Golf - Chip Shots with the 8 Iron

Hi, I am Paige with the Presidential and we are going to talk about chipping with the 8 Iron. We talked about club selection earlier, in this situation the ball is close to the green and I have a lot of room in which to roll a ball like a pud. Ideally in these situations, it is just kind of a standard chip shot. What I love about the 8 Iron though is it, there is a ratio that I can rely on when chipping with this club. It is one third air time and two third roll time, that means that as I am trying to gauge the distance I can look out and figure that my one third distance is my landing area and when I am making the under hand toss the one third point is my landing spot.

Remember, the pudding green starts here, so really any ball that can land on the pudding surface is going to release and roll closer to the hole then it will be some other clubs. When we are chipping it is important that the leading edge of the club is going in the direction of the target. The way we know this will happen is the leading edge, the last two lines of the golf club should be going straight up and down perpendicular to the ground. If the club is closed the ball will go left, if the club is open the ball will go to the right, square club base, looks like that.

So, as I am gauging the distance with the 8 Iron what I am doing is actually looking at on my one third spot and I like to take a couple of practice swings and I like to feel as If I really going to throw the ball under hand with the golf club. This motion right is going to help me gauge about the power level that I am going to need for this shot.

So, now when I take my setup, the ball is going to be in the middle of my stance, my alignment is good and all I am doing is I am making a tossing motion to the one third spot and the ball will release and roll two third of the way right of next to the hole. Remember, with the 8 Iron that one third carry and two third roll is a guideline It is barely reliable, but we want to remember that if the green is sloping severely upward or severely downward, we need to adjust our landing spot to accommodate the slope of the green. Coming up next we are going to talk about Pitching Wedge.