental state, your decision- making, and kind of your resolve. The final mistake that virtually guarantees a double bogey or worse is an approach shot into a penalty hazard. According to Aros data, scratch golfers make a double bogey almost 60% of the time when this happens. For a 10 handicap, it’s almost 80% of the time. The key to avoiding these is to learn the art of the bailout. Think of this as a kind of strategic retreat from a difficult hole design. And pros know how to do this and they actually do it quite often. Generally, you’ll see them bail out either short or long in this situation. So, for example, if the trouble is short of the green, as it tends to be on a lot of newer courses, the best way to bail out is by going long. PJ Tool Caddy Paulauri says, “Pros use a pretty simple formula for this. They take the number to the pin or to the middle of the green, whichever one is further away, and then they take the number to the back edge and then they play the average number between the two. So, for example, if there’s a penalty hazard short of the green and you’re a little spooked by it, if it’s 150 yards to the middle of the green and 160 yards to the back edge, pros will bail out by trying to hit a safe 155 yd shot. You may not realize it, but because older courses were designed in the Hickory era where the ball was played mostly along the ground, lots of holes were designed with little runways in front of the greens. These are slopes that are actually designed to feed a rolling ball not just towards the green, but often towards the pinnable hole location. These are great places to aim when the time comes to bail out short, just like Shane Lowry did on the eighth hole at Port Rush during his 2019 Open win. From more than 200 yd away in an awkward sidehill lie in the rough with a nasty pot bunker and heavy rough right, left, and long of this green, Larry bailed out to a spot short right. Then he watched his ball kick and funnel onto the front of the green. not glamorous and not going to make any highlight reels, but disaster avoid it. And that’s the thing about this stuff. It’s not glamorous. People remember the great shots, not the guy who grinded out a good bogey. But you know what people ultimately remember above anything else? It’s the guy who wins. And whatever trophy it is that you’re chasing, this is the stuff that helps you win. Just as defense wins you championships in other sports, it won’t always look glamorous. But that’s okay because good golf it doesn’t always need to