Garcia wins by Putting with Swinging Gate, what's your style?

For years Sergio Garcia has promissed so much, but over the last couple of years he has struggled with his putting, especially under pressure. Last year he lost The Open because of it! So it was great to see him firing on ALL cylinders last week and win the Players Championship at Sawgrass.

Sergio has rebuilt his putting stroke with the aid of short game guru Stan Utley. Using a "Swinging Gate" putting style which obviously works well for him he now has confidence in his putting again.

Lets hope we see him on form for the upcoming Majors. He has all the skills, his temperament is better nowadays...and wouldn't it be great to have a regular challenger to Tiger?

If you want to learn more about the Swinging Gate putting style check out my article:
Golf Putting Styles: Swinging Gate or Straight Through - Which is Best?

Which Part of Your Golf Game Needs the Most Practice?

I go down to the driving range and watch a whole line of avid golfers working hard at their game. But what do I really see? 20 golfers in a row ALL hitting drivers. Now it is true that some of the ladies and gentlemen practicing do need to work on their drives, but is it the shot that they should be spending most time practicing? Is it time well spent with regards to making the best improvement to their games?

If you want to improve your golf scores quickly, what is the first part of the game you should work on?

Well, before you can answer this question you need to analyse a round of golf in a specific way. An interesting and very effective method to use is "The Pareto Principle".

The Pareto Principle, sometimes known as the 80-20 law, states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Or more specifically, a large percentage of the output result is generated by a small percentage of the input parameters. This could be 80/20 or 90/10 or 70/5 (it doesn't necessarily add up to 100 as it is a relationship between two different measurements).

Pareto Golf Analysis

Applying this to golf we would need to see which clubs were used in a round and how many shots were played with each club. We could then relate each club to the total score by a percentage of the score taken by that club.

If you want to see an example of how you can use The Pareto Principle to analyse your golf scores effectively, then have a look at this article

If you analyse your scores with respect to the type of shots you made, then you can easily see which part of your game is causing a problem, and therefore which part of the game you need to improve to have the greatest impact on your score.

2008 Masters: What do the statistics tell us?

Tiger Woods was odds on favourite to win the 2008 Masters and he nearly did it...and not by doing anything special in the last round. He just held his place and the others started to slip.


However, Immelman was good enough and had the nerve to hold his lead and secure his first Green Jacket.

Congratulations to Trevor!

So I have been taking a look at the official statistics for this years Masters and it makes interesting reading

The first thing you notice is the consistency:

Immelman hit 51 greens in regulation (GIR) and Woods hit 50 (as did 3rd place Cink). Snedeker was doing well, but fell away with too many errors in the last round hit only 7 greens in regulation.

When you look at driving accuracy, Immelman was number 1, hitting 48 of the 56 driving fairways, 10 more than Woods did. It just shows - hit more fairways, and chances are you will hit more greens in regulation. It also shows how good Tiger is at finding the green from a missed fairway!

So, if they are getting on the greens in regulation, how do they compare with putting?

Immelman came 4th in the putting stats, taking only 112 putts for the 72 holes, that's an average of 28 putts a round which is pretty good for Augusta greens! Tiger however averaged 30 putts a round with a total of 120 putts i.e. 8 more shots than Trevor.


Those of us who watched Tiger throughout the week could see how frustrated he was that the putts were not dropping. Imagine if his putter had been hot - his 3-shot deficit could easily have been a 5 shot lead!


So, in summary, to win the Masters is quite a simple formula:

Hit the fairways, get on the greens in regulation, and then hole the putts!

.....just that Augusta National is not a very easy course to do it on!