Play It Like A Chess Match
Posted by Double Eagle in Course Management, Mental Game
Effective course management means you should be playing the game like a chess match, thinking a few moves ahead. When you start the day, you know several things including your skill level and what your current tendencies are. For instance, maybe for the last week, your tendency has been to draw the ball, and your consistency has been off with a number of thinly-struck toe hits so your misses have been short and left.
You should be attacking every hole with that information in mind. Before you stand over every shot you should be thinking where you’re trying to hit the ball and where a miss is most likely to go. Then you need to evaluate how likely you are to miss, and what the consequences are for the next shot if you do miss. If you’re hitting a driver off the tee and a sweeping hook that goes shorter than you expect has you flirting with an out of bounds area, then you really should be thinking of a more conservative approach if you feel that your likelihood of getting into trouble is high enough.
Let’s say you’re hitting the ball extremely well and your odds of a serious miss are very low. That doesn’t mean you still shouldn’t be thinking ahead. As you hit every shot, you should be thinking about where that will leave your next shot and how that positions you for the rest of the hole. Say your second shot is to a green where the pin is tucked back right behind a bunker. Maybe your best approach is from the far left side of the hole, giving you more green to work with, a better look at the flag, and less bunker to worry about. That means you need to position yourself off the tee in the best spot to take advantage of that.
One important note: considering your possible misses and planning around them doesn’t mean you can give yourself the luxury of dwelling on negative thoughts. As Sam Snead once said, “Ya gotta dance with who ya brung.” That means that you work on your swing at the range and when it comes time to hit the course, you live with whatever you have going wrong at that time. There’s no room for dwelling on negativity, but acknowledging reality and planning for it will allow you to shoot the best score possible.
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