How much of your golf score comes down to putting? If you guessed somewhere around 20 or 30 percent, you’re not alone. Most golfers drastically underestimate how much the putter matters. But according to Bob Labbe, author of Putting by the Numbers: A Quantitative Method of Lag Putting, it could be as much as 50% of the entire game.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Bob on the Drink O’Clock Podcast to talk about his journey into golf, the engineering mindset that changed his putting forever, and why most golfers are practicing all wrong.
From Akron to the Green: Bob Labbe’s Path to Golf
Bob has lived a full life. He grew up in Akron, Ohio, moved to Miami as a kid when his father needed a warmer climate for health reasons, attended Georgia Tech, and spent decades building businesses in the air pollution control industry. Over the course of his career, he started, developed, and sold three companies between 1972 and 2023.
But here’s what caught my attention: Bob didn’t pick up a golf club seriously until he was 52 years old. He had always loved the game but convinced himself he didn’t have time while running his businesses. When he finally retired from his second company, he and his business partner made a pact to learn the game together.
Bob went to a PGA school in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, took four days of group lessons, and started practicing three days a week while playing 18 holes another three days. Within a year, he was improving fast everywhere except one area that was killing his score: long-distance putting.
Why Lag Putting Is the Most Overlooked Skill in Golf
If you take a standard 72-par course and assume two putts per green, that’s 36 strokes with the putter alone. The other 13 clubs in your bag account for the remaining 36. That means putting is roughly half the game.
So here’s the question Bob asked that changed everything for him: have you ever seen anyone practice putting 50% of the time? The answer, almost universally, is no. Everybody wants to hit the driver and see how far the ball goes. But that one club, the putter, carries just as much weight as everything else combined.
When Bob started playing in 1996, he was hitting around 50 strokes outside the greens but racking up 40 to 44 putts per round. That gap was the difference between shooting in the high 80s and being stuck in the mid-90s. He knew something had to change.
The Engineering Mindset That Built a Better Putting Method
Bob is an engineer by training, and that background is what led him to approach putting differently than most golfers. Instead of relying on feel and instinct, he broke the putt down into its fundamental components: force and friction.
The idea is straightforward. Every golfer has what Bob calls an Individual Power Factor, or IPF. This is the distance your ball travels for every inch you retract the putter, based on your own natural shoulder-rocking motion. Once you know your IPF for a given surface, you can calculate exactly how far to pull the putter back for any distance.
For example, if your IPF on a particular green is 12 feet of travel per inch of retraction and you have a 60-foot putt, you retract the putter five inches, stroke through the ball, and Bob says you’ll consistently land within three to five feet of the hole. That means a reliable two-putt almost every time.
It Works on Any Course, Anywhere in the World
One of the things that makes this method stand out is its portability. Bob explains that if you show up to any course 30 minutes early and spend that time on the practice green, you can establish your IPF for that day’s conditions. You note the numbers for the green, the fringe, the fairway, and the first cut of rough, write them on your scorecard, and you’re set.
Different surfaces have different friction values. On most courses Bob plays, the green gives him about 20 feet of travel per inch of retraction, fringes and fairways come in around seven feet, and the first cut of rough is about two and a half feet. When you have a compound putt that crosses multiple surfaces, you simply add up the numbers and calculate your retraction distance.
And here’s a tip from the book that I didn’t know: PGA Rule 5 allows you to practice putting after you finish a hole, as long as you don’t slow down the group behind you. Bob recommends recalibrating every three or four holes, especially on hot days when the sun dries out the greens and changes the speed.
But What About the Pros? Don’t They Just Use Feel?
Bob is upfront about this. The 150 or so players on the PGA Tour are elite athletes with a natural feel and touch that most of us will never have. They’re playing six or seven days a week and competing in a different world than the average recreational golfer.
But that’s exactly the point. Most of the 30 million golfers in the United States and 300 million worldwide aren’t touring pros. They play once a week or once every two weeks, and they don’t have the muscle memory or hysteresis to carry over from one round to the next. Without a repeatable system, they either muscle up and hit the ball too hard or baby it and come up way short, leading to three-putts and four-putts that wreck their score.
Bob’s method gives everyday golfers something concrete to rely on instead of guesswork.
You Can Practice This at Home
You don’t need access to a course to start working on this method. Bob has a 50-foot stretch of indoor/outdoor carpet in his basement where he and his wife practice during the winter months in St. Louis. His IPF on that carpet is 11 feet per inch of retraction. His wife’s is seven and a half feet. The numbers are different for each person, which is why knowing your own IPF matters.
Any flat surface with a consistent texture works. Berber carpet, a game room floor, even a long hallway. Deep plush carpet is tougher since it mimics the first cut of rough, but most standard carpet gives you a workable practice surface. Even 35 feet of space is enough to practice the shorter retraction distances that come up most often on the course.
The 20-Year Journey to Writing the Book
Bob started developing this method back in 1997, but the book didn’t come together until 2021. In between, he spent over two decades collecting notes, testing the system on courses across the country, and verifying that the method was accurate, repeatable, and linear enough that anyone could use it.
The push to actually write the book came from a friend named Mike Beck. Bob had just sunk a 93-foot putt across a three-terrace green on the Robert Trent Jones Trail in Alabama, and Mike saw exactly what he was doing. He told Bob to write a book. Bob laughed it off at first, but the seed was planted.
By the time he sat down to write, he had around 300 notes organized by who, what, why, when, where, and how. Those categories became the framework for the chapters. The result is Putting by the Numbers, available in audiobook, ebook, softcover, and hardcover.
Who Should Read This Book?
Bob says the method is applicable to all golfers, from recreational players to club pros to even touring professionals. At its core, it helps you understand your own body’s putting power and gives you a plan before you ever step up to the ball. Even if you don’t adopt the full quantitative method, the process of knowing your IPF and thinking in terms of force and friction will organize your approach to every putt.
And yes, it even works for miniature golf. Bob says if you figure out your IPF on a mini golf surface, you’ll beat everyone in your group that night.
One Less Beer, Better Strokes on the Putt
We wrapped up the conversation with a laugh. Bob’s advice for the golfers out there having a few drinks on the course at 7 AM on a Saturday? Maybe slow down on the beer a little. Because if putting is 50% of the game and you need to do quick math in your head to nail a lag putt, that third or fourth beer isn’t doing you any favors.
One less beer. Better strokes on the putt. That’s the takeaway.
Where to Find Bob Labbe and His Book
You can learn more about Bob and his method at boblabbe.com or puttingbythenumbers.com. The book is available on Amazon and in over 350 brick-and-mortar bookstores. It’s also been featured at book fairs in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and internationally in cities like Shanghai, Tokyo, and Frankfurt.
If you want to check out the method before buying the book, Bob has an 11-minute home practice video and a 23-minute on-course practice video on his website that walk you through the basics.
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