How to Read Putts: The Fall Line Method

By learning what the “fall line” is and how to apply it to reading left/right and uphill/downhill break of the green, you should be able to drain more putts. This method works best for putts from around 6 feet and in, and can also help with long putts traveling over multiple breaks along the way by revealing how the ball will move as it approaches the hole. This can all be boiled down to the bolded sentences below, and perhaps it’s all something you intuitively understand already, but breaking it down can be elucidating.

Before defining the fall line, it’s important to understand a couple concepts about how putting greens are set up. Putting greens will have some kind of slope throughout the entirety of the green. Why? Some combination of aggravating you on every possible putt by having to figure out the slope, plus allowing for water to drain off the green. Otherwise flat surfaces would allow puddles of water to collect and damage the greens.  In addition, the slopes throughout the green can ebb and flow, undulate, bank in different directions, etc., but the direction of slope doesn’t change too fast/within a certain distance, ipso facto there will be only one single direction of slope to read within a certain radius around the hole.

That brings us to the fall line. The fall line is an imaginary straight line in the direction of a straight downhill putt through the hole. A CD tilted toward one side is a good representation of the putting surface around the pin (the hole in the middle of the CD represents the pin, and the disc itself represents the ~6 foot radius of green surrounding the pin). If you took a CD, rested one side down on the table, and placed your finger under the rim on the opposite side, the fall line would be the straight line along the CD from your finger to where it touches the table. To some grade of slope, whether subtle or pronounced, this “tilted CD” situation is what’s happening on the putting surface around any pin. In the above picture, the shadow of the pin and flag happen to make an arrow that points along the fall line (a happy coincidence).

So you’re on the green, you used your eyes to find the fall line, or maybe you used the feel in your feet and legs walking 360 degrees around the hole to determine the high and low point around the hole. You found the fall line and you can draw the line for a straight downhill putt through the hole. Here’s how to put the fall line into practice-

In your mind’s eye imagine the face of a clock aligned with the fall line, with 12 at the high point and 6 at the low point. Putting from the “12” position will be a straight downhill putt. Putting from the “6” position will be a straight uphill putt. Those are the only 2 points with straight putts. Here’s where the money is: a ball anywhere on the right half of the clock will break left, and a ball anywhere on the left half of the clock will break right. Furthermore, a putt from the “3” position will have the most leftward break, “2” and “4” will have less than that, and “1” and “5” will have the least leftward break. On the other side of the clock, a putt from the “9” position will have the most rightward break, “8” and “10” will break right less than that, and “7” and “11” will break right more slightly. Another layer to using the fall line is to not only consider the right/left direction of the break, but also the uphill/downhill direction. All things being equal, downhill putts break more than uphill putts.

The arrow pointing from 12 to 6 going through the hole is the fall line. A putt from 12 is a straight downhill putt. A putt from 6 is a straight uphill putt. These are the only two perfectly straight putts. Anything in the “blue” zone will be downhill and left-breaking. Anything in the “orange” zone be uphill and left-breaking. Anything in the “red” zone will be uphill and right-breaking. Anything in the “purple” zone will be downhill and right-breaking. Framing it another way, blue and purple are downhill putts, orange and red are uphill putts. Blue and orange break left, purple and red break right. Putts at 9 or 3 are basically level (hole is same height as the ball), in fact eyeing around the hole for where the level putts are at 3 and 9 is one technique to find the fall line.

So that’s how it be, and that’s what it do. The next time you’re at a practice putting green, try it out. Find the fall line, put 12 balls in a circle around the hole at each number of the clock, and put it to the test!

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