Mastering the Art of Chipping from the Rough

Even if you are an excellent ball striker, the need to chip from the rough is sure to come up from time to time.

In fact, if you play on a course with a lot of rough, it’s likely that you’ll need to chip out of the long grass at least once or twice in every round.

Knowing this is a shot that is bound to come up quite often, it makes sense to prepare yourself for the challenge.

Chipping from the rough will always be difficult, but you can improve your performance in this part of the game with a combination of knowledge and practice.

Understanding the Challenge

So, why is it harder to chip successfully from the rough than from the fairway? You’ll be dealing with a couple of main issues…

The first is the lack of spin that you are going to be able to place on the ball.

With so much grass in the way, the club face is not going to strike the ball as cleanly as it would on the fairway. That means less friction between the face and the ball, and less backspin in the end. So, when the ball lands on the green, it is likely to bounce and roll much farther than it would if you were chipping from a clean lie.

The other main challenge is the overall unpredictability of the shot.

Sometimes, your club will move through the rough relatively cleanly, and the ball will come out quickly. On other shots, the club will get tangled up in the grass, and you will be lucky to even get the ball out. You can look at the lie of the ball and the grass behind it to get some idea of what is going to happen, but there will always be some guessing involved.

Using a Lot of Loft

When your ball nestles down in the rough around a green, you will want to reach for your most-lofted club more times than not to handle the task.

The idea here is to get the ball up and out of the grass as quickly as possible.

If you were to use less loft, the club would be more likely to get tangled up, and the shot would struggle to come out cleanly. Also, since you aren’t going to have much (if any) backspin on the shot, using as much loft as you can will help you stop the shot quicker after it lands.

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In particularly difficult situations, you will even want to open the face of your lob wedge at address to add more loft and cut through the grass effectively.

It will take some practice to get used to chipping with such a high lofted club, so find time to work on this before using it on the course.

Take A Long Swing with Even Pacing

Perhaps the hardest part of chipping from the rough is getting comfortable with the length of swing you need to use from such a short distance. You aren’t going to be very far away from the hole when playing this kind of shot, but you still need to make a pretty sizeable swing.

Rather than making a short swing and trying to accelerate the club near impact, consider using a longer swing with a steady pace all the way through. You may find that this approach makes it easier to control your distance.

Again, so much of this comes down to practice. Work on using a long, steady swing for these kinds of chip shots and your results should gradually improve with experience.

Picking a Smart Target

If you were to ask the average golfer what his or her target was on a chip shot from the rough, you’d probably get a quizzical look before they answered, ‘the hole, of course!’

It seems obvious that the hole is the target for a chip shot, but that isn’t really how you should be thinking of it. Instead, think of your target as a landing spot that you select on the green.

This landing spot should be chosen based on how much you think the ball is going to bounce and roll after it lands. Then, you simply focus on sending the ball to the landing spot, trusting it to go on its way from there.

Picking a landing spot is a good idea for any kind of chip or pitch, played from any kind of lie. When in the rough, consider being a little more conservative with your selection, providing yourself with plenty of margin for error in case you make a mistake, or the ball doesn’t come out quite as you had expected.

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Playing it safe might not be the easiest choice to make when it means potentially leaving yourself a longer putt, but you need to take the big mistake out of play in this case. It would be great to set up a short putt for your up and down, but your primary focus needs to be on making sure you hit the green with the chip shot.

Having to chip again would be a major mistake and you’d run the risk of quickly turning this hole into a double or triple bogey. You’ve already made an error by hitting the ball into the rough – don’t compound that error by being too aggressive.

Be smart, pick a conservative landing spot for the chip, and execute it to the best of your ability.

Let’s be honest – you never really want to be chipping from the rough. You’d rather be on the green, putting for your birdie, than dealing with a tricky chip out of the long stuff. Golf is a difficult game, however, and sometimes you have to deal with tough shots if you are going to reach your goals.

Hopefully, the discussion in this article will help you make progress toward the goal of getting up and down as often as possible when chipping from the rough. Play well out there!