Game Golf LIVE
The newest arrival in the ProShop this week is Game Golf LIVE, a very easy way of tracking your round, with tags in the end of your club and a small device hooked to your belt. Here's how it works…
Simply, all you have to do is play golf and Game Golf LIVE does the rest by recording all sorts of stats such as fairways hit, greens hit, how many putts, your score for the hole and many more. Each club has its own tag which is synced to the device on your belt so all you have to do is concentrate on your game!
Once you've finished your round you can download every stat to your smartphone or tablet for a comprehensive breakdown of your round. The NEW strokes gained analysis and SMART Tips software provide an insight to your strengths and weaknesses and a few suggestions on how you can improve.
You can also share key moments in your round on Facebook and Twitter. Whether that is your monster drive or the 50 foot putt you holed to win a fiver, the GAME GOLF platform gives you the ultimate opportunity to share your talents with the world, not just your Saturday morning fourball…making it harder for them to deny all knowledge of your skills!
You can set yourself targets for certain areas of your game to improve, when you're feeling confident enough you can compare yourself against other GAME GOLF users, including Tour Professionals such as Lee Westwood, Jim Furyk & Graeme McDowell.
You don't have to be on the same course or even the same continent to beat your friends either with the pre- loaded Skills Challenges, you can even create your own challenges to make things really interesting! You can also take on the Game Golf Tour Professionals and see if you can beat them too.
You can create a live leaderboard with your playing partners to give your Sunday mornings that tour authentic feeling making for some very nervous putting strokes down the stretch! You can share your leaderboards on Facebook and Twitter, just in case your mates are working and want to be involved in the action!
Lifeboat Spoon
Last Saturday was the Lifeboat Spoon where 138 members were trying to get their name on the honours boards. Taking the spoils in Division 2 was Ian Grant with an impressive 37 points and getting a nice boost to his ProShop account. The winner this year of the Lifeboat Spoon was Shaun Macklin hitting 40 points playing off 1 meaning he was 3 under par gross!
Well done Shaun!
How Can Stats Help Your Game?
Quite often people ask why people record their stats. The simple answer is, how do you know what needs to be improved if you have no evidence to back it up? The amount of times people say their putting is bad or their irons aren't very good, well sometimes that can be a knock on effect from the previous shot; for example if you're not hitting the fairway from the tee then you're making the next shot so much harder.
For the next 5 rounds try to record how many fairways you hit, how many greens you hit and how many putts you have and I guarantee you will be surprised with the results. As you sit down after your round to recall each of the categories you will realise that missed putt was due to not hitting the green in the right place because the drive wasn't positioned well enough to attack the pin. You should start to see a trend after 5 rounds giving you a better idea of what to work on.
These are just an example of what stats you can record, follow this link to the European Tour website, and see what depth the Tour Professionals go into to ensure their game is in tip top condition.
I like to look at putts per green in regulation which only counts the number of putts you take on greens where you have birdie putts. At the end of your round you divide that number of putts by how many greens you hit and if the result is less than 2 that means you're under par for those holes on average and more than 2 means you're over par on average.
If you're serious about improving your golf, stat recording is the first step you can take to get that handicap tumbling down and you can go into as much detail as you like! Once you've found out where your weak areas are you can work on them with a purpose.
If you really want to improve your game, I cannot stress enough how good a Gapping Session will be for your golf. Getting exact distances you hit each club will take all doubt out of your mind when you're next standing over a shot.
