‘Tis the season of goodwill and and bad presents. When someone finds out that you are a golfer, you can almost see the little light go on in their head as they think ‘I know just what to get him for Christmas’. This of course means grinning fixedly at the boxes of cheap balls, spare 6 irons and ill-fitting and bizarrely patterned jumpers that your nearest and dearest will inflict on you.

Bag Chatter has had a dig through some of the putting aids for some ideas of what you might want to find in your stocking on Christmas morning

Triangulator

This little device looks at your alignment and can be used two ways. Firstly, you can set yourself up for a straight putt and then align the Triangulator to see if you are aiming in the right direction and secondly you can line the aid up prior to set up and get used to aiming directly at the hole. The Triangulator also has a piece of nylon cord attached so that if you are having difficulty lining up the device you can stretch out the cord and make exactly sure of your alignment.

Misalignment is one of the most common mistakes, especially for higher handicappers and a simple aid like this allows you to make sure that you are aiming your putts where you think you are.

For more info, see www.seemore.com or www.seemoreputter.co.uk

Absolute Reader

Green reading is a bugbear for almost every golfer. Informal studies show that amateurs golfers regularly underestimate the amout of break by about 50%. The Absolute Reader allows you to putt a ball on a repeatable line allowing you to match the amount of break to the slope. Setting this up on a slope not only allows you to see how much break a particular putt but also the importance of speed. Faster putts take less break and go high while slower putts take more break and go low. All very simple but a mistake almost all of us make and practising it can be difficult as putting on a repeatable line without any sort of guide is almost impossible as your body subconsciously tries to help you get the ball in the hole.

The Absolute Reader is very easy to use and you only need to be able to putt the ball down the slotted piece of aluminum. The ‘walls’ of the reader are low at the putting area minimising any chance of you damaging your expensive flatstick, and they slowly rise and tighten which forces the ball out of the Reader and on a consistant path. Practise with this aid is actually very fun, especially on sharply breaking greens, and putting competitions with others on the green are faily common as you set up the Reader so that the ball must die in the hole to go in. Because of its ease of use, the Absolute Reader is suitable for any age.

For more info, see www.esotericgolf.com

Pure Ball Striker

You might wonder why something that was designed to improve your full swing can help your putting stroke. Unlike the other aids here, the Pure Ball Striker is not designed to help the technical side of your stroke but the feel side. What the PBS does is make you more aware of the feedback during any golf stroke.

The PBS is a small hemisphere of orange rubber that fits on the bottom end of the grip thanks to a channel cut into the underside. It sits underneath the trigger finger of the bottom hand (with a standard grip) and the enhanced feedback allows you to become aware of how smooth or jabby your stroke is and at what pace you accelerate and decelerate during your stroke. While it sounds simple (and it is incredibly simple) the PBS is surprisingly effective at highlighting any tendency to jab or poke at the ball and instead make you focus on making the sort of smooth and positive putting stoke that gives the ball the least amount of backspin to produce the straightest and most consistent putts. With a good putt, you don’t even notice it but break the wrists or decelerate and you feel as though you are holding a small rock in your hand.

For more info, see www.pureballstriker.com

Path Finder

This is a training device that allows you to groove a repeatable putting stroke and hopefully one that is straighter and more consistent. It consists of a flat base plate on which you can stick 6 small carbon fibre posts via magnets at various locations on the base plate. These 6 posts create 3 gates which the putter has to pass through and are variable enough be able to use virtually any putter. The location of the posts can be altered to let you swing either straight back straight through or on a gated stroke and the width is wide enough for beginners to use. The better you get, the closer you can set the pins and the more demanding the aid becomes. The base plate also has a small mirrored section so that you can check where your eye-line is in relation to the ball. It also comes with a useful (if slightly cheesy) DVD and a booklet that features the lessons from the DVD as well as a smaller version of an alignment device called the Square Triangle.

While the Path Finder is a bit fiddly, it makes you think about your stroke more than any other putting aid I’ve tried and regular practice with this will see you reap rewards on the green.

For more info, see www.yesgolf.co.uk and www.esotericgolf.com