Great players, what do your great rounds look like?

[southernhacker]

Hey there,
New to the forum.  Entered qualifying this week and shot a decent -11 for all four rounds, but it looks like I might get placed in a solid Challenge tour because scoring is high on White-tailed National this week (I could be wrong). I'm concerned that I will not be able to remain on a mid-level challenge tour because I'm looking at tourney results and seeing VERY LOW scores.  Since moving to master settings, the best score I can shoot is -8 on a round and typically, its close to -3 or -4 per round. I feel like without being able to shot shape, many times I'm in between clubs and I just play safe and hit a full shot to the center of the green and try to two-putt. If I try to say, abbreviate a swing, or overpower it, it just causes me to not get a perfect/near perfect and it ends up not being useful to me.  I think I'm also giving up alot of shots on the greens because I'm struggling to get speed and line correct.

To those who are shooting some of the intimidating numbers I'm seeing in Challenge C/D/E/F and elsewhere, how do you shoot in the 50s on these settings?  Are you hitting shots close to the pin all day by hitting the right percentages on your approaches? Are you making putts from everywhere?  Having never shot a round in the 50s on Master, I'm wondering what that looks like because I am playing very safe golf and I really struggle to get low rounds unless everything lines up and I have a great club on most holes.

Just curious how you guys are shooting so low.

[Craig / Hendomedes]

A good way of seeing what a good round looks like is to take a ghost of one of the rounds you see and compare your play to theirs. Even post-round check your round stats compared to theirs.

[JosiaDB]

Dec 23, 2022 18:08:18 GMT -5 southernhacker said:

Hey there,
New to the forum.  Entered qualifying this week and shot a decent -11 for all four rounds, but it looks like I might get placed in a solid Challenge tour because scoring is high on White-tailed National this week (I could be wrong). I'm concerned that I will not be able to remain on a mid-level challenge tour because I'm looking at tourney results and seeing VERY LOW scores.  Since moving to master settings, the best score I can shoot is -8 on a round and typically, its close to -3 or -4 per round. I feel like without being able to shot shape, many times I'm in between clubs and I just play safe and hit a full shot to the center of the green and try to two-putt. If I try to say, abbreviate a swing, or overpower it, it just causes me to not get a perfect/near perfect and it ends up not being useful to me.  I think I'm also giving up alot of shots on the greens because I'm struggling to get speed and line correct.

To those who are shooting some of the intimidating numbers I'm seeing in Challenge C/D/E/F and elsewhere, how do you shoot in the 50s on these settings?  Are you hitting shots close to the pin all day by hitting the right percentages on your approaches? Are you making putts from everywhere?  Having never shot a round in the 50s on Master, I'm wondering what that looks like because I am playing very safe golf and I really struggle to get low rounds unless everything lines up and I have a great club on most holes.

Just curious how you guys are shooting so low.

Thats a great topic for discussion.   What parts of the game do the great players concentrate on, or place priority on getting right.

[Brenelan]

I'm definitely not a great player comparatively (CC-A), but I can say that a bulk of my improvement has come via simply getting my approach shots closer to the pin. Which came from doing a decent amount of range work to get consistently better tempos.

A few other things - short game in 2K23 is super important. Keep anything worse than par to a minimum, so you're not constantly climbing uphill. And get your drives in the fairway on the par 5s almost guarantees birdie at worst.

[trentmcneely]

Dec 23, 2022 18:08:18 GMT -5 southernhacker said:

 I feel like without being able to shot shape, many times I'm in between clubs and I just play safe and hit a full shot to the center of the green and try to two-putt.

What do you mean by this? The key to getting shots close is using shaping to adjust gaps in between clubs. In a practice round, turn on tru-shot so it will show you what shaping does to your clubs' distance and mess around with all clubs.

[Craig / Hendomedes]

Dec 24, 2022 11:47:04 GMT -5 Brenelan said:

I'm definitely not a great player comparatively (CC-A), but I can say that a bulk of my improvement has come via simply getting my approach shots closer to the pin. Which came from doing a decent amount of range work to get consistently better tempos.

A few other things - short game in 2K23 is super important. Keep anything worse than par to a minimum, so you're not constantly climbing uphill. And get your drives in the fairway on the par 5s almost guarantees birdie at worst.

This is great advice regardless of level. If you make bogey you're behind the curve so always have a good miss in mind where you can make par from. And as Brenelan says, know when to accept bogey or a longer par putt if you DO find yourself in a bad spot and not try a hero shot because anything worse and you're really up against it.

