If I’m in the bunker and I want to try and play a splash shot; now a splash and blast are two slightly different variations of bunker shots. And a splash is generally going to be used when the ball is sitting in a nice lie, nice soft fluffy sand, the ball doesn’t need to go that far, and we’d like to get the ball up nice and quickly, get it coming down nice and quickly, and get a little bit of a check spin on the ball.

And the way we play the splash shot is we open the club face up quite a lot. So we twist the club face to around about a two o’clock position, we play the ball a little bit more forwards in the stance, and we swing relatively gently and chop the golf ball’s legs off. We’re not going to be taking too much sand here so we want to try to fly the ball out in a nice little soft cushion of sand and expect the ball to come down nice and soft. So we’ve got a nice open club face, ball forwards in the stance, and just try and slide the club underneath the back of the ball. And you see the ball comes down here and puts the breaks on relatively quickly. So if you watch the blast video that I’ve just done for this section you’ll see the ball land and run off up the green towards the red flag, the splash shot there, the lie is much better, the power I hit is much gentle and much softer, softer grip pressure, more height on the ball, more check spin on the ball works nicely for shorter bunker shots.

So when you’re practicing your bunker shots next time just consider whether you’ve got a standard shot, whether you’re splashing the ball out softly, or whether you’re blasting the ball out with a bit more aggression.