Why do you need a lob wedge?

[Thrummyfox]

On 3/28/2024 at 3:40 AM, jlevitt9 said:

 

This. I have a higher bounce 58*, and a T grind Vokey 60*. gives me tons of options around the green depending on the lie. I'm a 2 handicap and my weakness is/was inability to get up and down. I do not hit the T Grind on anything more than a 30 yard pitch, but in the 15 rounds I've owned it, I've holed out 3 times from off the green, after not having holed out from off the green in as long as I can remember!

What does the rest of your bag look like? Last year I was tempted to play 47 PW, 54,56,58 ala Rickie Fowler 

[Thrummyfox]

22 hours ago, jaffabell said:

Rocco Mediate has never used anything higher than 56 and he is a wizard around the greens, and nearly won the US Open 🙂 

I think you’ll find the same for Seve … at least for his major wins

[Thrummyfox]

19 hours ago, goalie said:

I don't "need" a 60* wedge, but I'd be lost without my 58*   

 

It does great out of bunkers and around the green for me.  I could probably use a 56* instead of 58* without a big change in my scores though.

I’ve gone 59 this year - perfect 

[Ben B]

On 3/27/2024 at 9:38 PM, odshot68 said:

Assuming you have a 56 degree sand wedge you like what is the function of a lob wedge?  

To answer your question: it's simply an extension of your wedges. From full shots to short sided wide open lob shots and anything in between. Limited to only your imagination and short game ability. 

[MtlJeff]

I don't have great hands and am pretty mechanical with wedges. So the extra loft it good for me, especially out of bunkers. I've used 62s also, but get diminishing returns after that.

 

60 is a pretty good number for me overall. Not like I couldn't play with a 56 I just prefer 60

[chinaski]

An opened up 56 is not the same shot as a square 60. It's not the same spin or trajectory.

 

Having different grinds gives you more options. Yes, you can do a lot of things with just one wedge, but you can do a lot more with two different wedges. The more difficult the course the more options you need. 

 

No offense, but it is extremely rare to find a good player without a lob wedge. 

[Thayneil]

17 hours ago, kiawah said:

Ehh, I don't know about that.

 

First off, the word "always" doesn't have much practical use in golf instruction. For chipping, I think you absolutely need to de-loft the club if you want to keep the ball low to the ground to maximize roll and take spin out of the equation. Also, if you're hitting a pitch from outside of 20 yards and increasing the loft or keeping it static (assuming you're starting with very little shaft lean in the first place), it's gonna be really hard (or at least harder) to make a big enough swing to get the ball all the way to the hole and not mishit it. There are lots of uses for a lob wedge beyond being totally shortsided if you play on greens that run above an 8 or 9 

Seve and  Trevino  said as much. Not bad  tutors

[Thayneil]

37 minutes ago, chinaski said:

An opened up 56 is not the same shot as a square 60. It's not the same spin or trajectory.

 

Having different grinds gives you more options. Yes, you can do a lot of things with just one wedge, but you can do a lot more with two different wedges. The more difficult the course the more options you need. 

 

No offense, but it is extremely rare to find a good player without a lob wedge. 

Seve played his entire life without one

[Thayneil]

18 hours ago, petep5280 said:

This makes me wonder why golf courses have bunkers too. 

Bunker clubs  need higher bounce which are mostly found on 56  wedges

58 60 generally have lower bounce  and harder  to use except in hard packed sand

[chinaski]

22 minutes ago, Thayneil said:

Seve played his entire life without one

He also played in a different era. I’m certain he would if he played the game today.

[chinaski]

21 minutes ago, Thayneil said:

Bunker clubs  need higher bounce which are mostly found on 56  wedges

58 60 generally have lower bounce  and harder  to use except in hard packed sand

I don’t have any issue hitting a low bounce 60 out of a soft bunker. Depending on the grind you can add bounce by opening it up. 

[chinaski]

Just curious. For those that skip a lob wedge: Are you using an extra hybrid or two gap wedges to fill a strong lofted set instead?

[ArcticSound]

Let me preface this by saying that I typically carry 50/54/58, and I agree with all the comments here. Unless you have a specific need to carry an extra club at the top of your bag, there's no reason not to carry three specialty wedges.

 

But if I had to argue for why you shouldn't carry three specialty wedges, here's what I'd say:

 

I do think there's also a rationale to using only two, but I think it makes more sense to drop either the gap wedge (50/52) or the sand wedge (54/56) than the lob wedge. Though what the pros do aren't always a good model for what amateurs should do, I think it's instructive that there seem to be more pros who don't carry a GW (Tiger, Sam Ryder, Nick Taylor) or a SW (Fleetwood, Cam Young) than those that don't carry some kind of LW.

