I break every round of putting into distance cohorts. Under 4 feet. 4-8 feet. 8-15 feet. 15-25 feet. 25-40 feet. 40 and up.
Each zone is it’s own segment.
The chart I use — pictured above — maps every putt by hole and distance zone. At the end of the round you can see exactly where your putts came from, what happened to them, and where the strokes went.
Here's the one thing I track most closely: long versus short.
Long doesn't mean aggressive. Long means the ball got past the hole. That's the goal. A putt that finishes one inch past the hole is long. A putt that finishes three feet past is also long. They're not the same thing — but both are better than short.
Short means you didn't give it a chance. You can't make a putt that doesn't reach the hole. Ever. So the first job in putting is simple — get it there.
Track your longs and shorts. If you're consistently short, you're leaving putts out there before they even had a chance. Short can also mean missing on the low side and having the ball trickle past the hole where it’s long but it was actually short.
The low stress putting game looks like this.
Clean up your 15-40 footers. Not heroics — just good speed, get it close, make the short one coming back. No three putts. No disasters. Occasionally you make a bomb from 30 feet and the whole round shifts.
That's the rhythm. That's how rounds stay calm and scores stay low.
My round Tuesday on the qualifier looked like this:
Two makes from 25-40 feet. Speed mostly running long — not short — across all zones. One of nine inside 20 feet on slow bumpy greens I'd never seen. No three putts. No short putts missed under four feet.
Call it neutral. Not a great putting day. Not a bad one. Speed was decent, made the bombs, didn't bleed strokes on the short ones.
That's what the chart tells me. Not a feeling. Data.
Play well, Mark
What distance range costs you the most strokes in putting, do you even know? Hit reply.