The Short Putting Misconception That Is Costing You Strokes

The short putting misconception, in one line

Missed short putts are a face angle problem, not a stroke problem. Where your putter face points at impact is the dominant factor in where the ball starts, and from close range there is no time or distance for the ball to do anything except obey it. Most golfers spend years working on their stroke path and rhythm while the actual cause goes unmeasured.

That is the common short putting misconception holding thousands of club golfers back. It feels like a stroke fault because a missed three-footer feels clumsy. It rarely is.

Why the miss feels like a stroke fault but isn't

Miss a short putt and the instinct is immediate. You must have moved. You must have decelerated. You must have taken the putter back too far inside.

Occasionally true. Mostly not.

Here is the geometry. A golf hole is 4.25 inches across, so you have a little over two inches of margin either side of centre. At six feet, a putter face that is two degrees open at impact starts the ball roughly two and a half inches off line. That is already outside your margin. The putt misses, and it was never close.

Two degrees is nothing. It is a fraction of a fraction of a turn of your hands. No golfer alive can feel it, and no amount of staring at the ball will reveal it. That is what makes this the most stubbornly persistent fault in amateur golf: the error that costs you the putt is smaller than your ability to sense it.

Meanwhile the thing you can feel, the stroke itself, gets all the attention. So golfers rebuild a stroke that was working reasonably well, and keep missing.

Why short putts punish face angle more than long ones

On a thirty-footer, all sorts of things get their say. Path, strike position, green speed, slope, the grain, the pace you chose. The ball has a long journey and plenty of chances to be influenced.

A four-footer has none of that. The ball is barely moving for a second. Slope has almost no time to act on it. Your read is simple. Path has minimal influence at that length. Strip all of that away and one variable is left standing: where the face was pointing when it struck the ball.

This is why short putting is such a clean skill to improve. There is only one thing to get right. It is also why it is so frustrating without feedback, because the one thing that matters is invisible.

The compensation trap

There is a second layer worth knowing about. If your face habitually arrives a touch open, your hands will start rescuing it. Not consciously. Your brain notices that putts leak right, and it adds a small last-moment save.

Now you have two faults working against each other, and they only ever cancel out on a good day. This is exactly why short putting can feel fine on the practice green and desert you on the eighteenth. Under pressure the save either fires too much or not at all.

How to actually hole more short putts

Four things, in order.

1. Check your aim before you blame your stroke

Most golfers do not aim where they think they aim. Put a ball down four feet from a hole, set up as normal, then without moving your feet, lay an alignment stick or a spare club along the target line on the ground and see where your face was actually pointing. Plenty of golfers discover they were aimed outside the hole from the start, and their stroke had been quietly compensating for years.

2. Use a gate

Set two tees just wider than your putter head, a few inches in front of the ball, on the target line. Roll putts through the gate. Clipping a tee tells you instantly that your face and path disagree at impact. It is the simplest face feedback available and it costs nothing.

3. Hit them firmly enough to hold their line

Short putts that trickle towards the hole are at the mercy of every footprint, slope and imperfection between ball and cup. A putt with a bit of pace holds its line and takes less break.

The important word there is less, not none. Speed and line are locked together on every putt, which is why there is no single correct line on a breaking putt. There are as many lines as there are speeds you could choose. Most golfers read a line, then hit the putt at a completely different pace to the one that line assumed, and wonder why it missed.

This is a supporting fix rather than the main one. Firmness helps a correct face. It cannot save a wrong one.

4. Measure the face, because you cannot feel it

This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the only one that addresses the actual cause. Two degrees is below your perception threshold. Without measurement you are guessing, and guessing is what has kept the misconception alive.

The Wellputt BigTilt Wave changes the conversation

Both of our London studios run the Wellputt BigTilt Wave, and it is worth explaining properly because most golfers have never seen anything like it.

It is not a putting mat, it’s a putting platform with a moving floor. The surface tilts to recreate genuine course slopes, up to 5% left to right and 3% uphill and downhill, adjusted from an iPad, with gradient accuracy to 0.1%.

A laser projection system draws the break onto the surface in front of you, and it draws three different lines for three different speeds. There is your speed and line relationship, projected onto the green, in real time.

That is worth sitting with. Every golfer is told to read the break. Almost nobody is shown that the break they are reading only exists for one particular pace, and that choosing a firmer roll physically redraws the line. Seeing three lines on the same putt reframes putting in about thirty seconds.

For short putts specifically, this is the fastest feedback loop in the game:

• Put a real slope under a four-footer. Dial in 2% of tilt and hit the same putt at a dying pace and a firm pace. Watch how much break the firmer roll removes. You will never trickle a short putt again.
• See whether the miss was face or read. With the correct line projected in front of you, a miss can no longer be blamed on a bad read. If the ball did not start on the projected line, the face was open or closed. The excuse disappears and the actual fault is exposed.
• Practise the same putt endlessly. The platform is repeatable in a way a practice green never is. Same slope, same speed, same line, as many times as you want. No footprints, no wind, no queue.

At Tower Bridge the putting studio is a room of its own, with stroke analysis logging face angle, path and impact on every putt, and members have 24/7 access with a personal door code, in any weather, all year. Deptford Park is our coaching home in SE8, with its own putting studio alongside the Trackman bays. The Wellputt app adds structured drills, games and pressure formats on top, so a session has a score attached rather than being twenty aimless putts.

Putting is the most under-practised part of golf, mostly because hardly anyone has anywhere decent to practise it. Fixing that is one of the cheapest strokes available to you.

Book a session

The misconception is comfortable because it points at something you can feel. The truth points at something you cannot, which is why it needs measuring rather than guessing. Check your aim, roll putts through a gate, give them enough pace to hold their line, and get your face angle on a screen.

Ready to see your numbers? Book a free trial at Tower Bridge or Deptford Park and spend it in the putting studio, or look at membership if you want unlimited access to it. Our professional coaches can also run a putting session and tell you in two minutes what your face is doing. Most golfers are a couple of degrees away from holing far more short putts than they do.