Golf Pro Drive-In: Low Torque vs. Face Balanced vs. Toe Hang Putters

Описание: What gives? Are low torque or zero torque putters worth it? Certainly they have been the craze for the past two years, but are you being tricked by the propaganda?

You can decide for yourself but I took it a step further and bought the latest Scotty Cameron 11R OC to test it for myself. Why? Because statistically, I lose strokes from 10 feet and in putting and I’m trying to find something that helps me in this area. Perhaps something with more stability. So I decided to give a low torque putter a chance to see if it would be impactful. But before I put it into play I wanted to see if it offered any noticeable enhancements to my putting.

I took two of my favorite putters to compare against the Phantom 11R OC. I used my old faithful Scotty Cameron Red X with a single bend shaft and near face-balanced, and a more modern Scotty Cameron Phantom 7.2 with a plumber neck and slight toe hang. I used CAPTO to track all putts which gives me about any data point you would want to see on a putt in terms of what the club is doing thru the stroke. I hit 50 putts with each putter from a distance of 8 feet on a flat putt (zero break and zero uphill/downhill). You can see some of the results on my Instagram or Facebook pages by searching Chris Dillow PGA.

Here’s what I found out, the putter style made very little difference. On average I returned all three putters back to 0.4 degrees open at impact. I usually average 0.5 degrees open. The degrees of rotation were all within a degree per second of each other regardless of the putter style and well within the standard deviation. Here is where I saw some difference. I actually had more rotation open and closed with the Phantom 11R OC than either of the other two putters. Remember these putters are called low torque. I would have expected less rotation given the stability of the putter and overall weight being heavier. Not the case. With that said, the putters stability did help with off-center hits. I also had about 10% more hand action (rolling open and closed) with the Phantom 11R OC than the Phantom 7.2, and about 20% more than the Red X. Again this was an interesting find given the weight of the Phantom 11R OC and properties of that putter meant to be more stable and less torque.

So all in all there was no significant difference in rotation and face at impact between each model regardless of design, weight, and shaft type.