The Easiest Way to Break 80

What does the average golfer need to shoot to be considered good at golf? Anything in the 70s, 78, you got to break 80s, 70s, 80s, under 80. I think 70s is very 70s is great. 80s is good. 90s is average. OK, I don't hate them. Breaking 80 is the one thing that nearly every golfer wants to do. It's also a feat that only 15 to 20 percent of golfers ever accomplish. And if you can do it consistently, you're better than about 95 percent of golfers. But the thing is, those numbers, they really should be bigger. You see, I spent hours crunching numbers for this video. I dug through pages of stats, talked to some of the best coaches and players in the world. And after combing through everything, I discovered something surprising that most golfers are way closer to breaking 80 than they think they are, closer than they even realize. They're kind of actually a coin flip away, a coin flip that they're losing simply because a couple of times around, they're making wrong decisions. So that's what we're going to unpack in this video. A game plan to help you break 80 based on data, probabilities and strategy from tea to green. I can't guarantee it'll work every time, but it will start to tilt the odds of that coin flip a little more in your favor. Let's get into it. OK, so before we get into the specific strategies, let's first do some basic math on what it takes to break 80. We'll get into how to accomplish all of these things in a minute, but it's important to understand the foundations first. For a lot of golfers, the idea of shooting the 70s is this big, intimidating thing when it really doesn't need to be. In essence, what you're looking for on a standard par 72 course is just seven bogeys and 11 pars. I wouldn't mentally budget for birdies because a 10 handicap makes less than one of those on average per round. And for reference, a scratch golfer makes just over two per round. In fact, the PGA Tour average is less than four birdies per round. The birdie gap between handicaps just isn't actually that big. Chasing them isn't going to make a meaningful difference in getting you to break 80. In fact, in trying, it might actually hurt you. What is big, however, is the double bogey gap. A 10 handicap may only make one less birdie per round than a scratch, but they make almost two and a half more double bogeys. And that accounts for about half of the entire difference in those two handicaps. It's massive. And the data shows that there are some patterns in how they're making these bigger mistakes. Just a little taste of what we're going to get into here. Our scores in golf drop more from avoiding bogey than making more birdies. From 79 to 76, 82% of that is bogey and higher avoidance. And then it's 70% in the other three shot increments, 76 to 73, 73 to 70. But it's the same all the way to number one in the world. 70% of your improvement is from avoiding bogeys. Next, greens and regulation is obviously super important for 70 shooters. But something that I think is even more important when it comes to breaking 80 is this fantastic stat that statistician Lou Steiner came up with. It's called greens and regulation plus one. This means you're hitting a par three in two shots, a par four in three shots and a par five in four shots. Lou's research found that 70 shooters hit at least 16 or 17 of those per round, but 80 shooters hit less than 50. And finally, when I looked at the scoring average on different types of holes for different handicaps, I found that for 90 shooters, par threes are the easiest holes because they require just one solid shot in order to get into that G.I.R. plus one zone. And par fives, interestingly, are the hardest for them because it takes more shots to get into that same position. And for higher handicaps, more shots are just more opportunities to screw up. For scratch players, it's reverse. Par fives are the easiest and par threes are the hardest. And golfers trying to break 80 sit pretty much right in the middle, which is actually really good news because they're kind of good enough to get the best of both worlds. It means that of those 11 or so pars you need, the par fives and the par threes are kind of your best opportunities to get them. There are about four of those each on most golf courses, so eight total. Anyway, together, these are essentially the bones of your breaking 80 game plan. Board a path to get greenside and regulation plus one on every hole. Target par threes and par fives as your best par opportunities. Avoiding doubles is more important than pushing for birdies. So the question now is obviously great, Luke, but how do I do it? Well, there are three main ways, and the first starts off the tee. Now, I've talked a lot in this series about avoiding penalties off the tee. And for good reason, penalty tee shots are horrible. But along the way, I've kind of been neglecting this other really important thing, drives into recovery territory. Dirts. It's a terrible acronym, but it's