Customer Reviews

Dave Pelz's Putting Bible: The Complete Guide to Mastering the Green (Dave Pelz Scoring Game Series)

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This book covers everything that you will ever want to know or need to know about putting. The knowledge that I have gained from this book has improved my putting tremendously. There is nothing like playing with your buddies and nailing most of the putts from 6 feet in. Dave points out the realistic odds of making putts from certain distances. This concept stopped me from being frustrated by missing 15 - 20 footers.

I have used his setup routine and I have practically eliminated all pushes in my stroke. I am finally putting straight. I go through an exercise at my club where I putt 20 balls from 6 - 8 feet, before I read this book I was hitting 9 out of 20. After reading the book and taking in some of the concepts I made 19 out of 20! The chapter on reading greens is a must read for all golfers.

If you don't have the Short Game Bible, run out and get that book also. Both of those books have shaved 10 strokes off of my game. I played 9 holes yesterday and shot 41 on par 36 without hitting a green in regulation. Way to go Dave!

This book deserves many more than five stars!

This is simply the best book to improve your putting that has ever been written.

Let me give you an example. I recently played in Southern California after a rain-soaked night. The greens were dripping. My opponent said "I wonder how hard to hit it through this water." And I quoted from this book. He made his putt, and so did I. In fact, the highlight of the round was a tricky 23 foot birdie putt. Thank you, Dave Pelz!

I have taken Dave Pelz's short game course, so I didn't know how much this book would help me. So I came to this book thinking, this will be a good refresher. That was right, but the insights I got from this book exceeded all that I learned in that course about putting.

The book explains the engineering approach that Pelz has brought to putting. He measures everything he can think of. The beginning explains key concepts of green problems -- like the raised donut around the hole where no one steps (the rest of the green is downtrodden by thousands of footsteps daily).

The next section explains the 15 building blocks of putting -- like aim, path, touch, rhythm, ritual, feel, face angle, stability, attitude, and routine.

Then Pelz puts special attention on speed and reading the green. Chapter 7 on green reading was worth the price of the book alone. He answered questions I have asked dozens of pros, and received no good answers to.

Then, he describes how to use these basics to improve your putting. I have been using a number of these for the last several years, and can certainly attest that they work.

Each point is beautifully explained. He has photographs of great players, graphs of experiments he has conducted, graphs of research he has done with average and great players, and diagrams of what to do and not to do. The language is simple and unambiguous.

For the average golfer, this book can take 4-6 strokes off your game. It will mean winning a lot of weekend bets.

One of the book's great strengths is that it starts with the thinking that most people have about putting that gets them in trouble. He helps you identify your stalled thinking that holds back your putting, and then shows you how to break out of the stall and develop an improved habit.

If you have a father, grandfather, uncle, brother, or son who is a father and plays golf, this is the perfect gift for Father's Day. I took the liberty of giving a copy to myself as my Father's Day gift this year. Maybe it will help me win the Father's Day golf tournament!

Keep in mind that in the average round you'll make more putts than you will tee shots, fairway shots, or finesse shots around the green. Get better at putting, and your score can really improve! A two foot putt and a 300 yard drive count for the same on the score -- one stroke.

Enjoy your putting game the most!

One word describes this book and Dave Pelz. WOW. Here is a guy that has helped out my game. This book covers everything about putting that you can think of. This book is a must have for the beginner golfer to the pro. With using a lot of the drills devised in this book I have stopped being a three or four putter person. I can see this as a top selling book for a long time! Thank God for Dave!

Fifteen Stars! ***************

This is simply the best book to improve your putting that has ever been written. It's a 2,000 percent solution!

I had the pleasure and honor of attending Dave Pelz's short game school a few years ago. I became interested in the school after playing golf with a woman in Palm Springs who had just finished the school, and kept putting the ball within 10 feet of the cup from 40-100 yards out. Naturally, I was impressed and wanted to learn how to do that.

Boy, was I surprised by the school. I thought I was a good putter, and I certainly could putt better than most of the people in the class when we started. In fact, I qualified for the regionals of the World Championship of Putting that year. During the instruction, I was diagnosed with over 60 weaknesses in my putting. I still keep the notes, and review them before almost every round.

So I came to this book thinking, this will be a good refresher. That was right, but the insights I got from this book exceeded all that I learned in Dave Pelz's short game school about putting. Since that course cost over $2,000 for 3 days and half the material was on putting, I figure this book is worth over $1,000. Run, don't walk to buy it!

