Which club, and how do I stand?
This is the page you read once, on a couch, to understand how club choice works. Not a lookup table. The model, so that standing over a ball you already know how to think.
Lie first. A bad lie takes clubs off the table before distance matters. Middle of the green, never a tucked pin.
One more club, swing easier. You come up short far more than you fly it long. Get it rolling around the green: least loft that works.
One swing thought. Decide everything behind the ball, so that standing over it there's nothing left to think about.
The four-question ladder
Every club decision in golf is these four questions in this order. Answer them and the club chooses itself. It takes about eight seconds once you've done it a few times.
Where is the ball sitting? (the "lie")
This comes first, always, because it can veto everything else. Sitting up on a tee, sitting clean on the fairway, buried in thick rough, in sand, on a slope, or on hardpan dirt. A bad lie removes clubs from consideration before you've even thought about distance. You cannot hit a 3-wood out of deep rough. It doesn't matter that the distance is right.
How far do I need to carry it?
Not "how far to the flag." How far to the thing I must clear, and how far to a spot I'd be happy with. The pin is 150 out but there's water at 130. Your real question is "what carries 140 comfortably." Use your phone's GPS. Use the yardage markers. Use the sprinkler heads, which are often stamped with distances to the green.
What's the trouble, and where is it?
Water, sand, trees, out of bounds, a steep slope. Then pick the club that makes the trouble irrelevant, not the club that flies over it perfectly. If a bunker sits at 145 and the green starts at 150, don't hit your exactly-150 club. Hit the one that lands at 165, or the one that lands short of the bunker at 120. Take the trouble out of play.
Which club do I actually trust today?
The honest one. If your 5-iron has produced four consecutive worm-burners and your 7-iron is behaving, hit the 7-iron and accept being 25 yards short. Short and in the fairway is a fine place to be. In the trees with your "correct" club is not. Your best club today beats the technically right club every time.
When you're torn between two clubs, take the longer one and swing easier. Beginners come up short far more often than they fly the green. The chart described your best swing, not your average one. A smooth 6-iron beats a violent 7-iron by a mile.
The full lie filter, every lie type with the clubs that work and the clubs that don't, lives on the Cheat Sheet. The short version: from a bad lie, your only job is to get to a good lie. A wedge back to the fairway is not a wasted shot, it's the shot that prevents the triple bogey.
The universal setup
Setup is most of the shot and it's the part that requires zero athleticism. Get this right and the swing has a chance. Get it wrong and no amount of swinging fixes it.
These five things are true for every full swing with every club. They never change.
- Grip: lead hand on top (left hand for righties), trail hand below it, hands touching and working as one unit. Hold it like a tube of toothpaste you don't want to squeeze. Tension is the enemy. If your forearms are hard, you're too tight.
- Posture: stand tall, then bend from the hips, not the waist. Push your butt back like you're about to sit on a barstool. Back stays straight. Slight knee flex. Arms hang straight down from your shoulders. If your arms are reaching out or jammed in, move your feet, don't change your arms.
- Alignment: feet, knees, hips, and shoulders all parallel to your target line. Parallel, not pointed at. Think railroad tracks: the ball is on one rail heading to the target, your body is on the other. Aiming your feet at the flag actually aims you right of it.
- Weight: centered, on the balls of your feet, not your heels or toes. Athletic. You should be able to get bumped and not fall over.
- Eyes on the back of the ball. Not the top. The part of the ball the club is going to strike.
Between clubs, only ball position and stance width really move. Everything else is the same swing. That's the whole secret. You're not learning fourteen swings, you're learning one swing and moving the ball around in your stance.
Ball moves back and weight moves forward as clubs get shorter.
Driver: ball way forward off your lead heel, weight slightly favoring your trail foot, and you sweep it off the tee on the way up.
Chip: ball way back off your trail instep, weight hard on your lead foot, and you hit down on it with your hands ahead.
Everything else is a step along that line. Learn those two ends and you can guess every club in the middle correctly. Longer club means ball forward, sweep it. Shorter club means ball back, hit down on it.