the best I could do. So we're just going to let it ride. Now, when I looked at the Arco stats, I found the difference in penalty drives across handicaps groups is real. But actually, it's surprisingly small. There's only a point three difference in penalty drives per round between low 70 shooters and high 80 shooters. Where there's a huge difference is in these dirt drives, drives that end up in play but require some kind of recovery shot because you can't reach the green. We're talking punch outs, hacks out of rough or layups out of fairway bunkers. And low 80 shooters hit like 50% more of these dirt drives than 70 shooters. A high 80 shooter, for that matter, only averages like one tee shot penalty more per round, but they average almost two and a half drives into recovery territories. So, yes, the penalties are bad, but the dirts are a big problem, too, which also makes sense because most courses don't have penalties on every hole, but they do have other obstacles on every hole. And now to me, the signal that this was really flashing here is that low 80 shooters are kind of pretty good at avoiding penalties when they see them, because it's just obvious how bad they are. Nobody sees water and thinks, I want to go there. And if you're scoring in the low 80s, you're generally pretty decent at avoiding things like the water because of it. But when there aren't literal penalties like water on a hole, those same golfers seem to get kind of complacent. They don't realize how much all this other stuff adds up and hurts them overall. The way Eric Barzynski, co-author of Lower Score Wins, puts it, is that for many amateur golfers, obstacles like fairway bunkers are some of the biggest bleeds on their score, even though they may not look like it. Bunkers may as well have red paint around them because they may as well be treated like water. The number of strokes to get out of it and get on the green from there skyrockets pretty quickly. The bunkers are to the right. As long as there's not a bunch of trees and tall grass and stuff to the left, a lot of people should be aiming in that scenario at the left edge of the fairway or into the left rough slightly. I think people don't properly weight the values of some things when they look at a golf course. There's way more to it than this. But when it comes to breaking 80 on a hole with no penalties, pick one side of the hole as the safe side. That safe side should either have no hazards or just rough. And when there's trouble on both sides or it's right in your distance range, it's probably time to club down. But the strategy itself doesn't really change. Remember, the goal here isn't to break any records. We'll touch on this later, or maybe we'll just do a whole rough strategy game plan episode if that sounds interesting. Let me know in the comments below. But the reason why this works so well for breaking 80s is because the penalty for being in the rough isn't that big for these golfers. And it actually shrinks the longer that the shot gets. Arco's data shows that 10 handicaps score about the same from 140 yards in the rough as from 160 in the fairway. And by the time you're way back on a long hole, the difference between fairway and rough basically disappears for these golfers. And most of the time, you're probably going to accidentally hit your ball into the fairway anyway. Basically, rough isn't great, but it's not a killer. It's the recovery shot situations that are the killer for a sub 80 score. The dirt drives. A lot of golfers do not play U.S. Open rough. OK, so sometimes the little bit of a flyer you can get out of the rough might help you because amateurs tend to underclub a little bit. But most of the time, a lot of the rough that amateur golfers play isn't that bad. They've been conditioned to hit the fairway, hit the green. That doesn't really matter as much at the amateur level. Which brings us to the next thing I uncovered in my research for this episode. The 50 yard black hole. Now, there's one distance that's an absolute black hole of double bogeys for golfers trying to break 80. And that distance range is right around 150 yards to 200 yards. If you're a 10 handicap or a low 80 shooter and you have an approach shot of 200 yards or more into a green, the data shows that you have a 20 percent chance of making a double bogey. And that's from the fairway. It's 14 percent at 175 yards, and it doesn't get under 10 percent until 150 yards. Now, I'm not trying to bring this up to scare you. I'm bringing this up to make clear that when you're in this 50 yard black hole between 150 and 200 yards, either on par fours or on par three tee shots, you need to be on absolute high alert defense mode, especially if you're in the rough. And this is important because when you're 175 yards out, you're not going to feel like this is a high alert situation. It's actually, in many ways, going to feel kind of normal. And it's why it's so easy for us to get complacent from here. You've hit good shots