 

Though I typically carry 50/54/58, I'll occasionally go 50/58 in my wedges in order to bring a driving iron with me. When I bring my 54° for a round, I often use it only 1-2 times. My 50° gap wedge is my longest full-swing club. While I could hit my 54° full if I wanted, I play much better golf when I hit a partial PW or GW, and I think the average amateur would be better off learning to hit partial shots than hitting a full bore 54° (or especially 56°). With that much loft, the face is being presented at such an extreme angle that it's so, so easy to make poor contact high or low on the face and I've seen guys I've played with—time and time again—have really poor distance control with full-swing sand wedges because the face is just so open that the margin between a centered shot and a shot that rides up the face is so small.

 

I think for Joe Average it's easier to remove loft (ball back, lean the hands forward) than to open the face and make good contact, because of what I describe above (and what others have already mentioned to this effect in this thread). For that reason I think carrying a 58° and delofting when you need to makes more sense than carrying a 54° and opening it wide.

 

But what about bunker shots? Candidly, I think that most average amateurs playing on municipal courses suck out of the sand anyways, and whether they're hitting a high bounce 54° or a low bounce 58° doesn't make a difference because their technique is inconsistent enough that whether they hit a good or bad sand shot is essentially random. (I also think that unless you play on a private course, the sand itself is probably equally at issue here, but that's another discussion.)

 

Really, though, this is all course dependent. I play on a course where it doesn't make sense to hit driver on 5 of 13 par-4s, so having extra options at the top of my bag makes sense. If you play a course where you're hitting driver off every par-4 and par-5 tee box, then you probably don't need extra help at the top of the bag. If your course has a lot of sand, tight fairway lies and deep rough, you probably want a variety of different wedges instead.

 

[njmack]

I didn't realize the LW was such a lightning rod... four pages in a little more than a day lol this thread seems to be a bunch of people jumping in to defend them, so I'm going to continue to assume they are in the majority of wrx'ers bags

[goalie]

Just now, njmack said:

I didn't realize the LW was such a lightning rod... four pages in a little more than a day lol this thread seems to be a bunch of people jumping in to defend them, so I'm going to continue to assume they are in the majority of wrx'ers bags

You may be right, but, just like if X flex shafts are the "majority" here on WRX, it doesn't mean it's gonna be a good fit for me........  

[North Butte]

1 minute ago, njmack said:

I didn't realize the LW was such a lightning rod... four pages in a little more than a day lol this thread seems to be a bunch of people jumping in to defend them, so I'm going to continue to assume they are in the majority of wrx'ers bags

It's a meme you only encounter in online golf forums. The rest of the world got over the idea that lob wedges were something weird or useless some time before Tom Kite won the US Open.

 

Really, it's just one form of the typical forum silliness. Start from an obvious truth, for example, "Some people like to play full swing flop shots when another shot would make more sense...". Then blow it up into a ridiculous overreaction, as in, "...therefore carrying any club with more than XXX degrees of loft is going to cost you strokes". 

[North Butte]

5 minutes ago, goalie said:

You may be right, but, just like if X flex shafts are the "majority" here on WRX, it doesn't mean it's gonna be a good fit for me........  

Well yeah but if you put an X flex shaft in your driver that's just going to lead to overswinging and hitting the ball farther into the woods.😬

[gator022]

1 hour ago, chinaski said:

He also played in a different era. I’m certain he would if he played the game today.

The way the ball is now, green speeds etc. I think you’re correct. He’d bag something 57*+.
 

I think if one is just learning the game most teachers would say hold off on the lob wedge. I don’t know what the magic number is for HC or scoring but more than likely folks are going to have shots around a green where a higher lofted wedge helps more than the extra 190-220 club.

[North Butte]

5 minutes ago, gator022 said:

The way the ball is now, green speeds etc. I think you’re correct. He’d bag something 57*+.
 

I think if one is just learning the game most teachers would say hold off on the lob wedge. I don’t know what the magic number is for HC or scoring but more than likely folks are going to have shots around a green where a higher lofted wedge helps more than the extra 190-220 club.

In my second golf lesson (30+ years ago) my teaching pro told me to get a 60-degree wedge to use from bunkers. 

[kiawah]

2 hours ago, Thayneil said:

Seve and  Trevino  said as much. Not bad  tutors

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I could see "keeping" the loft on pitch shots and on many shots that's a great way to play it. My understanding of chipping conflicts with the idea that you should be adding loft in almost any circumstance, though. If you're trying to keep the ball on the ground, adding loft will make that harder.

[speedeuphoria]

I have to say Ive never hit a LW from a bunker. 

