The Clever Aiming Strategy Tour Pros Actually Use | The Game Plan | Golf Digest

Aiming. It’s one of the most underrated strategies in the world of golf. What’s the line? Should I try and curve it to that spot? In this episode of The Game Plan, Golf Digest Senior Editor Luke Kerr-Dineen dives into the often underutilized strategy of aiming like a Tour Pro to discover whether or not those aggressive lines off the tee and into greens are actually worth the risk for pros and amateurs alike.

We want to know – have you tried this aiming strategy?
Be sure to like, subscribe and comment, letting us know what you think!

Still haven’t subscribed to Golf Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/golfdigestyoutubesub
Want even more GD? Grab a Golf Digest + membership ►► http://glfdig.st/mFqM50OXuv4

ABOUT GOLF DIGEST
Home of the Hot List, Golf Digest +, news and trends, Golf Digest is the definitive destination for all things golf.

This is Ben Hogan the best ball Striker that golf has ever seen and Ben Hogan had a secret a secret that he said was in the dirt but Hogan left Clues buried away here and here and here it went largely unnoticed at the time people obsessed over his golf swing and they

Went looking for answers there it was only years later when golfers took the lessons of Hogan’s words and then started applying mathematics to it that they discovered the extent of Hogan’s intuitive genius Hogan’s secret it turns out was actually a strategy a game plan of sorts and one that was

Hiding in plain sight this entire time once you understand it and you start to use it like the pros do it’ll start seeming obvious it’ll make golf a little easier just like it did for Hogan and you’ll be able to play better golf because [Applause] of Ben Hogan’s most famous quote is that

Golf is a game of Misses he who misses the best wins but what does that actually mean in some ways the game most like golf is a card game like Blackjack we know what cards are in the deck but we don’t know what specific card is

Coming up next the same way we don’t know if we’re about to hit a good shot or a bad shot our job is to make our best guess place a bet hit and hope but hope isn’t a strategy so how should golfers deal with all this Randomness

And luck in a way that actually can help them shoot lower scores that’s the question that former pro golfer and mathematician Scott faucet obsesses over it was this question that led to Scott founding the course management system decade golf which is used by pros and high level amateurs all over the world

He knows the numbers and his advice to you is simple that Randomness is part of golf and there’s simply no way around it but you can use math to account for that Randomness and to start to stack the odds in your favor the game of golf is entirely about the shotgun idea but

Instead of 50 BBS coming out of the shotgun only one does and you just don’t know which one’s coming I know which one you want to come out like people say sometimes well sometimes you just got to suck it up and hit a good shot that’s not how it works otherwise you should

Have done that for 72 holes you just don’t get to suck it up and hit a good shot on call to understand how this works in practice imagine you stand on the same spot in an open field and hit let’s call it 100 shots with every

Single Club in your bag you hit a few perfect ones with each Club but most of your shorts go left or right you stripe some but others you hit in the toe or heel so those go a little shorter you go from your wedges to your driver and then

You put them all together when you do that it forms a kind of ice cream cone this cone represents golfer’s total range of left and right misses at each distance for pros the top of thate cone at about 300 yd will span 70 yard wide meaning that if the average pro hit 100

300 yd drives most of their drives will miss either 35 yards left or right of their intended target for amateur golfers it’s obviously wider they may miss 35 yards in each Direction at 250 yards but either way all these shots together form your ice cream cone of

Misses and this is what you should be thinking about on every shot on every hole every single time you play to see why think of your ice cream cone of misses and start plugging it onto golf courses like the 18th hole at TPC Sor grass it’s not about where your best

Shot ends up it’s about where all of your shots would have ended up one good drive it looks fine on paper but if you were to aim your entire Mis cone down the middle of the Fairway like the corses yardage book suggests upwards of 30% of your drives would end up in the

Water so what the pros do they aim their Mis cone into places that sometimes look pretty weird like on this hole Scott wants players to aim almost directly at the trees on the right because it shifts the left side of their Mis cone onto the Fairway it’s weird yes because it does