from this range. But again, breaking 80 isn't about the good shots. It's about managing all the medium and bad shots. And the fact is, is that you're making a double bogey almost once every five times you're in this spot. And anecdotally, something I see happen a lot from this range, from golfers trying to break 80, is they take whatever club they want to hit, like a five or a six iron, they aim to aggressively. And then they hit an iffy shot, which misses short. Now they've got some awkward, long range, short sighted situation that rarely ends well. And this kind of stuff is what you need to strategize for by going back to that concept from Lou Stagner we talked about earlier. Greens in regulation plus one. You want a strategy that will give you your easiest path to a green in regulation in one extra shot. And to do that, you need to reimagine where the green is in your mind, which is something Eduardo Molinari explained to me here. The good chippers, they miss in the right spots. Like Scottie Scheffler, I think chipping is fantastic, but it's also fantastic because it misses a lot of times, a lot more times than his peers in the easy spots to chip from. Basically, look at a green and pick a spot around the green, which represents the easiest possible chip shot. That's point A, your bailout spot. Point B is either the middle of the green or the pin, whichever is closer to point A. Now, this is the zone you're trying to hit your ball. When you're in that 175 to 200 yard high alert zone, you want to be aiming closer to point A. Why? Because a 10 handicap is a shot pattern that's about 50 yards wide from this range, which is like double the size of most greens. And if you do this correctly, your misses to one side will give you a clear look at a GAR plus one. Good shots will do that too. And a decent chunk of your bad shots will end up on the green, which is an added bonus, because again, the goal is greens and regulation plus one shot. And while we're here, what better time for a refresher on your whole chip shot strategy? You can check out our game plan video on chipping in the description below. Anyways, as you get closer to the green, into the 150 yards and end zone, you can start inching your aim more to the middle of point A and point B because an average 10 handicaps spread shrinks to 35 yards across. And honestly, this strategy will serve you really well all the way until you get to about 100 yards and end. At that point, a 10 handicaps double bogey rate is under 5%. So you can adapt this strategy by picking a new target like Scotty Sheffler does. He aims between the middle of the green and the pin. And those are your new points A and B. We'll put that video in the description below as well. Again, it's probably going to feel weird for a lot of people to be pivoting this far away from the pin on so many holes. But who cares? As they say, there are no pictures on the scorecard. Remember the goal. Breaking 80. So I'm thinking about doing this whole video about putting strategy soon, which I think would be cool. But if you have other ideas, let me know in the comments below. But anyway, as part of the reporting for this one, I got some awesome data from biomechanist Sasha McKenzie from his stack app. I use it myself and they're not paying me to say that. It's just really good stuff. When we looked at the data for golfers who shoot right around 80, there was a very clear trend that these golfers are very commonly hitting the longer parts outside of 10 feet too soft and way too soft outside of 15 feet, which is a lot different from pros whose average lead from that 17 to 30 foot range is just over a foot past the hole. These speed control mistakes lead to a big three putt lead. Obviously, short putting plays a role in this, but it's two soft live putts that are a big reason why three putt percentages are up to 40% for 10 handicaps from this range. Two different groups of low 80 shooters lost more than three and a half strokes on the green per round compared to 70 shooters. In other words, this three putt bleed was absolutely crushing them. It was the only thing standing in the way of them breaking 80. Now, the issue isn't as much of the average low 80 shooter probably needs to hit putts like these harder, which maybe they do. It's more that our speed control is just really bad and it really hurts us on the greens. The takeaway here is that in our warm ups, practicing a few more lag putts, 30 footers and beyond, doesn't have a big return on investment when it comes to breaking 80. Anyway, more to come on this putting stuff I'm excited about. Put all this together and you've got a pretty no nonsense guide to breaking 80. And the best part is that it is no nonsense. You already have the tools right now to do this. The final thing holding you back is just a few shots around where you're leaving yourself in the wrong spots. A little more discipline and strategy is all you need to win that coin flip. It's a sign for a school in the 70s.