Quick Answer: Plumb bob putting means dangling your putter by the grip, closing your non-dominant eye, and checking whether the hole sits left or right of the shaft. A 2005 University of Saskatchewan study found the read only holds up when your stance matches the slope by the hole. Treat it as a backup read.
I picked up plumb bobbing nine years ago from a scratch player at my home course, back when I was a 14 handicap who three-putted more greens than I’d like to admit. He’d stand behind every mid-range putt, dangle his putter off his thumb and forefinger, and squint down the shaft like he was reading a blueprint. I copied him for an entire season before I actually understood what I was looking at. This update covers the exact mechanics, tells you honestly where the method breaks down, and shows how it compares to AimPoint, the system that’s replaced it in a lot of tour bags.
What Plumb Bob Putting Actually Is
Plumb bob putting borrows its name from an old construction tool. Builders once hung a weighted string, called a plumb line, to check whether a wall ran truly vertical. Golfers adapted the idea using a putter shaft in place of the string and gravity in place of a spirit level. That’s why some golfers use the term plumb line putting instead, a different name for the identical method.
Standing behind the ball, you’re not checking a wall anymore. You’re checking whether the ground between your ball and the hole tilts left or right. It’s a green-reading aid, not a stroke technique, and it changes nothing about how you actually hit the putt. That’s plumb bob putting explained in one paragraph, and the rest of this guide covers exactly how to execute it.
Find Your Dominant Eye First
The best plumb technique for putting starts before you ever pick up the club, and it has nothing to do with your stroke. Find your dominant eye first. Skip this step and the method turns into guesswork, since your dominant eye decides which side of the putter you sight down.
Here’s the fastest way to test it. Extend both arms out in front of you and form a small triangle with your thumbs and index fingers. Look through that triangle at a doorknob or light switch roughly ten feet away, keeping both eyes open.
Slowly pull your hands back toward your face while keeping the object centered inside the triangle. Whichever eye still sees the object centered through the triangle when your hands reach your face is your dominant eye.
Roughly 70 percent of golfers are right-eye dominant and about 29 percent are left-eye dominant, based on published research into ocular dominance, with a small remainder showing no strong preference either way. Neither setup is better, but using the wrong one for your eyes hands you a read that’s consistently backward.
Plumb bob putting right eye dominant setup: close your left eye and sight down the shaft with your right eye only.
Plumb bob putting left eye dominant setup: close your right eye instead and read the shaft with your left eye only.
| Setup Detail | Right-Eye Dominant | Left-Eye Dominant |
|---|---|---|
| Eye you close | Left | Right |
| Eye you sight with | Right | Left |
| Share of golfers | About 70% | About 29% |
| Most common setup mistake | Peeking through the closed eye | Standing slightly left of the true line |
| Retest if | Reads start feeling backward on familiar greens | Reads start feeling backward on familiar greens |
Eye dominance can shift. It feels different depending on fatigue, glare, or how tightly you’re gripping the putter shaft. Retest yourself once a season, and definitely retest if your plumb bob reads start feeling backward on greens you know well.
How to Plumb Bob a Putt, Step By Step
This is the plumb bob putting technique in the order you’ll actually use it on the course.
- Find your dominant eye first, using the triangle test above. Do this at home, not for the first time on the 9th green.
- Check your putter’s hang. Hold the grip loosely between your thumb and forefinger and let the head hang freely. Find a true vertical nearby, a door frame or flagstick works, and rotate the putter until the shaft matches it exactly. Note where the head points when it hangs true.
- Walk 8 to 10 feet behind your ball, directly on the line between the ball and the hole. Longer putts call for standing a bit farther back.
- Hold the putter out at arm’s length, gripping it the same way as step 2, and let it hang so the shaft covers the ball.
- Close your non-dominant eye and look up the shaft toward the hole with your dominant eye only.
- Read the gap. If the hole sits to the right of the shaft, the putt breaks right to left. If it sits to the left, the putt breaks left to right. Dead center means a straight putt, assuming the ground you’re standing on matches the slope under the ball.
Picture it as a simple diagram: your eye, the shaft, and the hole all need to land on one straight vertical line for a putt to read as straight. Any gap between the shaft and the hole is the break. That’s the entire plumb bob putting diagram for beginners in one sentence, and everything above is just the mechanics of getting there correctly.
Learn the sequence in the right order, starting with the eye test, and each read takes about ten seconds on the course. Written steps aren’t for everyone. A plumb bob putting video search on YouTube, specifically “how to plumb bob a putt,” turns up dozens of tour pros and instructors demonstrating the exact hand position above, including a plumb bob putting left eye dominant video option for golfers who need the mirrored setup.
Does Plumb Bobbing Actually Work? What the Research Found
Plumb bobbing has a real physics problem, and it’s not a matter of opinion. In 2005, researchers at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Kinesiology published a study in the Journal of Sports Sciences testing exactly when the method holds up and when it doesn’t. Their first finding was blunt. If the slope beneath your feet as you stand behind the ball differs from the slope between the ball and the hole, the plumb bob read comes back wrong.
The second finding was arguably worse for plumb bobbing’s reputation. Researchers asked golfers to stand perpendicular to a tilted platform, the exact posture plumb bobbing requires, and measured how accurately they did it. Half of the participants missed true perpendicular by 1.5 degrees or more. On a putt of any real length, a postural error that size compounds with the slope-mismatch problem above and can flip your read entirely.
That study should have settled the plumb bobbing debate a decade ago, and the fact that golfers are still arguing about it on forums says more about golf forums than it does about the physics. I still use it, for what it’s worth, but only as a tiebreaker on putts where my eyes genuinely can’t decide which way the green leans. If you already walk every putt from both sides and trust what you see, plumb bobbing won’t add much to your season.
