Strategy guides › Putt
How to beat par in Putt: bank shots, soft putts and the robot's gaps
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The direct line is blocked, the wall is right there, and you aim at the spot behind it where the cup’s reflection would be, the way you learned with a snooker cushion. The ball kisses the wall, comes off, and rolls a hand’s width past the cup on the wrong side. Your aim was fine. The mirror was wrong.
Putt’s ball follows simple, fixed physics, the same code for you and for the robot that sets each par. Simple physics can be measured. We fired thousands of test putts through the game’s own simulation, and the results come down to four habits.
Walls don’t bounce like mirrors
When the ball hits a wall, the part of its speed along the wall is kept and the part going into the wall comes back at three quarters. In physics terms that is a coefficient of restitution of 0.75. So the ball leaves flatter than it arrived, hugging the wall a little more, and slower:
| Angle into the wall | Angle out | Speed kept | Roll left |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30° | 23.4° | 94 % | 88 % |
| 45° | 36.9° | 88 % | 77 % |
| 60° | 52.4° | 82 % | 67 % |
| 90° (head on) | 90° | 75 % | 56 % |
Angles are measured from the wall’s surface. “Roll left” is how much of the remaining distance survives the bounce, because on felt the ball’s roll goes with the square of its speed. A glancing bank barely slows the ball. A head-on one takes almost half its remaining roll.
The angle change is what wrecks the mirror trick. The fix is easy to remember: aim at a mirror cup one third further behind the wall. If the cup is 30 units in front of the wall, aim at a point 40 units behind it, not 30. Measure from where the ball’s centre touches, which is a ball’s radius in front of the wall’s face. We tested both rules on 565 random one-bank shots that full power can reach. Aimed at the plain mirror image, the ball passed over the cup only 5 % of the time and missed by 5.8 units on a typical shot. Aimed at the stretched image, it passed over the cup every time, typically within 0.3 units of its centre.
Arrive slowly
The cup takes a ball whose centre passes over it at less than 55 units a second, about a third of full speed. Faster, and it rolls straight across. That speed has a handy translation: a ball moving at 55 would roll on another 19 units before stopping. The dashed aim line shows how far the putt would roll on open green, so let the line end no more than about 19 units past the cup, a little under five ball-widths. A putt on line whose aim line ends anywhere from the cup to 19 units past it drops. Beyond that, you are hoping.
Power is not linear either. Roll distance grows with the square of the drag: full power rolls 160 units, half power only 40, a quarter just 10. If a putt came up halfway, you need about 40 % more drag, not twice as much. Keep a bank’s lost roll in mind too, from the table above.
Respect the sand and the water
Sand brakes five times as hard as the green, so a ball in sand rolls a fifth of the distance it would on felt. Crossing a narrow strip costs less than that, since the extra braking only applies while the ball is in it. But a putt from inside a bunker needs far more power than the aim line suggests, because the line assumes open green.
Water costs a stroke and gains nothing: the ball goes back to where you played from. Two-thirds of our holes have some sand and two-fifths have water. When water lies beyond your target, a putt that comes up short costs you nothing extra, and one that runs long costs a stroke.
Par is the robot’s score, not the best score
Every par comes from a robot that tries a putt every 3° at eight strengths (1/8 to 8/8 of full power) and plays on from the best few places those leave. Across 300 generated courses, hole 1 was always par 2, hole 4 almost always 3, and holes 5 and 6 split about evenly between 3 and 4. Round pars ran from 15 to 19, mostly 16 or 17.
Eight strengths is coarse, and that is your opening. The game throws away any hole the robot aces, but a finer search finds aces the robot missed. We tried every putt from the tee at 0.5° steps and 40 strengths on 120 holes. Twelve of them could be holed in one, nine of those on hole 1, and none after hole 2. On the first holes of courses 1 to 60, 32 had an ace on.
Course 41’s first hole shows the gap. The robot’s first putt goes at 303° and 7/8 power, banks off the block and stops 4.9 units from the cup, so par is 2. The same line goes in at anything from 90 % to 97.5 % power, aimed between 303° and 306.5°: a window that sits between two of the robot’s eight strengths. There is a second window off the left border, around 232° to 234° at 92.5 % power or more. On a keyboard you can hit it exactly. The aim starts pointing at the cup, so press → nine times (or Shift+→ once and → four times), ↑ nine times to 95 %, then Space.
Practice
The practice button opens course 41. Take the ace on hole 1 by keyboard or by drag. Then, on the later holes, use the stretched mirror on every bank and let the aim line end just past the cup. Aim one third deeper, arrive slow, and par is only the robot’s opinion.
