Sandbelt sand and kikuyu rough: how many wedges, which degrees, which bounce

Most golfers buy wedges the way they buy fuses: when something stops working. A sand wedge turns up with the iron set, a lob wedge gets added after a shocking afternoon in the bunkers, and a gap wedge appears two years later because there is a hole in the bag nobody measured. Three clubs, never chosen together, covering the part of the course where half your shots are played.

Wedges are the only clubs you can buy correctly using arithmetic. The two numbers stamped on the sole, loft and bounce, tell you nearly everything. Here is what they mean, how many wedges you actually need, and how to pick the degrees without guessing.

Start with the loft you already own

Before you buy anything, find out what your pitching wedge really is. Not the P on the head, but the loft in the manufacturer’s specification for your model and year.

Pitching wedge loft has been creeping stronger for twenty years. The traditional pitching wedge was 48 degrees. Most sets now sit between 43 and 48, and game improvement irons go as strong as 42 or 43, because stronger loft makes the 7 iron fly further on the demo mat. Nothing wrong with that, but it pushes the bottom of your iron set seven metres further away and opens a gap underneath it that the rest of the bag has to cover.

Write the number down. Your pitching wedge is not the last iron in the set. It is the first of your wedges, and every other loft decision follows from it.

How many wedges: count backwards from fourteen

You are allowed fourteen clubs. Start at the other end of the bag and see what is left.

A putter, a driver, and the woods or hybrids you genuinely hit. Then the irons down to the pitching wedge. Count what remains. Eleven clubs before the wedges leaves room for three. Ten leaves room for four.

Three suits most golfers. Four suits one particular player: the one who hits plenty of greens from inside 110 metres and wants finer control there than at the long end of the bag. If you are still carrying a 3 iron you cannot get airborne, that slot is worth more as a fourth wedge. If you cannot carry a bunker face from 35 metres, a fourth wedge is not the answer to your problem.

The urge to carry four is strongest in the golfers who need it least. A 20 marker plays far more shots from 140 metres than from 50, and the fourth wedge usually pushes out a hybrid that would have earned its keep more often.

The degrees: four to six, and no exceptions

Consecutive wedges should sit four to six degrees apart. Under four and two clubs go the same distance, which wastes a slot. Over six and you are left with a number you can only reach by easing one club or leaning on another, which is the shot club golfers miss most often.

Four degrees is roughly ten to fourteen metres for most players. That is the hole you are trying to fill, and it is why the loft numbers matter far more than the model name.

Run it through with a 45 degree pitching wedge. Add 50, 54 and 58 and you have five degree steps the whole way down, three wedges and no hole. Now run it through with a 43 degree pitching wedge, which plenty of modern sets have. The same 50 is seven degrees away. Either you add a 47 or 48 and carry four wedges, or you accept a gap exactly where your approach shots live.

Two common sets are worth naming. Pitching wedge, 50, 54, 58 is the four club answer for a strong set: the pitching wedge does iron duty and three genuine wedges sit underneath. Pitching wedge, 52, 56, 60 is the three wedge classic, and it works cleanly when the pitching wedge is 46 or 47, not when it is 43.

One warning about the bottom of the bag. A 60 degree wedge is harder to strike well than a 56, it costs distance control, and it punishes a poor contact more than any club you own. On the firm, tight lies of a Sandbelt summer it is the club that produces the worst miss in golf. If you are not already comfortable with a 56 off bare ground, a 60 will not rescue you. Most club golfers would score better stopping at 58.

Bounce: the number you have been ignoring

Bounce is the angle between the leading edge and the lowest point of the sole when the club sits square. It decides whether the club digs into the ground or skids across it. It is the most useful number on a wedge and the one almost nobody checks.

Low bounce is roughly 4 to 6 degrees. It suits firm turf, tight lies, coarse or compacted sand and a shallow swing that takes little or no divot. Clean leading edge, no help whatsoever if you arrive steep.

Mid bounce is roughly 7 to 10 degrees. It is the safe answer for firm to normal turf and for most swings, which is why it is the stock option on nearly every model. Buying without a fitting, buy this.

High bounce is above 10 degrees. It suits soft ground, fluffy lies, soft sand and a steep swing that takes a deep divot. The sole hits the ground first and keeps the club moving instead of letting the edge bury itself.

