When you are out playing on the golf course, you will notice that there are slopes everywhere and when it comes to putting on the greens, there are no exceptions.
There will only ever be a very low number percentage of putts that you face that are actually straight. By far the majority of the putts that you will experience will have break on them as greens are very rarely flat.
Whenever you are on a green which has a slope on it, the slope will cause the ball to curve, or to break. When you are faced with a putt where the ball needs to travel over two different slopes to get to the hole, then the putt will curve, or break, twice as it travels towards the hole.
In order to discover what the surface slopes of the green are between the ball and the hole, you initially need to crouch down directly behind the ball and in line with the ball and the hole. Now look at the surface between the ball and the hole. Allow your eyes to travel along the ground from the ball to the hole and notice what the slopes are like. If you are facing a putt with two breaks in it, you will notice that the surface initially slopes one way for part of the putt, but then it slopes the other way after this, resulting in two curves, one that goes left to right and then one that goes right to left, or vice versa.
The best way to handle putts with two breaks, is to split the putt into two sections. One section has one direction of slope and the other section has the other direction. Look at the first section and decide on the general direction of the curve, or break. Is it left to right or right to left. Now look at the other section of break and again decide on the general direction of the curve. To do this simply use your imagination and imagine watching a ball roll through that area of the putt. What does the ball do, which way does it travel? You can practice reading the break by then simply rolling a ball along that area of the green and noticing if the ball travels the way you imagined that it would. This will help your green reading skills greatly.
To work on getting the ball into the hole, when the putt that you are facing breaks twice, you need to look at the section of the putt nearest to the hole first. Decide how much the ball will curve in that section and then once you can imagine the shape of the curve, work out where the ball needs to be positioned to enter that section so that the curve the ball will travel along finishes in the hole.
Do the same for the first section of the putt and the slope within this. Imagine how the ball curves through this part of the putt and again once you have decided on this shape, remember the end of that shape needs to finish in the position that you decided the ball needs to be in for the start of the second part of the putt.
You should now know the direction to begin the first part of the putt in, to allow it to finish where the second part of the putt needs to start, to allow the ball to then curve into the hole. Aim your putter face along the initial curve of the first part of the putt and work on getting the ball to travel along this curving line and into the second part of the putt.
Splitting up putts that have a double break into sections like this will really help you become a lot more accurate when you are faced with this situation out on the golf course and as a result, you will take less putts and see your golf scores get lower.