Plumb Bob Putting vs AimPoint: Which Should You Use?
AimPoint putting has taken over a lot of the territory plumb bobbing used to own on tour, and for good reason. Instead of reading the green with your eyes, AimPoint has you stand roughly halfway between the ball and the hole, feel the slope through your feet, and assign it a percentage from one to five. You then hold up that many fingers, lined up against the hole, to find your aim point. It’s a completely different sense, feel instead of sight, and it comes with its own certified instructor network and a claimed accuracy rate above 90 percent when learned correctly.
| Fact | Plumb Bob | AimPoint |
|---|---|---|
| What you sense | Sight, down the shaft | Feel, through your feet |
| Time per read | About 10 seconds | 20 to 40 seconds |
| Learning curve | Same day | Weeks, often with a certified instructor |
| Works on multi-break putts | No, single break only | Yes, reads the whole green |
| Cost to learn | Free | A 2-hour clinic can run $225 or more per player |
| Current tour presence | Declining | Growing, used by players like Adam Scott and Justin Rose |
Neither system replaces your own eyes completely, and pros who use AimPoint still walk the putt and look at it the old-fashioned way first. The honest answer for most club golfers is that plumb bobbing is worth learning because it costs nothing and takes an afternoon, while AimPoint is worth learning only if you’re willing to put in the practice reps to trust the numbers under pressure. If your struggle isn’t reading the break at all but controlling the putter face through impact, that’s a different problem, and equipment like a broomstick putter solves a different issue than green reading ever will.
The Pros Who Use It (And Why Fewer Do Today)
Patrick Reed plumb bobbed his way to a green jacket at the 2018 Masters, and Rickie Fowler has used the technique for years. Jim Furyk built a reputation for it too, dropping into the stance on nearly every putt during his prime. Fewer players lean on it now. AimPoint has pulled a chunk of the tour away from sight-based reading entirely, and putting coaches like Phil Kenyon, who has worked with Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson, tend to teach systematic feel-based methods over the old eye-and-shaft routine.
Scottie Scheffler is a good example of where the sport has drifted. He used to mark a line on his golf ball to help with alignment, then dropped it in 2024 in favor of a putter with a built-in sightline on the crown, trusting his setup over any visual read at all. The trend across the sport points toward removing subjective reads wherever equipment or a repeatable system can replace them.
Common Mistakes That Wreck Your Plumb Bob Read
- Gripping the putter too tightly. Squeeze the shaft with more than two fingers and it won’t hang true, throwing off every read that follows.
- Skipping the eye dominance test. Golfers guess which eye to use more often than you’d think, and a wrong guess flips the read entirely.
- Standing closer than 8 feet. Get too close and small stance-angle errors multiply instead of canceling out.
- Trying it on a double-breaking putt. Plumb bobbing only shows you the break closest to the hole. Use it on a putt with two distinct slopes and you’ll misread the first half completely.
- Ignoring your own eyes. If the plumb bob read contradicts what you clearly saw walking up to the green, trust your eyes over the shaft. The method is a tiebreaker, not gospel.
Fix even two of these and you’ll cut down on the kind of three-putt from inside ten feet that does more damage to your score than a lost tee shot.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Scottie Scheffler use a line when putting?
No. Scheffler used to mark a line on his golf ball to help with alignment, but he dropped it during the 2024 season and hasn’t gone back. He switched to a mallet putter with a built-in alignment feature on the crown instead, saying the change let him trust his setup and stop overthinking every roll.
What are the illegal putting stances in golf?
Rule 10.1c bans straddling your line of play, standing with a foot deliberately on each side of the ball or touching the line of play behind it. The penalty is two strokes in stroke play or loss of hole in match play. Plumb bobbing itself doesn’t break this rule, since you read the putt from directly behind the ball rather than straddling the line, but a full croquet-style stroke does.
What is the best putting technique for seniors?
There’s no single technique, but green-reading methods that don’t require bending down help the most. Plumb bobbing and AimPoint both let you read a green from a standing position, which matters if crouching low behind every putt bothers your back or knees. Pair either method with a slightly longer, heavier putter and a slower practice tempo, and you’ll cut down on both physical strain and missed reads.
What putting method does Bryson DeChambeau use?
DeChambeau uses arm-lock putting, locking the grip against his lead forearm to remove wrist breakdown through the stroke. His putter runs 43 inches, well beyond the standard 33 to 35 inches, with roughly 6 to 7 degrees of loft to compensate for the forward shaft lean the arm-lock position creates. On the green-reading side, he leans on a data-driven, almost engineering-style approach to judging break rather than a visual method like plumb bobbing.
What’s the difference between plumb line putting and plumb bob putting?
Nothing beyond the name. Both phrases describe the exact same technique, borrowed from the same construction tool. Golf instruction uses both terms interchangeably, and neither one is more “correct” than the other.
Is plumb bobbing worth learning if I already use AimPoint?
Yes, mostly as a fast tiebreaker. AimPoint takes longer to execute properly, and on a straightforward, short putt, a quick plumb bob read can confirm what your feet already told you without slowing down play.
Final Word
Plumb bobbing won’t fix a bad stroke, and it won’t replace walking a putt from both sides. What it will do is give you a second, gravity-based opinion on subtle breaks that are genuinely hard to see, as long as you’ve found your dominant eye and you’re standing on the same slope as your ball. Test it on your home practice green before you trust it in competition, and keep an eye on your handicap index to see whether the extra ten seconds per read is actually paying off.