The pattern above is the lesson. The precise ball position, stance width, and weight for all 15 clubs is a lookup, and it lives on the Cheat Sheet where you can actually use it standing over a ball.
The one that matters most
🚩 Hit DOWN on your irons
This is the thing. If you fix one thing this year, fix this. Every new golfer instinctively tries to help the ball into the air. They hang back on their trail foot and try to lift or scoop it. It feels completely correct and it is completely wrong.
The result is a thin shot that screams along the ground, or a fat shot where you hit dirt first. Both come from the same instinct.
You hit down to make the ball go up.
The loft on the club face is what launches the ball. It does that job automatically. Your job is to deliver the face to the back of the ball while the club is still traveling downward, and let the club exit into the turf after impact.
The divot goes in front of where the ball was. Ball first, ground second. If you're taking divots on the target side of your ball mark, you're doing it right. If you're taking them behind the ball, you're scooping.
Drill: put a tee in the ground an inch in front of your ball (target side). Try to clip the ball and then the tee. That's the motion. Do that fifty times and your iron game changes permanently.
The reason people scoop is that their weight hangs back on the trail foot, so the club bottoms out behind the ball. Fat shot. Or they compensate by lifting up. Thin shot. Same root cause. At impact your weight should already be moving onto your lead foot.
The clock-face method
The 50 to 90 yard shot is where beginners fall apart, because a full wedge goes too far, so they try to hit a "little" one and decelerate. Chunk. Skull. Disaster.
The fix: control distance with backswing length, not swing speed.
Imagine you're standing in a clock face, facing the target. Your lead arm is the hour hand. Take it to a fixed position and then swing through at the same speed every time. A 9:00 swing means your lead arm goes back until it's parallel to the ground, which gets you roughly half your full distance.
Go to the range and hit ten 9:00 pitching wedges. Whatever that averages is now a club you own. Do it for 9:00 and 10:30 with your PW and SW and you suddenly have four reliable distances inside 90 yards. This is how good players get up and down, and it's completely learnable without talent.
Always accelerate through the ball. Deceleration is what causes chunks and skulls. A shorter backswing with commitment beats a long backswing you slow down out of fear. Never quit on a wedge shot.
Chipping
The default beginner move is to grab the most-lofted wedge and try to fly it high and land it soft. Do not do this. It's the highest-risk shot available and you'll blade it across the green.
Get it rolling as soon as possible.
A ball rolling on the ground behaves predictably. A ball in the air does not. So use the least loft the situation allows. On the fringe with green all the way to the hole? Putt it. A few feet of fringe then lots of green? Bump an 8-iron. Only reach for a lofted wedge when something is genuinely in your way.
The chipping setup is different from a full swing and it's worth memorizing exactly:
- Feet close together, almost touching. Narrow stance.
- Ball back, off your trail instep.
- Weight 70–80% on your lead foot, and it STAYS there. Do not shift back. This is the whole shot.
- Hands ahead of the ball, shaft leaning toward the target.
- Grip down on the club, an inch or two. More control.
- Rock your shoulders like a putt. No wrist hinge. No flip. The arms and chest move together.
- Accelerate through. Follow-through at least as long as the backswing.
The chip is basically a putting stroke with a lofted club. If you find yourself trying to lift the ball, you've lost it. Get the weight forward and hit down.
Bunkers
The bunker shot is the only shot in golf where you do not hit the ball. That's not a metaphor. Your club never touches it. You hit the sand behind it and the sand throws the ball out.
- Sand wedge. Its bounce is designed for exactly this.
- Dig your feet in for a stable base. This also tells you how deep the sand is.
- Open the face, rotating it so it points slightly right of target (righties), then take your grip. Open first, grip second, always in that order.
- Open your stance, aiming your feet slightly left to compensate.
- Ball forward, off your lead heel.
- Pick a spot about two inches behind the ball. Hit that spot. Ignore the ball entirely.
- Swing hard and follow through. This is the part everyone gets wrong. You're moving a wedge of sand, not a ball, and it takes real effort. A tentative bunker swing leaves you in the bunker.
