The sheer variety of golf clubs you need can be overwhelming. Once you have all the clubs you need and you hit the links, how do you know which club to use for each shot? Check out this video or the following table for a quick guide to the kinds of clubs in your bag and the shots you take with them. Club What It’s For Driver Teeing off — and very occasionally hitting from a good lie in the fairway Hybrid club Getting shots of 150+ yards airborne 2- to 9-iron Hitting toward the green, usually from 120–190 yards away — use low-numbered irons for longer shots, high-numbered irons for shorter shots Wedges Hitting short, high shots from near the green or from sand bunkers Putter Rolling the ball into the hole after it’s on the green (or occasionally from just off the green) To figure out which golf club to use for a specific shot, you need to know the average distance you hit a ball with each golf club in your set.

Many people think that the most effective way to develop a consistent golf swing is to stand on the range whacking balls until you get it right. But the best way to develop a consistent golf swing is to break the swing down into pieces. Only after you have the first piece mastered should you move on to the next one.

Even if you’re new to golf, you can still look and act like you know what you’re doing. Making sure you have the right equipment in your bag and making intelligent decisions about which club to use can get you off to a great start. Offer to keep score and propose a couple of fun bets, and you can really impress your fellow golfers, no matter how long they’ve been playing the game.

In golf, chips are short shots played around the greens with any golf club from a 5-iron to a sand wedge. The basic idea is to get the ball on the green and rolling as soon as you can. If you get the ball running like a putt, you can more easily judge how far it'll go. Pick your spot Your first point of reference is the spot where you want the ball to land.

Penalty shots are an unfortunate part of every golfer’s life. You may find yourself in a variety of penalty situations during a game of golf. Here are the most common ones: Out-of-bounds: When you hit your ball to a spot outside the confines of the golf course — over a boundary fence, for example. Out-of-bounds areas are usually marked with white stakes that are about 30 yards apart.

Scoring is another great thing about golf. You can easily see how you're doing because your score is in black and white on the scorecard. Every course you play has a scorecard. The scorecard tells you each hole's length, its par, and its rating relative to the other holes (see Figure 1). Figure 1: Keeping score.

Because putting is such a crucial part of the game, your putter is the most important weapon you have. Club makers seem to have noticed: They’ve brought out a dizzying array of options. High-tech putters Don’t be confused by all the high-tech (and high-priced) putters on the market. Although they appear as colorful and as different as new cars, most offer only one or two features that may even make them worth the price.

The United States Golf Association constructed the handicap system to level the playing field for everyone. Golf handicap calculations use an esoteric system of “course rating” and something called “slope” to compute exactly how many strokes everyone should get. Few people understand or can explain how the course rating and slope are computed, so be like everyone else — accept both and go with the flow.