Ball speed is something that gets talked about endlessly when new drivers are released, but should it be affecting your putter choice? Odyssey’s research would suggest so, and it has led to two brand new putter ranges with AI-designed club faces.
Odyssey Ai-One and Ai-One Milled Putters: The Technology
Odyssey have some of the biggest tour stars on their roster. If they want them to put a new putter in play, it needs to be good, and it needs to improve their game fundamentally. This led to the question, what do tour pros need to be better at putting?
If a PGA Tour pro is 34 feet from the pin, that’s eleven paces away; they are more likely to three-putt than to single putt. Once a PGA Tour pro gets to 8ft from the hole, they are just as likely to miss as they are to hole the putt; from 15ft, they only have a 25% chance of single putting.
Holing putts is very difficult, so should two putting more often be the objective rather than trying to hole out more? If so, we need to dial in our pace control.
What controls pace control? Ball speed. The biggest factor affecting ball speed is a mis-strike, a ball hit high or low on the face or off-centre on the toe or heel will cause inconsistent ball speed numbers and mean you hit the same length putt a variety of distances.
The question for Odyssey then became, could Artifical Intelligence (Ai), design a club face that made ball speed more consistent, so you can three putt less often?