 

I did however just move from 47/52/56/60. To 47/52/57

 

 

[nitram]

To quote Dan Grieve; "If it were up to me, lob wedges would have stamped on the back in bold letters: FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY". Unfortunately, I find myself breaking the glass to access the 60 once or twice a round. Admittedly, I hit the SW (55) and GW (50) for 70 and 25% of my wedge shots respectively, while the 60/10 services the remaining 5%, mainly short bunker and really short wedge shots that are too short to "feather" the 55.

[Poor Mans Ty Webb]

1 hour ago, ArcticSound said:

 

I think for Joe Average it's easier to remove loft (ball back, lean the hands forward) than to open the face and make good contact, because of what I describe above (and what others have already mentioned to this effect in this thread). For that reason I think carrying a 58° and delofting when you need to makes more sense than carrying a 54° and opening it wide.

This really resonated with me. I think turf interaction with a wedge is way more important than loft, which can be easily manipulated.

 

It’s been brought up once, maybe twice, but having a higher bounce mid 50s wedge might necessitate a lob wedge. If you need to play a shot that requires height, opening the face of the HBSW could add way too much bounce and become problematic from a turf interaction perspective - you’d ideally need less effective bounce in your SW to lay it open and get that height, so the LBLW goes into the bag to address this particular issue, for better or for worse. 

 

I think a lot of us are encouraged to go high bounce in the SW and low bounce in the LW (OEMs reinforced this with the options they make available and we see many pros play lower bounce LWs), but one size does not fit all, and the logic may be backwards for many of us. At least a few of us out there might really benefit from a more neutral/relatively lower bounce SW for versatility around the greens, and a higher bounce LW that can be delofted or played square - this would give two options for the higher trajectory pitch shot depending on lie/turf, and would save many from the perils of trying to deloft a LBLW into soft turf. 

 

[BombinJim]

20 hours ago, driveandputtmachine said:

I play most 115 - 40 yard shots with my 56, but the times I need the extra height is roughly 6 times per round between needing height, or having the backstop where the skip shot doesn't play as well.

The same for me.

[rgk5]

For the 17 years I was a fitter I would ask my customer these questions.

 

1. Does your course have a lot of elevated greens and tight short side pins?

 

2. Do you have a practice area where you can hit shots with the golf ball you use consistently?

 

3. If you said yes to #2 are you going to practice diligently with this wedge?

 

If no to all three don't buy one. If yes to #1 and #2 you have a reasonable need for the lob wedge but still need to adhere to #3. Otherwise, buy a SW with no more than 10* of bounce and learn how to use it more effectively.

[jonkevin]

Flop shots when required, short sided pitches/chips/bunker shots, back of the stance spinners

 

Also gives me options from 50 yards and in -- i.e. standard pitch 54*. high pitch to a front pin 58*

 

More options in the scoring clubs is better than more options at the top of the bag.

[Tumadre1337]

The only reason I carry it is for a different bounce on tight lies.

[njmack]

58 minutes ago, nitram said:

To quote Dan Grieve; "If it were up to me, lob wedges would have stamped on the back in bold letters: FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY". Unfortunately, I find myself breaking the glass to access the 60 once or twice a round. Admittedly, I hit the SW (55) and GW (50) for 70 and 25% of my wedge shots respectively, while the 60/10 services the remaining 5%, mainly short bunker and really short wedge shots that are too short to "feather" the 55.

 

Dan's the man. Once I started practicing his releases, this became my philosophy, too. I also grew up chipping with my PW and SW, so... some of it is comfort, but yeah everyone here understands that you really can loft and spin a 56* wedge to kind of remarkable levels with the right technique and good hands. But sometimes you need to take it to 11....

[Thayneil]

1 hour ago, kiawah said:

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I could see "keeping" the loft on pitch shots and on many shots that's a great way to play it. My understanding of chipping conflicts with the idea that you should be adding loft in almost any circumstance, though. If you're trying to keep the ball on the ground, adding loft will make that harder.

thats why you have 7 8 9 irons  plus your wedges

[Thayneil]

53 minutes ago, rgk5 said:

For the 17 years I was a fitter I would ask my customer these questions.

 

1. Does your course have a lot of elevated greens and tight short side pins?

 

2. Do you have a practice area where you can hit shots with the golf ball you use consistently?

 

3. If you said yes to #2 are you going to practice diligently with this wedge?

 

If no to all three don't buy one. If yes to #1 and #2 you have a reasonable need for the lob wedge but still need to adhere to #3. Otherwise, buy a SW with no more than 10* of bounce and learn how to use it more effectively.

i think 10  is about the minimu bounce  needed for most  bunkers

 

my good friend  plays  3 wedges  all 8 bounce  but he's a scratch golfer  since  the age of  15  and has the coordination of a  circus juggler