Lay-Up Distances That Save Strokes

Every lay up strategy you have ever heard falls into one of two camps. One says advance the ball as far as you safely can, because expected strokes drop with every yard you take off the approach. The other says leave yourself a full wedge from a number you love, because the half-swing pitch is the shot amateurs butcher most.

Both camps have data behind them. They just describe different golfers. The useful question is not which rule is correct, but which one describes your wedge game, and there is a straightforward way to find out.

What the expected strokes table says

Start with the baseline. From the fairway, here is roughly what a 15-handicap needs to hole out from a given distance:

The curve slopes down the whole way. Nothing in Mark Broadie’s amateur data shows a bump at 100 yards where accuracy suddenly improves, which is the entire basis for the argument that getting closer beats your favorite yardage. On average, across thousands of amateur shots, 40 yards beats 100 yards by about a third of a stroke.

That average is doing a lot of work, though. It blends golfers who practice pitch shots with golfers who have never hit a deliberate 45-yard wedge in their lives.

Where the curve breaks

The expected strokes table assumes your skill declines smoothly with distance. For full swings it does. Inside about 60 yards it often does not, because the shot changes character. You are no longer picking a club and making your normal swing. You are calibrating a partial swing, and calibration is a practiced skill rather than an athletic one.

Sort tracked amateur approach shots into distance buckets and a common pattern shows up: proximity improves steadily from 150 yards down to about 70, then flattens or gets worse through the 30-to-55-yard band before improving again inside 25 yards, where the shot becomes a pitch rather than a partial wedge.

If your data has that dead zone, laying up into it costs you strokes even though you are technically closer to the hole. A shot that ends 38 feet from the pin off a chunked partial wedge is worse than one that ends 30 feet after a comfortable full swing from 95, and it is much worse than the table predicts, because the miss pattern includes duffs and skulls that the average never shows you.

If your data does not have that dead zone, the table is right and you should advance the ball.

The lay-up distances that save strokes

Three situations account for nearly every lay-up decision in a round. The right distance is different in each.

Par 5 second shots

This is the big one, and it is where the full-wedge argument is strongest. You have already decided the green is out of reach, so you have real freedom to choose your third-shot distance. Pick the number you hit with a full swing and no thought: for most mid-handicaps that lands somewhere between 85 and 110 yards.

The cost of hitting less club is small. Giving up 30 yards of progress is worth about 0.10 strokes on the table above. Landing in your worst distance band can cost double that, and it brings duffs into play. That asymmetry is why the smart way to play par 5s is to work backward from the wedge you want.

Par 4s where trouble crosses the fairway

Here the freedom disappears. A creek at 240 yards off the tee does not care about your favorite wedge number. Your options are the layup short of it or a driver that has to carry it, and the layup distance is set by the hazard, not by you.

The rule in this case is different: take the shortest club that clears the decision. If a 5-iron leaves you safely short of the creek with 165 in, hitting 3-wood to squeeze out 20 more yards while flirting with the water is a bad trade. A penalty stroke costs a full shot plus distance, which is five times the value of the yardage you were chasing.

Short par 4s off the tee

Drivable and near-drivable par 4s are where lay-up thinking gets sloppiest. Golfers reach for a 7-iron to “leave a wedge” and end up at 120 yards from a spot with a bad angle into the green.

On these holes, treat it like the par 5 question in miniature. If a driver can get you to the front edge or into the fringe, that is usually the play, because from 20 yards and closer you are chipping rather than calibrating. If it cannot, lay back to your full number rather than an in-between one. The worst outcome is the middle: 55 yards, awkward, with a bunker in the way.

Lie and angle change the math more than yardage

Twenty yards of distance is worth about 0.10 strokes. Going from fairway to rough at the same distance is worth roughly 0.15 to 0.20, and short-siding yourself over a bunker is worth more than that once you count the times it turns into a bogey.

Which means a lay-up target is a piece of ground, not a number on a rangefinder. Ninety-five yards from the right side of the fairway with the whole green to work with is a genuinely different shot from 95 yards behind a bunker on the short side. When those two conflict, take the angle.

Build your lay up strategy from your own data

None of this is worth much as a general rule, because the dead zone is personal. Some golfers have none. Some have a 20-yard band they should never voluntarily visit.

Your own tracked rounds settle it. In golfity, filter your approach shots by distance and look at strokes gained per shot in 20-yard buckets: 20-40, 40-60, 60-80, 80-100, 100-120. Twenty to thirty rounds gives you enough shots for the pattern to be real rather than noise.

Read the result plainly. If your strokes gained per shot climbs steadily as distance drops, advance the ball at every opportunity and stop protecting a favorite yardage that is not earning its keep. If there is a band where your number sags, that band is off limits, and every lay-up club you pull should be chosen to skip past it or stop short of it.

Most golfers who do this find one surprise: the distance they thought was their strength is average, and the distance they have been avoiding is fine. The lay-up you have been making on autopilot for years is usually the one costing you the strokes.