Welcome to Play Smart, a regular GOLF.com game-improvement column that will help you play smarter, better golf.
Bryson DeChambeau is meticulous in everything he does on the golf course. From his single-length irons to his finely-tuned driver, everything is optimized.
It should comes as no surprise then that this attention to detail extends even to the seemingly mundane. Take, for example, the way he marks his golf ball and lines it up on short putts.
Bryson Dechambeau explaining how he uses the dimples on the ball to help him make more short putts is fascinating. pic.twitter.com/Aupjnf56P2
— Tour Pro 🏌️♂️ (@OfficialTourPro) January 3, 2024
The dimples on a golf ball are seemingly in a random pattern all around the exterior, but there are certain places that these dimples form a line. DeChambeau has taken note of this uniformity (of course), and he tries to use it to his advantage when he’s on the greens.
“I line it up on that line,” DeChambeau says. “The reason I do that — this is very very important, guys — is I want to be hitting the top or the bottom of the dimple. I don’t want to be hitting the sides of them.”
Hitting the sides of these lined up dimples, DeChambeau says, can knock the ball off its intended line. So, when DeChambeau has a putt inside of 5 feet, he lines up his putt with these dimples on his start line.
“That is the biggest secret I’ve learned in putting,” he says. “[It’s] how to launch a ball inside five feet correctly.”
As DeChambeau has shown throughout his career, attention to detail is one of his strong suits. And while this instance might seem a bit far-fetched, it’s only crazy if it doesn’t work.