You can read your own swing without a launch monitor. Look at your divots after nine holes. Deep and long means you are a digger and want more bounce. A scuff, or nothing at all, means you are a sweeper and want less. Nearly everyone takes a divot with a wedge and none with a fairway wood, which is normal, and the wedge divot is the one to read.

Then look at the ground you play on, because in this country that changes the answer more than your swing does.

Grind, in one paragraph

Grind is the shaping of the sole: material taken off the heel, the toe or the trailing edge so the club behaves differently when you move the face. You do not need to learn the letter codes. You need one rule. If you open the face to play anything, you need heel relief, because an open face without it lifts the leading edge off the ground and you thin it. If you play everything square, a standard full sole is fine and gives you more forgiveness in soft ground. Tell the fitter which of those two golfers you are and let them pick the letter.

What it costs, and where not to spend

A new premium wedge is not cheap here. A Titleist Vokey SM11 in tour chrome is A$339.99 at GolfBox this season. Three of those is over a thousand dollars, which is more than plenty of club golfers paid for their irons.

Two ways to spend less without buying worse. First, last season’s model. Wedge technology moves slowly, grooves are regulated by rule, and the previous generation of the same head is usually a third cheaper and identical in the ways that matter. Second, buy in the right order. Replacing all three at once is rarely necessary: start with the one you hit most, which for nearly everyone is the sand wedge.

What genuinely repays the money is fresh grooves. Wedge faces wear out, and a worn 56 spins dramatically less out of kikuyu or a wet lie than a new one. If your wedges are five years old and you play every week, the grooves are the reason the ball releases past the flag, not your technique.

Where Australian turf and sand change the answer

Australia has the widest spread of playing surfaces of any golfing country, and the bounce that is right in Melbourne is wrong in Brisbane.

The Sandbelt is the low bounce argument. Fine couch on deep sand, mown tight, firm almost year round and rock hard from December to February, gives a lie with no cushion under the ball at all. A high bounce sole on that ground bounces the leading edge straight into the equator of the ball. If you play Melbourne sand, or the links ground at Barnbougle and Cape Wickham in Tasmania where the fescue runs firm and fast, 4 to 8 degrees on your lowest lofted wedge is the sensible choice.

Kikuyu is the opposite argument, and it covers a great deal of Sydney, Perth and the warmer coastal courses. It is thick, springy and grabby, it sits the ball up on a cushion and then wraps around the hosel on the way through. More bounce and a wider sole help the club keep moving instead of stalling in the grass. Queensland couch through a wet summer behaves the same way, and so does any course in Victoria or Tasmania in July, when the ground softens and the divots come out in slices.

Bunker sand pulls the same way and is worth checking by hand. Sandbelt bunkers are often filled with fine, soft, deep sand where high bounce is the only club that gets under the ball and a low bounce wedge digs a trench. Council and country courses on heavier ground frequently have thin, coarse, compacted sand where a 14 degree sole skips off the base and you thin it into the face. Walk into your own practice bunker before you buy a bunker club, because the sand at your course is a fact and the recommendation in a catalogue is not.

For fitting, Drummond Golf, House of Golf and GolfBox all have hitting bays and launch monitors in their larger stores and will do a wedge gapping session. Manufacturer demo days run at public and club courses from spring through autumn and cost nothing. Cheapest and most neglected of all: your own club professional can put the wedges you already own on a loft and lie machine in ten minutes for the price of a couple of sleeves. Wedges bend out of spec with use, and a 54 that has quietly become a 52 is a gap you have been playing around for a season without knowing it.

Five things to do before you buy

• Look up the loft of your pitching wedge. Every other number depends on it.
• Count backwards from fourteen to see whether you have room for three wedges or four.
• Keep the steps at four to six degrees, and be honest about whether you need a 60.
• Read your divots, then read your turf and your bunker sand, and buy the bounce those two agree on.
• Have the lofts of the wedges you own checked before you replace any of them.

Wedges decide your score on the holes you play badly. Chosen as a set, four to six degrees apart, with the bounce that suits the ground you actually stand on in January, they cover every number inside 110 metres without a shot you have to invent. Chosen one at a time, in a hurry, after a bad round, they cover about two thirds of it.