How do you feel about playing blind holes? Playing your golf shot from a position where you will not be able to see the ball come to rest once you have hit your golf shot, over a ridge, for instance. Like most golfers, I find these shots a little daunting, though it helps if you walk forward before you play the shot and see for yourself the layout of the land in front of you.

This also helps me to visualize the golf shot before I play it. It is like taking a mental photograph. Once you have looked back to where you are about to play the shot from, then forward to where you are aiming, the problem then is picking out a landmark that you can aim for so that you know you are aiming on target. I typically look for a tall tree in the background as a marker, aiming straight at it, or to the left or right of the marker. If there are no obvious landmarks, then that calls for more ingenuity on the part of the golfer.

Since researching the GPS for golf, in particular the Garmin Golflogix GPS 8, I realize there is another dimension to these golf shots. The lay up. The golf course gps allows me to lay up to say, fifty yards from the green, depending if there are any hazards in my path. Call this strategic thinking, or safety play, if you like, but I see it as a strategy to save me wasting golf shots and keep my ball in play.

Some golfers might see lay ups as a defensive style of play, but I think this is a sensible option. Going back to the playing over the ridge example above, one way of playing the hole would be to play to the top of the ridge, where you can still see your ball, then play the next shot to the green, from where you now will be able to see the green in front of you. Do you sacrifice a shot by doing this? Perhaps. But at least you are less likely to lose your ball, or hit it out in a hazard, or worse, play it out of bounds.

It makes a difference of course, when faced with these shots, on how well you know the hole you are playing. If you have played it before, that makes a difference. This type of strategy might make more sense if you are playing a course that you do not know. As always in golf, it calls for judgment on your part, with a view to returning the best golf score you can.