Mean that occasionally those Pros will Hammer a near perfect drive into the trees or cart path but by aiming your Miss cone here you’ve taken your worst 30% of misses the water balls that would have cost you about 1.5 Strokes on the field and you’ve moved them in play that

Alone would save them about a stroke and a half to their competitors meanwhile on the other side of the cone yes you have made your right misses slightly worse but only slightly maybe a third of a stroke worse they’re all still in play after all overall you’re coming out way

Ahead because you’re leaving your worst misses in a mathematically better spot in exchange for only a slight downgrade on the other side this was Justin Thomas’ strategy when he won the players in 2021 JT aimed down the right with hopes of hitting a draw then accidentally hit something that was

Close to a snap hook right down the left side of the Fairway playing that big right to left Looper easy it got close yesterday oh boy that got an incredible first bounce yeah it could have veered left it’s still going to go left but it’s if he had aimed on

The middle JT would have lost that year this same misone concept happens into greens Scott tells golfers all the time to forget about the pin remove it from your mind aim for the middle of the green turn your brain off and let the Run Randomness happen here’s why let’s

Say you aimed straight at this Sunday pin on the right of TPC Sor grass’s 17th green again about a third of your misone would have ended up in the water but aim towards the middle and you’ve turned most of those wood be water balls again into birdie Parts meanwhile the left

Side of your misses they’re still on the green sure they may be a little further away but from outside of 30 ft tall players still tart or better more than 90% of the time again it’s a good trade worth making making and then sometimes you’ll get a little lucky like Cameron

Smith did at the 2022 Players Championship with a Sunday pin tucked over to the right Cameron Smith aimed over the left side of the bunker aligned just right of the middle of the green and then just like JT the year before he hit a shot he didn’t mean to this is way

More aggressive than I anticipated oh man what a shot Cameron Smith blocked his fade slightly too far to the right but it grabbed the tiniest slice of the green I’d be lying if i’ if I said I was aiming there I was probably aiming 10 ft left of that but

Um still wanted to stay aggressive still wanted to make birdie and and then Cameron Smith made the pot he ended up winning his hero shot it was actually a Miss which is kind of funny because if Cameron Smith had actually tried to hit the hero shot he would have lost look

Closely and you’ll start to notice tall players doing this everywhere like did you ever notice where Tiger Woods was aiming on his iconic Fairway bunker shot at the ,000 Canadian open right to the middle of the green he accidentally blocked this shot to the right but it

Turned into one of the coolest and maybe best shot of his career that looked like it might have went right this is right online what a shot does it get any better than this guys mat Fitzpatrick did something similar at the 2022 US Open he admitted

That from the Fairway bunker if he would have hit his ball straight it would have ended on the front left portion the green but some accidental adrenaline sent his ball fading more severely towards the pin two putts later and he was the US Open Champion there are

Countless examples but the point is that this is how tour players aim they don’t think about their perfect shot they think about all their shot and especially about their misses that may mean aiming into the rough sometimes and it will mean aiming away from almost every pin it won’t leave your best shots

In the best spot but it will leave your bad shots in better spots and that’s the entire Point that’s what playing the odds and golf looks like and that’s what Hogan figured out himself before he had any data to validate it Ben Hogan wrote that golfers should never under any circumstances aim

At a pin when it was on the corner of a green why because of where it would leave his misses Hogan would talk about clubbing up when the pin was at the front of the green and then making shorter three quarter swings to back pins because that moved his potential

Misses up and down to avoid the short side Hogan said he didn’t make more holes in one because he would always aim at the quote fattest part of the green and he constantly told golfers to play really safe to use their common sense and to above all else play to leave your

Misses in the best possible spot the truth is that even for the best ball Strikers in the game the best shots they usually stakes and that’s okay golf is a game of Misses like Hogan said and he was right so plan for them play them and who knows you may even hit an

Accidentally perfect shot along the Way