The book explains the engineering approach that Pelz has brought to putting. He measures everything he can think of. The beginning explains key concepts of green problems -- like the raised donut around the hole where no one steps (the rest of the green is downtrodden by thousands of footsteps daily).

The next section explains the 15 building blocks of putting -- like aim, path, touch, rhythm, ritual, feel, face angle, stability, attitude, and routine.

Then Pelz puts special attention on speed and reading the green. Chapter 7 on green reading was worth the price of the book alone. He answered questions I have asked dozens of pros, and received no good answers to.

Then, he describes how to use these basics to improve your putting. I have been using a number of these for the last several years, and can certainly attest that they work.

Each point is beautifully explained. He has photographs of great players, graphs of experiments he has conducted, graphs of research he has done with average and great players, and diagrams of what to do and not to do. The language is simple and unambiguous.

For the average golfer, this book can take 4-6 strokes off your game. It will mean winning a lot of weekend bets.

One of the book's great strengths is that it starts with the thinking that most people have about putting that gets them in trouble. He helps you identify your stalled thinking that holds back your putting, and then shows you how to break out of the stall and develop an improved habit.

If you have a father, grandfather, uncle, brother, or son who is a father and plays golf, this is the perfect gift for Father's Day. I took the liberty of giving a copy to myself as my Father's Day gift this year. Maybe it will help me win the Father's Day golf tournament!

Keep in mind that in the average round you'll make more putts than you will tee shots, fairway shots, or finesse shots around the green. Get better at putting, and your score can really improve! A two foot putt and a 300 yard drive count for the same on the score -- one stroke.

Hit 'em all in the cup!

To start, I would have to say that this book is easily the most detailed, most comprehensive book on putting ever written. Dave Pelz, the super-freak of golf, most definitely covers every aspect of putting that there is.

That having been said, as a big fan of Dave Pelz Short Game Bible, I was thinking that I would like this book just as much. Turns out I was wrong. The style that Pelz presents in the putting bible is not as clear as in the Short Game Bible, and he tends to ramble about certain things and repeat himself continually. I have adjusted some aspects of my putting and feel like I am a better putter after reading this book, but for some reason it did not grab me like the Short Game Bible did.

I would strongly recommend this book for two types of people: VERY serious golfers who are planning on dedicating a large amount of time to improving their putting, and people who consider putting to be their favorite part of golf. For the rest of us, it's not a great read, but can still help any golfer become a much more adept player on the greens.

Reading this book AND PRACTICING will undoubtably make you a much better putter. However you must be in it for the long haul, because this is simply not a putt great by tomorrow type of system.

Pelz leads you somewhat laboriously through all the whys and hows of putting. I like this kind of information because I want to understand and be able to do. This satisfies my intellectual curiousity and gives me greater confidence that I can pull off the shots automatically without having to think too much about them.

He then details equally detailed guides to exercises designed to improve your putting. He is also honest in the sense that he readily acknowledges to truly learn his system will probably take years of diligent work on your part.

The book is great however it could have been signicantly better with little additional work. Namely Pelz please please include an index in your future books. A simple index would make finding little tidbits easy instead of the current search to find the information you need. It would only take a few extra pages and a computer could do the indexing work for you quickly............PLEASE!

In the beginning of this book Dave is very smart to mention that this is only 'his' putting bible and is not in fact 'the' putting bible. Well, I have to disagree with Mr. Pelz on that one. This is in fact THE putting bible. Everything you need to know to improve your play on the green is in this book. Everything from the mechanics of your stroke, the physics of the game, the mental aspect, rhythm, touch, feel ... it's all here. I think the greatest thing about this book is that Dave Pelz is a very honest person. He tells you up front that simply reading this book will not take stokes off you game. Simply put: You need to practice. But the most important aspect of practice is, as he mentions, the quality and not the quantity. He removes any beliefs in that old adage 'practice makes perfect' and replaces it with 'practice makes permanent'. Because if you practice poorly, you will become a permanently poor player. The book describes many effective ways to go about improving the '15 building blocks' of putting. He gives fantastic drills for both on the putting green and on the living room rug that will improve your stroke, and lower your scores.

I think my favorite section of this book is that which deals with reading the green. After reading that chapter I honestly feel I dropped 3 or 4 more putts in my next round, that I never would have sank the week before. (So I suppose just reading this book CAN takes strokes off your game!) And there you have it. Stop reading reviews and grab this book ASAP! Read it, practice, and have fun. And who knows, maybe in a few years, we'll see you on tour! Good Luck!

