New Course Strategy
There are important reasons why some golfers play their home course better than they play other courses.
The information you need to play courses with which you are not so familiar, need to be decided upon before you can attempt to play the course seriously and with good planning you can play a course with confidence and without the fear and apprehension of the unknown, which as we all know, so often leads to poor scoring.
When playing a new course you may find difficulty in selecting the correct club or feeling the pace of the greens, but this missing information you can find if you set about to ’read’ the course because there is an ideal route around all courses and you have to decide upon the chess type moves required in order to play with the calm confidence required for satisfactory achievement.
You may feel at first that a suitable yardage gadget will remove most of the doubt and uncertainty and to a certain extent it will BUT what these gadgets don’t offer are the positions of the ‘fairway greens’ which you may like to call your landing areas.
As I have advised you before, it is not positive golf to stand on the tee, hit the ball into space and expect it to arrive in a suitable place from where to play the next shot.
You must know exactly where you want the ball to finish, because only then can you have faith in your club selection and be able to line up correctly to a predetermined target because at all times you must be confident of your intended shot.
Finding these landing areas is one reason for a practise round, take plenty of time and get it right because it may not be in the same place for all of you as your natural (automatic) game may shape the flight of the ball in different ways.
Another reason is to find the layout of each green; you need to know if the greens are level, if they are more than one tier, and their dimensions.
If there is a slope you need to know which way it slopes because for example if a particular green slopes from front to back you may have to pitch onto the front of the green to avoid going over the back if the greens are hard and if there is a slope from back to front then you can be more bold with your club selection.
Setting out course strategy is an exercise in common sense and you must understand the best way to solve the problems placed before us by golf course architects then you can set about beating the course, which should ensure that you beat the opposition.