What speed is best

Three ways to read a putt

Stand over any breaking putt and you have a choice before you ever pull the trigger: what pace are you reading it for? A ball that dies in the hole takes the most break. A firm ball takes the least. Read the same putt for a different pace and you are aiming at a different line.

So which pace should you read for? Not which holes most when struck perfectly — they all do — but which holes most in the real world, where your delivered speed is give or take a foot off your intended speed. We ran a test on every putt from 3 to 20 feet, across three slopes, through the AI Caddie break model. Here are the findings.

The make rate, by slope

Here is the whole picture. Switch the slope with the tabs; each row is a reading strategy, each column the speed you delivered against the pace you read for. And it is not just the line that matters — the model also factors in TrackMan’s hole-capture data, so the hole shrinks with the pace you hit, exactly as it does on a real green.

Which speed is best?

First, the obvious: a good read struck at the perfect pace goes in whichever strategy you choose. The interesting question — the one this study set out to answer — is what happens when the pace is off by give or take a foot. Which reading strategy holds up best then?

Across every putt in this study, the best purely on the data is two feet past: 49% of putts were made when the speed came in a foot either side of the intended pace. Dying the putt scored worst — 26% at best, and 0% any time it was left short. Dying is still a valid strategy on longer putts, but on short ones it relies on near-perfect pace control. We also ran Dave Pelz’s 17-inches-past number to compare.

On pure make rate, two feet past edges it — but that is only half the story. Our test asks one question, does the first putt drop, and never counts the one coming back.

The LSR view is that a foot past is the pace we recommend. Two feet past has a slightly better make rate, but it is not worth the two- or three-foot return putt you leave yourself. On putts over twenty feet, dead weight is preferred — and up to a foot short there is a smart, low-risk play.

LSR AI Caddie break model · stimp 10 · TrackMan % hole capture · make/miss validated vs TrackMan direction tolerance to a hundredth of a degree