I spent some time the other day with Scott Fawcett, a golf strategy expert who founded the app DECADE Golf. Fawcett has a knack for explaining important things very simply, and one of those important things when it comes to course strategy is the concept of leaving yourself short-sided. But for as important as it undoubtedly is, it's often misunderstood in one key way.
What is short-sided? For some context, short-siding yourself is statistically the worst place to be when you miss a green. When you have more green between yourself and the pin, you have more margin for error in playing your next shot. You can hit an easier chip instead of a difficult flop, and you'll get up-and-down more because of it.
You can go deeper on the concept right here:
The misunderstood technicality
Technically, you've short-sided yourself any time you've missed the green on the same side the pin is on. So if you miss right when the pin is on the right side of the green, you've missed on the short side of the green.
The red line below is the short-sided miss; the green line isn't.
The thing is, the short-sided penalty is most severe when the pin is tucked on one side of the green. But the pin isn't always tucked.
Let's say instead that the pin is on the right-center of the green. Often, well-meaning golfers will try to avoid missing slightly to the right because they fear a short-sided miss.
But that's where the misunderstanding comes into play. Many golfers think a slight right miss to a right-of-center pin is a short-sided miss, which it may be technically, but it's not really a bad miss.
The 1:1 ratio, explained
A better way to evaluate your misses is by simplifying golf statistician Mark Broadie's short-sided index stat.
Broadie's advanced metric calculates the Strokes Gained penalty by measuring how far your ball is off the green, and how far the pin is from the edge of the green.
The rest of us may not be able to calculate the exact measurement, but Fawcett can eyeball it using the same principle.
Fawcett explains how the Broadie-inspired one-to-one ratio works:
"Think of it as a 1-to-1 ratio. If your ball is the same distance from the edge of the green than the pin is to the edge of the green, that miss is OK. If your ball is closer to the edge than the pin [is to the fringe] that's miss is fine. If your ball is further from the edge than the pin, that's the bad miss."
Oversimplified: In short, the 1:1 ratio is the tipping point. Anything inside of that, and it's not going to damage your score.