- Don't touch the sand right behind or in front of your ball, and don't take practice swings that brush the sand. You can rest the club lightly in the sand at address, the rules changed in 2019, but touching the sand around the ball is still a penalty.
- Rake the bunker when you leave. Non-negotiable. See etiquette.
If bunkers are destroying you and you've swung three times and you're still in there: pick it up, drop it outside, add a stroke, move on. In a casual round this is completely acceptable and every person you're playing with will be relieved you did it.
Putting
A third of your strokes. Almost no athleticism required. This is the fastest place for a beginner to get good, and almost nobody practices it.
- Eyes directly over the ball. Drop a ball from between your eyes and it should land on your golf ball. If it lands inside or outside, adjust until it doesn't.
- Lower body dead still. Nothing below the chest moves. Nothing.
- Rock your shoulders like a pendulum. No wrists. The wrists are what makes putts squirt offline.
- Equal length back and through. Same tempo on every putt. Distance comes from stroke length, not from hitting harder.
- Speed beats line. A putt on a perfect line at the wrong speed misses. A putt on a slightly wrong line at the right speed often goes in anyway, and if it doesn't, it stops near the hole.
- Read it from behind the ball, crouched down, looking at the slope between ball and hole. Water runs downhill. So does your ball.
- Long putts: aim to get inside 3 feet. Don't try to make a 40-footer, try to make your second putt a tap-in. That's how you avoid three-putting.
When you're in trouble
Trees
You're in the trees. Everyone gets in the trees. The question is only how you get out.
- Find the biggest gap and take it, even if it's sideways, even if it's backwards. The fairway is your friend.
- The punch shot: ball back in your stance, grip down, hands well ahead, and abbreviate the follow-through so you finish with your hands about waist high. This keeps the ball low.
- A punched 7-iron goes about as far as a normal 9-iron. Expect less distance and plan for it.
- "Trees are 90% air" is a lie told by people about to hit a tree. Aim at the gap, not through the branches.
- If there's genuinely no shot: take an unplayable, add a stroke, drop within two club-lengths, get on with it.
Water and out of bounds
The casual-round version, which is not the full rulebook but is what most groups do. Ask your group what they play on the first tee, then do that. Consistency across the group is the only thing that matters.
- Water: add one stroke, drop where it crossed into the hazard, keeping that point between you and the hole. Play on.
- Out of bounds (white stakes): officially it's stroke-and-distance, so you go back and hit again from the same spot, hitting 3. In a casual round, most groups let you drop where it left the course, add two, and keep the pace up.
- Lost ball: you get 3 minutes to look. Then drop nearby, add a stroke, move on.
- Provisional ball: if you think your shot might be lost or OB, announce "I'm hitting a provisional" and hit a second ball immediately. If the first is gone, you're already down there and you saved everyone a walk back. This makes you look like you know what you're doing.
The pre-shot routine
Every good player has one. It's not superstition, it's the thing that makes your setup repeatable when you're nervous. Yours should take under 20 seconds. Do the thinking before you step in, so that once you're over the ball you have exactly one thought.
- From behind the ball (this part is important, behind it, looking down your line): check the lie, get the number, spot the trouble, pick your club. Run the four questions.
- Pick an intermediate target, a leaf or a discolored patch of grass or an old divot, about three feet in front of your ball and directly on your target line. Aiming at something three feet away is much easier than aiming at something 150 yards away.
- One practice swing. One. Feel the shot you want. (Two if you must. Never three. Three is a pace-of-play crime.)
- Step in. Set the club face behind the ball, aimed at your intermediate target first. Then build your stance around the club face, not the other way around.
- One look at the target. One breath.
- One swing thought, and swing. Not five. One. "Ball first." Or "smooth." Or "finish tall." Pick one and go.
Standing over the ball is the worst possible time to think. The routine's actual job is to move all the decisions to before you set up, so that once you're standing there everything's already decided and you can just swing. Golfers who stand frozen over the ball are golfers who didn't finish thinking in the right place.
Now go use it
That's the model. Five ideas: lie first, middle of the green, one more club and swing easier, get it rolling, one swing thought.
Everything else is lookup, and lookup belongs on a page you can read one-handed in a golf cart.