I always think if a course has four par 5's then par for me is -4. Birdie all of those and no bogies. Then you know you'll pick up 4 or 5 birdies so you're going to shoot around -8 as a base level each round if you can do that.

Then when you get used to shot shaping, get your tempo down and can play for certain spots on the green that leave an easier putt, hole a few longer putts etc. you'll start to shoot double digits under.

[sanchez]

All good advice and appreciated. The area i really struggle with is approach shots. Mostly slows but sometimes fast just cannot find the sweet spot so usually leaving a long putt or chip/flop/pitch which is easy to get wrong especially pitch. If i shoot under par thats good for me. Driving is pretty good putting is good compared to the last game (apart from some disasters on very fast greens but the best probably have those on very fast). By the time EA release their game i might be nearly almost but not quite half good.

[southernhacker]

Dec 25, 2022 6:05:36 GMT -5 Craig / Hendomedes said:

Dec 24, 2022 11:47:04 GMT -5 Brenelan said:

I'm definitely not a great player comparatively (CC-A), but I can say that a bulk of my improvement has come via simply getting my approach shots closer to the pin. Which came from doing a decent amount of range work to get consistently better tempos.

A few other things - short game in 2K23 is super important. Keep anything worse than par to a minimum, so you're not constantly climbing uphill. And get your drives in the fairway on the par 5s almost guarantees birdie at worst.

This is great advice regardless of level. If you make bogey you're behind the curve so always have a good miss in mind where you can make par from. And as Brenelan says, know when to accept bogey or a longer par putt if you DO find yourself in a bad spot and not try a hero shot because anything worse and you're really up against it.

I always think if a course has four par 5's then par for me is -4. Birdie all of those and no bogies. Then you know you'll pick up 4 or 5 birdies so you're going to shoot around -8 as a base level each round if you can do that.

Then when you get used to shot shaping, get your tempo down and can play for certain spots on the green that leave an easier putt, hole a few longer putts etc. you'll start to shoot double digits under.

This is good advice, I appreciate it.  I'm going to head to the range when I can and start messing with the shot shaping some and working on approach game.  Its odd, but I drive the ball really well.  But for some reason, I feel like the approach/iron swing is different or at least it feels different to me than a driver swing. Like it is shorter or something? I've never been able to be as consistent with approach swing it as I am with the driver swing.

I also need to tinker some with my wedges and see what adding loft/deloft does as far as yardage and how it reacts because without the Tru Shot on Master, its a guess and you need to know these numbers.

Thanks for all of the information folks, I really appreciate it.

[Blade]

Dec 25, 2022 10:46:50 GMT -5 southernhacker said:

I'm going to head to the range when I can and start messing with the shot shaping some and working on approach game.  Its odd, but I drive the ball really well.  But for some reason, I feel like the approach/iron swing is different or at least it feels different to me than a driver swing. Like it is shorter or something? I've never been able to be as consistent with approach swing it as I am with the driver swing.

I also need to tinker some with my wedges and see what adding loft/deloft does as far as yardage and how it reacts because without the Tru Shot on Master, its a guess and you need to know these numbers.

Thanks for all of the information folks, I really appreciate it.

You can pretty easily build yourself a driving range where you have a tee-box and the worlds largest green. Throw in some bunkers and rough, you can test all sorts of things with no wind and no lie angle issues. From the green surface it is like hitting a 99% lie. This has really helped my game as I now know what loft and spin doing to each of my clubs. They are definitely not the same across the clubs.  If you want, then you can add wind and see what a heavy loft does in the wind vs a heavy de-loft. Of course this is hitting from flat to flat. When you hit into a loss of elevation, the ball rolls much less (and vice versa for gaining elevation). I just estimate that but I suppose you could build a green that is really low or high.

I also hit good drives and my irons are what I am really working on now. I have my distances pretty good, so now I am trying to dial in how to account for all the factors, including how shot shaping is affected by winds (I have not mapped that out on my range).

[twofor22]

I wouldn't put myself in the great player category, however I am finding I'm shooting lower scores a bit more often than I was a month or two ago. I don't really do anything special, with approaches I have a scan of the green and work out where I want to miss, or if there are any slopes I can aim at to feed the ball down to the pin. Tucked pins I only go at if I'm in short iron/wedge range.

It's a bit like my real golf, some days I can't find the rhythm, or putts keep scaring the hole without dropping, other days I get in a groove and swing well, and/or the putts keep dropping because I keep landing in spots that make them relatively easy (little to no break) or I just get my eye in on the breaking ones.