How to Analyse Your Golf Score and Identify Areas For Improvement

If you want to improve your golf scores quickly, what is the first part of the game you should work on?

Well before you can answer this question you need to analyse a round of golf in a specific way. An interesting and very effective method to use is "The Pareto Principle".

The Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80-20 law, states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Or more specifically, a large percentage of the output result in generated by a small percentage of the input parameters. This could be 80/20 or 90/10 or 70/5 (it doesn't add necessarily add up to 100 as it is a relationship between two different measurements).

Applying this to golf we would need to see which clubs were used in a round and how many shots were played with each club. We could then relate each club to the total score by a percentage of the score taken by that club

Here is an example: Suppose you went round in a score of 90 on a Par 72 course. Assume your set of clubs is made up of 1 Driver, fairway woods 3 and 5, Irons 3-9, Pitching Wedge, Sand Wedge, Gap Wedge, and Putter. That is 14 clubs (the legal limit).

For the purposes of this analysis let us group the clubs as follows

1 Driver
4 Long Irons/woods 3W, 5W, 3, 4
4 Mid Irons 5,6,7,8
4 Short Irons 9, Pitching Wedge, Sand Wedge, Gap Wedge
1 Putter

We can now convert those groupings of clubs into percentages of the total number in the bag, and we get 11%, 28%, 28%, 28% and 11% respectively.

Using the groupings above lets calculate the number of shots scored in each group and along with each the percentage of the total score. Suppose the breakdown is as follows

Driver, 10 shots. (11%)
Long Irons/woods, 10 shots. (11%)
Mid Irons, 10 shots. (11%)
Short Irons, 20 shots. (22%)
Putter, 40 shots. (45%)

Now the figures can be represented as percentage of total score by percentage group of clubs as follows

Driver: 11/7
Long Irons/woods 11/28
Mid Irons: 11/28
Short Irons: 22/28
Putter: 45/7

From this we can see clearly see that in this scenario the putting comprises the largest part of the score i.e. 45% of score taken by 7% of clubs. Incidentally, putting is always the biggest part of the score, but if your total score is high then it is likely you are taking a lot of putts, or another part of your game is in very bad shape!

If you were to improve just the putting part of your game to "regulation" i.e. 2 putts per green, you would save 4 shots per round i.e. break 90 and drop your handicap from 18 to 14. Not bad!

There are many other ways to analyse your score in this way. For example, instead of which club was hit on each shot, how about which type of shot? Tee shot, approach shot, chip shot, putt, sand shot etc. You may find you are spend far too much time in bunkers for instance.

Keep a log of your scores for a while and you can break down the data and easily see which part of your game is causing a problem, and therefore which part of the game you need to improve to have the greatest impact on your score.

MARK PEARSON has been playing golf for over 25 years, and teaches and plays golf professionally in the UK. Mark is the author of "How to Master Putting and Putt like a Pro - a guide to golf's game within a game"

www.masterputting.com