How do you play a bunker shot from a buried lie? (Video) - by Pete Styles
How do you play a bunker shot from a buried lie? (Video) - by Pete Styles

Now nobody really likes going into a bunker, do they? But there's nothing worse than getting into the bunker and then having the extra disappointment of finding it’s in a buried lie. Now buried lie might be two reasons, it might have flown really high into the bunker, landed in the bunker and plugged like a fried egg almost. That’s one sort of buried lie, the other time might have just be less fortunate if somebody hasn’t raked the bunker very well and you find yourself in the bottom of a footprint or a raking mark and the ball sits down.

So to get over that disappointment it’d be really nice if you could just play the ball back onto the green in one shot, get your putt, move on to the next hole, save the score adding up too much. The best way that you can play the ball from a buried lie is to alter your standard bunker technique in two very slight ways. The first thing we are going to do is not to open the phase. A normal bunker shot would probably the club facing an open position about one o’ clock as it is here, what I’m going to advocate for a buried lie is you actually square the phase back up a little bit. This encourages the club to dig down and go under the ball a bit more and then also to drive the ball more forwards. Whereas the open phase creates too much bounce which stops the club digging in and makes the ball come more upwards, we want this club to go down and the ball to go forwards, so we are actually stand with a relatively square club position. The next thing we are going to encourage you to do is to play the ball very slightly back to in your stance, a normal bunker shot position we’ll probably take it ahead of center. I’m going to suggest playing it into the back third and that effectively steepens the downswing. The downswing is going to come down on the golf ball more and pop the ball out more and again we don’t want to take too much sand before this ball we’ve already got a lot of sand to get through, so by having the ball back, we can then be a bit steeper. I am going to encourage you to grip a little tighter and make sure you really follow through quite hard, so its grip tight, follow through hard and keep accelerating. So you’ve got the ball back, the grip pressure is tight and we’re going to be quite steep on the ball and we’ve got the nice square club phase and that can blast the ball out and forwards from your green side bunker in the buried lie. Lots of acceleration and really show it that you mean business and hopefully that ball would pop out nicely. 2015-03-26

Now nobody really likes going into a bunker, do they? But there's nothing worse than getting into the bunker and then having the extra disappointment of finding it’s in a buried lie. Now buried lie might be two reasons, it might have flown really high into the bunker, landed in the bunker and plugged like a fried egg almost. That’s one sort of buried lie, the other time might have just be less fortunate if somebody hasn’t raked the bunker very well and you find yourself in the bottom of a footprint or a raking mark and the ball sits down.

So to get over that disappointment it’d be really nice if you could just play the ball back onto the green in one shot, get your putt, move on to the next hole, save the score adding up too much. The best way that you can play the ball from a buried lie is to alter your standard bunker technique in two very slight ways. The first thing we are going to do is not to open the phase. A normal bunker shot would probably the club facing an open position about one o’ clock as it is here, what I’m going to advocate for a buried lie is you actually square the phase back up a little bit.

This encourages the club to dig down and go under the ball a bit more and then also to drive the ball more forwards. Whereas the open phase creates too much bounce which stops the club digging in and makes the ball come more upwards, we want this club to go down and the ball to go forwards, so we are actually stand with a relatively square club position. The next thing we are going to encourage you to do is to play the ball very slightly back to in your stance, a normal bunker shot position we’ll probably take it ahead of center.

I’m going to suggest playing it into the back third and that effectively steepens the downswing. The downswing is going to come down on the golf ball more and pop the ball out more and again we don’t want to take too much sand before this ball we’ve already got a lot of sand to get through, so by having the ball back, we can then be a bit steeper. I am going to encourage you to grip a little tighter and make sure you really follow through quite hard, so its grip tight, follow through hard and keep accelerating.

So you’ve got the ball back, the grip pressure is tight and we’re going to be quite steep on the ball and we’ve got the nice square club phase and that can blast the ball out and forwards from your green side bunker in the buried lie. Lots of acceleration and really show it that you mean business and hopefully that ball would pop out nicely.