If you want to shoot lower scores, I recommend you read Lowest Score Wins by Erik J. Barzeski and Dave Wedzik.
Lowest Score Wins will show you which parts of your golf game have the most impact on your score. You’ll know whether to prioritize hitting driver, putting, fairway bunker shots, and more, with stats to back it up.
Barzeski and Wedzik also explain how to navigate a course based on your shot patterns, how to hole out in fewer strokes, how to prepare for a tournament, and a lot more.
The point – I learned a lot from reading Lowest Score Wins and I think you will to. Here are some of the biggest lessons I learned by reading this book.
Note: I recommend you buy Lowest Score Wins from their website. The $30 + s/h you’ll pay there is far cheaper than prices on Amazon.
My Biggest Takeaways from Lowest Score Wins
I want to share a few things I learned while reading Lowest Score Wins to give you an idea of what the book covers. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil the book. I’m just going to give you an overview of each idea below.
Separation Value + SCOR (page xii-xiii)
One of the first things you’ll learn is what the authors call separation value. Separation value is a rating system they use to determine how much separation there is in being good at one aspect of golf compared to another.
For example, if you’ve read Mark Broadie’s Every Shot Counts, you know that “drive for show and putt for dough” is a myth. There is way more value in hitting the ball further off the tee than there is working on your putting.
Put another way – being longer off the tee than your opponents has more separation value than holing more putts from 10 feet.
Barzeski and Wedzik rates every skill in golf from 1-4, with skills rated a 4 having the most separation value. But they don’t just randomly assign numbers to various skills. They have a process they use to determine a golf skill’s separation.
They call this criteria SCOR, which is an acronym for the following:
- Strokes
- Ceiling
- Opportunities
- Related Skills
The number of strokes you can save, the ceiling on how good you can get at a skill, the number of opportunities per round that you’ll have to use that skill, and how well that skill transfers to other skills will determine its separation value.
Ultimately, the idea here is that if you want to become the best golfer you can, and you want the fastest and straightest line there, getting good at the skills with the highest separation value is the way to do it.
Putting Capture Speed (page 58)
Another big takeaway I had from Lowest Score Wins is capture speed – the amount of speed your putt needs to have for the hole to be large enough to “capture” the ball.
The harder you hit your putt, the smaller your margin for error becomes and the more likely it is that your ball will lip out or skip over the cup.
For example, the book gives an example of a putting green with a stimp speed of 8. If you hit a putt so that it’d stop about 1 foot past the hole, the ball would need to hit the middle 2.6 inches in order for it to drop. Hit the putt hard enough so that it’d stop two feet past the hole, and your margin for error drops from 2.6 inches to 1.9 inches.
This takeaway shifted my perspective from hitting the ball hard enough to give every putt a chance to rolling the putt just hard enough that it’d drop even if it caught the edges. The authors say this is the equivalent to hitting the ball hard enough to stop about 9 inches past the hole.
Decision Maps (page 157)
Another thing I’ll apply to my game from Lowest Score Wins are decision maps. A decision map is simply a shot zone – drawing a circle around where you expect your ball to end up and coloring the penal areas black, the less penal areas gray, and the safe areas white.
When mapping out your course strategy before a round or while on the course, you’ll draw your shot zones for the clubs you want to hit. Then you’ll position them over various spots of the course to determine how to advance your ball as far as you can while minimizing the amount of risk you take on to do so.
That’s the simplified version of decision maps. I recommend you pick up a copy of the book and read this section a couple of times, as there are many variables – your shot zone, hazards, out of bounds, etc. – that will impact your club selection and strategy at any given time.
Dead Center (page 199)
The idea that the authors in Lowest Score Wins is that you should aim for the center of your shot zone when hitting into the green. This is opposed to aiming for the flag.
The higher your handicap, the larger your shot zone, thus the more likely you bring greenside dangers into play. This makes it even more important to playing to the center of your shot zone.
One of the most surprising things about this strategy is that everyone should follow it regardless of handicap or distance from the flag.
The lowest handicapped players obviously closed the gap the most – the difference in strokes between aiming at the pin and aiming for the center of their shot zone from approx. 50 yards out. Still, aiming for the center of their shot zone resulted in more greens and lower scores.
Worst Putt > Worst Chip (page 47)
This is a short and sweet mindset that will save you strokes for sure. The authors make the point that you should putt whenever possible – when there’s no rough, debris, or sprinkler head between your ball and the cup.
They give the following reasons:
- Your best putt is the same as your best chip – you hole out
- Your worst putt will ALWAYS be better than your worst chip
That last point is what I always think about when I’m trying to decide whether to chip or putt, especially if I’m thinking I need to do a high-risk chip or flop shot.
The odds of me skulling or fatting a flop shot is relatively high, which will almost always put me in a bad position – likely worse than the position I was just in. However, it’s hard to make that bad of a putt.
In Lowest Score Wins, Barzeski and Wedzik also say that you should always aim to make only one greenside shot – get it on the green in one shot and then aim to one or two putt.
Keeping the phrase – that your worst putt is better than your worst chip – in mind will help you make decisions that will lead to fewer greenside shots and reduce your scores.
Track nGIR (page 142)
One unique thing that the authors of Lowest Score Wins introduce is the idea of nGIR or near-greens in regulation.
This is an important concept because stats show that the correlation between the number of GIRs you hit and your score cannot be denied. As they say, your short game will never be good enough to beat someone who hits more greens than you do.
To them, greens in regulation is the king of your game. And since proximity to the hole and GIRs are so important to your scoring, that getting within 20 yards of the green or nGIR to try to save par, is the queen.
As such, I’ve started tracking my near GIR in the same column as I track my GIR. And much of my short game practice is from inside of this range too, just to give myself every chance to save par when I miss the greens.
I recommend you do the same.
Should You Read Lowest Score Wins?
Absolutely.
What I like about Lowest Score Wins is that they give you a lot of similar information that you might find in Every Shot Counts by Mark Broadie, but without having to read that stat heavy textbook.
They also give you the information and resources necessary to improve your golf game TODAY using the game and skillset you have now, as well as the information you need to improve your golf skills.
It’s good to know what you should work on, what to prioritize in your practice and to what extent and, more importantly, the benefit or upside to doing so.
Ultimately, if you want to learn how to improve your golf game and shoot your lowest scores, Lowest Score Wins by Barzeski and Wedzik is a must-read. You can read it once in a couple of days and you’ll come back to it time and time again for the drills and ideas.
Buy Lowest Score Wins now. I’m positive you’ll get as much out of it as I did.