The Flop shot

Okay, so you didn't hit the green with your approach shot. Disaster, right? Not really. Sure, you can chip or pitch and that's not really that hard, but there are many times I find (in fact, most of the time) that the flop shot, if done correctly, can be a real weapon in lowering scores. You can flop from 40-50% rough all the way down to fringe, and be very accurate without ever having to chip, pitch, or putt. Saving par when you are off the green is a matter of choice between chipping, pitching, and flopping, and the flop shot can really help you out when you need to get up and down in two strokes. Getting the ball near the hole for a one-putt can save par or even make birdie when you go for that green and come up short, long, left, or right.

First, let's cover flopping on a flat green from fringe. I don't like putting from fringe, although it's a matter of adding 5% for each grid (two feet) of fringe, but the contour of the green and the run of the grain can make a putt from fringe quite inaccurate when not done right, so I choose the flop most of the time.

Most lob wedges have a distance rating of 16 yards, and I've found that a FULL SPIN flop(complete underspin...that's moving the dot on the little white ball in the lower right-hand part of your screen to the bottom of the ball) will go exactly 15.4 yards at 100% on the Shot Pal. This is with my Callaway Hex Chrome 33+ balls, and it will go slightly farther with starter balls. At 75%, the ball goes 10.3 yards, and at 50%, it goes 5.2 yards. For every 5% on the Shot Pal meter, the ball will go one yard more or less, depending on what you pull the meter out to when shooting. This is on a dead flat green like the 9th at St. Andrew's, and all you have to do is aim properly, and the ball will settle very close to the hole for a tap-in par or birdie, and many times go in the hole...(yippee).

When you aim, make sure you move the aimer 1.5 grids left (that's three feet) of the hole on a 15-yard shot, 1 grid (that's two feet) left on a 10-yard shot, and half a grid (that's one foot) left for a 5-yard shot, and adjust a bit for every distance in between. The ball will settle close enough to the hole for a short putt, and you will walk away from the hole without making bogey, and once in a while, the ball will go in, and you are happy with birdie.

However, when you have a rise or fall of the putting surface, you have to adjust your distance accordingly to ensure the flop makes it to the hole or doesn't go past the hole. This is where the trick comes in for good flopping. I usually start with adding 1/2 of the rise-to-distance ratio or subtracting 1/2 of the drop-to-distance ratio when flopping. This gets me in the ballpark.

Then, I move the aimer back to about half the overall yardage of the shot (and sometimes more) and look at what the height in inches is compared to the height in inches at the hole and figure out a ratio of the rise or fall and add or subtract half of that ratio to the shot. For instance, if you have a 10-yard flop that has a rise of 5 inches in 5 feet from the 5-yard point, the ratio is 1-1 (or 100%) and therefore you would add .5 yards to your shot to make it settle close to the hole. The example goes like this: 10 yards distance and a 10-inch rise, and at 5 yards,it shows a 5-inch rise. The ball will bite and end up short if you hit the ball only 10 yards, and you have that tricky putt to deal with, so that extra .5 yards makes all the difference. Of course, you are taking off .3 yards to begin with on a ten-yard shot, making it a 9.7-yard shot, and then you have to add that .5 yards to the shot, so now you have a 10.2-yard shot to get it nice and close. For a green that falls away from you, the opposite is true, AND you will have to take a 10-yard shot, subtract the .3 yards first, and then subtract another .5 yards, thus giving you a shot of 9.2 yards to adjust for the roll. Try it and see if I am not correct. I've done it time after time, and it has lowered my scores significantly even when I haven't hit the green. There are times when I see a ball rolling back off of a green from 30 feet andPRAYED it ended up on the fringe so I could flop. Sure, it won't help your G.I.R. stats, but your score will go down and your putting stats will improve, and that's the whole point.

Here are some distances to subtract from a shot on a full-spin flop that seem to work really well. I've holed a lot of flops lately and danced around the hole a lot closer from clean fringe or fairway lies. Subtract .2 at a 5-yard calculation, .3 at a 10-yard calculation, .4 from a 15-yard calculation, .5from a 20-yard calculation, and .6 from a 25-yard calculation. These are solid numbers with my Callaway Hex Chrome 33+ Soft balls, and those numbers may vary slightly with starter balls or high-spin Nikes due to the spin rate differential.

For flopping from rough, I add 5% below the minimum indicated on the rough factor meter, and then subtract 8% from that final calculation for a flier (more on "fliers" later from rough)for the initial calculated distance of the shot from the rough. THEN I look at the rise and fall and adjust my flop shot accordingly. Know that rough will also affect how the ball flies in the air, and you usually have to aim twice the distance left of the hole than originally figured. For a shot that normally goes at 1.5 grids left in 30-40% rough, I'll move the aimer 3 grids left to adjust for how the rough treats the shot. Also, when I look at the contour of the green and I see a radical swing on the contour, I'll do further adjustment left or right depending on the flow of the green. You'll see what I mean when you try it.

I've found that going digging on a 20-25% lie actually throws the ball a bit shorter than I want because there is less grass behind the ball increasing the spin contact, and the opposite is true for a 40-50% lie because there is more grass behind the ball, killing the spin factor and throwing it farther. Experiment with this and see if this works. It certainly works for me, and I've gone from scores of 36 or 35 down to 32 or 31 on a nine-hole course by using the flop shot as my main weapon.

For a sand wedge (mine is rated at a full distance of 26 yards), the ball normally goes 29-30 yards on a no-spin flop, and 25 yards on a full-spin flop. The increments go down to 3% for every yard for a full-spin flop with a sand wedge, and that means that at 90% it goes 22.4 yards on a full-spin shot, 19.3 yards at 80%, and 16.2 yards at 70%. Anything below 16 yards, and you have to switch clubs to the lob wedge.

The rest is up to you and your experimentation. Good luck, and you'll most likely abandon the chip and the pitch (like I have), although there are methods mentioned further on in this blog that will help you chip and pitch with relatively good accuracy, but the flop shot takes most of the contour out of play, along with the green speed factors, which take more time and calculation than you would normally want to do.