In golf, there is one thing that is certain. You can never predict your lie, especially around the greens. The better the lie, the more spin you can generate and vice versa. A typical issue amongst amateur golfers is that they don’t consider their lie when playing shots. In this Play Better Golf segment, short game guru, Dave Pelz, shows us the maximum and minimum spin around the greens so you can know how your ball will react on the greens.

Dave Pelz: I want to talk to you about backspin. I’m not sure you know how to judge how quickly your balls are going to stop when you hit wedges to the Greens. Look, a few years ago, the USGA took away our box grooves, and they gave us V grooves. Now you’re not going to get as much spin as you used to but how much are you going to get?

First, you start with I think the best wedge in golf is the Cleveland RTX face grinding. That puts the maximum allowed backspin on the ball, but you still don’t know how much your shots are going to stop even if you have the best wedge in golf.

So here’s the test. I want you to run go out on the golf course where you can get balls in the fairway balls in the rough with a lot of grass around them and then take a tee and give yourself the perfect lie. There’s no grass anywhere on that ball. That will give you the best face contact and the maximum backspin you can generate. Then you can practice the others too to see how much you lose in normal lies. Here’s off of the tee, this is maximum backspin. You see that stop.

This ball will not stop, cannot be made to stop that fast, this one nowhere near that. You need to practice this; one off the tee, one off the fairway one off the rough. Then go over here; one tee, one fairway, one rough. The more grass around the ball, farther it’s going to roll, the less backspin you’re going to get, and that’s true for the best players in the world, and it’s true for you.