It's good for your game

                                                                                              The Korea Times   2012-10-31 20:24

It's good for your game

Flip-flop your way to better putting
 In politics, the kiss of death is to be a flip-flopper. Apparently, changing your mind because of new information is considered a character flaw in politicians. But in real life, as Gen. Douglas MacArthur said, "The hand closed permanently in a fist is useless in hand-to-hand combat."
In golf, where changing one's mind is the essence of the game, we are much safer following the dictates of one of our greatest soldiers.
To accurately peg the position of the cup in relation to your ball as you line up a putt, you need to use triangulation, where you look at your putt from three vantage points. When you use just one position to determine the location of an object, you're likely to encounter parallax ― distortion via the position of the observer. That's why surveyors use more than one position to measure the exact location of objects. They can't afford to be fooled, and neither can you.

The three vantage points match the three points on a triangle:
1. From behind the hole;
2. From midway to the hole, on the low side;
3. From behind the ball.

As you move from point to point on the triangle, your commitment to the line of the putt often changes. This is as it should be because, as you gather more information from different vantage points, your brain adjusts the line or curve of the putt automatically. Your brain needs to keep "changing its mind" until it gets it right.
So make sure you have a putting routine designed to locate the target by gathering enough information about distance and direction necessary to get the ball in the hole. Give your putting routine a permanent structure so it's an integral part of the shot rather than a trivial option that comes before the real thing.

Triangulating the line of a putt starts here, behind the hole. Next I’ll move to the midway point.

I took a good look at my putt from the midway point on the low side, where the X is, before moving behind the ball for my final read.