How Pros Pick Where To Tee Up Their Ball | The Game Plan | Golf Digest

Teeing up your ball. You do it on every hole, and yet we typically don’t put too much thought into it. However, for pros, it’s arguably one of the most critical decisions they make when staring a hole. It’s all about angles and degrees. How do you create a miss buffer to avoid disaster? How do give yourself the tiniest of advantages before you even hit your tee shot? In this episode of The Game Plan, Golf Digest Senior Editor Luke Kerr-Dineen dives into the data of the often unrealized tee box strategy Tour Pros use to avoid disaster and shave strokes off a round.

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you probably don’t realize it but you’ve seen players do this thousands of times and you’ve done it yourself thousands of times but the thing is you don’t really think about it not as much as you should anyway it’s a secret hiding in plain sight and Pros they have been using it to their advantage for Generations you can see Arnold Palmer doing it at Royal trun right here and Tiger Woods here here’s Jack doing it and Stenson and Phil doing it here and here if you haven’t figured it out yet I’m talking about where players tee up their golf ball something that on paper seems a little boring a tiny detail which comes down to a matter of a few degrees but believe it or not those degrees start to add up they start to add up in meaningful ways if you don’t pay attention to them you can end up hitting decent shots into bad places and be left with no idea why where you tea up the ball is a small decision you make at the start of every hole but it’s one of the easiest strategies to use for pros and amateurs alike it can drastically change what happens next take it for granted and it can make or break your entire game plan traditionally when it comes to picking which side of the t- Box you should start from the advice is to subtly hit across the Fairway if if your stock shot is one that moves from right to left that means teeing up on the left side of the t- box so you’re aiming slightly more out to the right side of the Fairway young Justin Leonard used to hit right to left draws throughout his PG tour career and it’s why you can spot him teeing up from the left side of the t- box so often throughout the 1997 open at Royal TR when I’m trying to draw the ball I like to get on the left hand side because it pushes my eye down the right because that’s where I want to start the ball so I feel like I’m giving myself visually more room to to start the ball and bring it back from right to left if your shot shape is the other way around a shot which moves from left to right then you do the opposite tea up on the right side of the tea box so you’re aiming subtly out to the left side of the Fairway and then let it rip TR winner to Hamilton was a classic left to right fader it’s why you could see him constantly teeing up deep on the right side of almost every single T box during his win at the 2004 open generally players say adopting this t- boox strategy helps the drive fit their eye but they also intuitively figured out that teeing up this way meant their drives covered more surface area of the Fairway so it’s a rule that still works and generally speaking this is still good advice for most players to use on straightforward holes the problem is most golf holes aren’t straightforward holes usually the T box is off center or the Fairway is tilted in a certain direction and that’s when you start to see more interesting strategies emerge to understand why the best place to start is once again with this guy Mark Brody about 10 years ago bro used Advanced analytics to find that PJ tour players have a margin of error of about 3 to 4 and 1/2 de either side of their target of the team a 90 shooter has a margin of error closer to 7° when you equain these degrees to yards each degree offline adds up to between 4.3 and 5.3 yards it was by Framing things in terms of degrees of Miss that helped golfers figure out the best way to aim which you can learn more about in our video right here but it can also highlight how important something as small as where you tea up your ball on the tea box is because where you teae up the ball can spot you a few extra degrees to one side or the other it can give you in other words a Mis buffer here’s a great example from Royal trun it’s the 11th hole the landing area of this Fairway is about 30 yards wide and the whole Fairway is tilted about about 17° to the right it has literal railway tracks down the right side which is obviously out of bounds but there are gor bushes to the left of the Fairway so you can’t just bail out and aim more left if you’re an amateur golfer playing this hole and worried about slicing your ball out of bounds onto the tracks teeing up on the left side of the t- Box creates a Miss buffer out to the right because a 7° Miss to the right now has to travel over more land in order to end up in trouble you’ve spotted yourself an extra degree and a half worth of right misses which is about 10 yards without changing where you’re aiming just by taking a few extra steps to the left of this tea box you’ve made life a little easier you create Miss buffers on the opposite side of where you tea up the ball and you can see Pros creating M buffers often on par 3s like Henrik Stenson during the final round at trun in 2016 that day the holes were cut deep to the left on both those screens fearing a short-sided Miss to the left with nasty bunkers lurking stenen teed up way to the right on both of these tea boxes that meant he could approach the Green Mall from the right which aligned the middle of the green with the pin and opened up a Mis buffer of about 10 yard left of the pin he ended up using that Miss buffer on the 14th hole which he birdied in all he played the two holes and one under and one the open because of it chice and the Shambo used this tbox strategy throughout his final round at Pinehurst during the US Open he was struggling with the right all day during the final round so often you’d see him tea up way on the left side of the tea box this aligned him more with his Target and gave him a buffer out to the right which allowed him to control the run out of his misses which was especially important on the firm and fast conditions at Pinehurst so while Pros generally use where they tee up the ball to create Mis buffers on one side of the hole or the other there’s one big exception to this and it’s the wind if the wind is blowing from left to right for instance a right Miss may go 8° to the right whereas a left Miss may only go a degree or two or it may go from 2° to the right to 6° to the right while the ball is in midair because of a strong gust of wind at the last moment Pros call this getting gusted and yeah again they really hate this in the past players would often try to work the ball towards trouble but look at the 18th hole at Royal trun and you can see how that could occasionally backfire in a playoff with Mark calovi at 19 1989 Greg Norman did the conventional thing of the day he teed up on the right side of the tea box and tried to ride the wind towards the bunker on the right side of the Fairway he smoked his drive but it just didn’t stop rolling it rolled across the Fairway all the way into a pot bunker Norman didn’t even finish the hole he lost the tournament right there Norman got really unlucky and it’s easy to Monday Morning Quarterback on this stuff but teeing up on the left side of this 6-yard wide tea box and aiming at that same spot gives you about a 2° more Miss buffer to the right 2° on a 300 yd Drive adds up to about 10 yards spot Greg Norman half a degree here and his Drive avoids that bunker he’s probably got another open trophy instead of another major heartbreak it’s perhaps fitting that Stenson when it was his turn almost 30 years later did up a few yards left of Norman on this hole he aimed at a similar spot and stayed on the grass by just a few yards no he’s not done a Greg Norman oh oh he very nearly did a Greg Norman Greg drove into that bunker in 1989 using the T box can provide a tiny little Advantage which again you can do for yourself just like the pros you’re allowed to pick your starting position 18 times around and you should because yes it may be a tiny decision of just a few degrees but those degrees add up and sometimes it just takes one degree to make all the difference [Music]