I bought this book because I craved a truckload of technical information about putting; the effects of what the golfer does or does not do as well as why putts behave (roll) the way they do.

"Dave Pelz's Putting Bible" does not disappoint on either count.

Mr. Pelz knows putting, there are no two ways about it. He knows it as a physicist and as a golfer, and herein lies my only problem with this book: It is organized in a way that emphasizes the technical forces at work in putting first, while details about the crucial steps the golfer must take in order to improve his putting come much later.

For example, Mr. Pelz refers early and often to a "dead-hands" grip, and to a "pils" (pure-in-line-square) stroke. He hints at what the dead-hands grip might look like, but it is Chapter 11 of this 15-chapter text before any actual instruction about various types of grips for putting, with close-up photos, is presented. And advice on how to develop a pils stroke doesn't show up 'til Chapter 12.

The same is true of the wealth of extremely useful, practical putting exercises which Mr. Pelz has painstaking developed and so thoroughly describes in this book. The result is that the author must repeatedly resort, in the first eight chapters or so, to reassuring the reader that full "how-to" information will be presented in later chapters.

For someone like me, who bought this book because he is salivating, yes, for technical information, but is primarily interested in applying that information to improving his putting game (as I would suppose is the case for most of the book's readers), this poor organization made it difficult to read the book "in order," from front to back. That might be O.K. if the book had an index. Readers could locate information alluded to early but presented farther back in the book, then come back to the "front" to continue with the text as presented. But surprisingly, "Dave Pelz's [380-plus-page] Putting Bible" has *no index.*

It is natural that Mr. Pelz, a former research scientist with NASA, would opt to present his scientific findings about putting -- the product of years and years of exacting research -- first. And there is no question whatsoever that all the information any golfer needs to improve his putting is here.

But even I, starved as I was for the technical nitty-gritty on putting when I purchased this book, found myself thinking, "Enough, already! How do I get started?" by about Chapter 6. And alas, my answer would not come for four more chapters.

All of this notwithstanding, I highly recommended this book. I am confident that this exhaustive text will help me putt better.

I only hope that, in future books, Mr. Pelz will consider presenting the fundamentals and exercises first, and the technical, supporting material which forms the basis for those fundamentals and exercises in appendices, or, at a minimum, in the second half of his books.

I believe many golfers are disappointed with books written by pros which provide little or no basis for the instruction presented. And perhaps the organization of this book is Mr. Pelz's answer to that problem. Nonetheless, I think golfers want to know what they need to do in order to get better first, and to have the "whys" close at hand if they care to study them as they progress. So a minor change in presentation could prove a watershed for golfers and for Mr. Pelz.

And this bears repeating: Serious readers of any text this weighty, regardless of how it is organized, deserve an index.

Knowing of Pelz's background as a NASA engineer, my fear was that a 400-page book on putting would be so technical as to leave me paralyzed on the greens ("paralysis through analysis," along the lines of what happened to Bobby Clampett after he immersed himself in Homer Kelley's incomprehensibe "The Golfing Machine"). Instead, I found the book extremely practical and educational. Pelz is an excellent teacher whose instruction is based on solid research rather than pet theories, and this book does a super job of explaining what you ought to be doing and why (as well as what you ought not to be doing and why). It is very readable and well-illustrated -- the 400 pages go very quickly. Even after 35+ years of playing, I had a hard time understanding how to achieve a straight-back-and-through stroke as opposed to one that opens and shuts the clubface like a screen door. Now I do understand, and I know what I need to be working on. You simply will not find a clearer, more comprehensive treatise on putting; it is light years ahead of anything else I've seen, and I've read hundreds of golf books. It would be equally valuable for a beginner or an experienced player -- Pelz is so good at explaining himself that even a raw beginner won't find the material over his or her head.

Dave Pelz is starting to tick me off. If you thought his "Short Game Bible" was demanding, wait until you see this book. In it he insists that the only route to improvement is to practice his "pils" stroke until you've done 20,000 repetitions. And that's just for starters. Call me wacky, but I find that downright discouraging. I'm as dedicated to improving my golf game as the next guy, but jeez I've got a job. I don't have all day every day to wire myself up with all of his feedback gadgets in order to have "meaningful" practice. In fact, by his standards my feeble practice sessions are only guaranteeing my mediocrity. He'd have me just quit. Interesting and illuminating scientific discoveries aside, no non-professional golfer could possibly follow his 15-point/47-rule improvement program. Hence, while I predict that every golfer on earth will buy Pelz's book (and most will give it a positive review), I also predict that no one will follow his advice.