One Swing, Nine Distances: David Armitage and the Repricing of the Bunker Shot

On an evening in Incheon, I re-opened David Armitage's instructional video on GOLF.com. The premise sounded almost too simple to bother with: how to change bunker-shot distances without changing your swing. Three wedges. Three face positions. Nine distances. One single swing.

I watched it three times. The first time as a weekend golfer. The second time as a spectator. The third time — and this is the one that made me sit up — as an analyst who once built revenue tables for twelve K League clubs during a pandemic season, and who was once questioned by a board for refusing to believe in a ten-million-euro signing.

What I saw in that video was not bunker technique. It was a valuation model. And like every valuation model, it carries a beautiful assumption at the top and an unpaid invoice at the bottom.

Context: who is teaching, and what seat stands behind the teaching

David Armitage is not a tour professional. He has no OWGR ranking, no majors, no competitive record to check against. What he has is a card: "GOLF Top 100 Teacher" — a designation awarded by GOLF Magazine based on professional reputation and peer standing, not on results on the course.

That does not make his advice wrong. It simply tells me what kind of content I am reading: an instructional media product, not a performance report. And this is where my professional reflex kicks in. When a club sends me a striker's file, I do not read the summary. I look for which numbers were measured and which were merely told.

Armitage's video is a pilot episode of the "Top 100 Teacher Sessions" series. It is tied to no tournament, no season, no schedule. It exists independently of time — evergreen, in the language of the content industry. For an analyst, that is a plus for lifespan: instructional content does not expire in days like results news. But it is also a minus for verification: nothing forces the teaching to be right, because there is no scoreboard to check it against.

I once spent two weeks just building a revenue table covering tickets, advertising, and broadcast rights for twelve clubs, only to produce three loss scenarios. I know what a model without a real data column feels like. It still runs. It just does not run correctly.

Core analysis: the 3×3 matrix and the trap of linear addition

Armitage's method boils down to one sentence: keep the swing constant, change the club and the face position. He uses three wedges — a gap wedge around 50 to 52 degrees, a sand wedge around 54 to 56, and a lob wedge around 58 to 60. Each is set in three face positions: square, opened toward one o'clock, and opened toward two o'clock. Three times three equals nine. Nine different distances, all from the same motion.

Logically, this is a very tidy system. It turns a hard variable — swing effort — into a constant, and turns two easier variables — club and face angle — into controls. To an analyst, that is an attractive structure: less variance, fewer errors, easier to repeat.

But this is where I stop and open the spreadsheet.

Linear addition does not exist on sand. When you open the face from square to one o'clock to two o'clock, you are not merely changing distance. You are changing effective loft, changing the sole's bounce, and changing the strike point all at once. Those three changes do not add linearly. They multiply, and they drag trajectory and rollout along with them. In other words, what is presented as nine distances is really nine combinations of distance, height, and roll. The reader is shown one axis while three axes are moving.

This matters for a very concrete reason. In a bunker, you do not just need the ball to travel the right distance. You need it to stop in the right place. A shot that travels exactly ten meters but rolls four more has already failed, even if the carry was perfect. A distance-pricing model that ignores rollout is a valuation model missing half its balance sheet.

Those nine distances are not evenly spaced. The three wedges differ by a few degrees of loft, but when you open the face, the gaps between steps do not stay constant. The gap between a square sand wedge and a one-o'clock sand wedge might be a single meter. The gap between a two-o'clock lob wedge and a square sand wedge might be ten. The matrix is drawn as a grid of even squares, but in reality it is a stretching table. Readers think they are receiving nine rungs of a ladder. They are receiving nine points scattered along a curve.

And sand condition is the largest variable, not the club. Armitage says one thing I rate above the entire matrix: sometimes the sand makes the spin, not the player. On a links course, sand is firm and thin, and an open face tends to skip off the surface instead of digging in. On a parkland course, sand is soft and deep, the club digs, and the ball pops up with spin the player never generated. Same lob wedge, same two-o'clock angle, same swing — results in the two sands can diverge so much that they cannot honestly be called the same distance.

This is where I remember a line I keep writing in my analyses: "A good model does not predict the future, it exposes what we choose not to see." Armitage's 3×3 matrix exposes something very real — that swing effort is not the only variable. But it also hides something else: that sand condition is the variable a weekend golfer cannot control, and cannot control by changing clubs.

Who actually creates spin: the player or the sand?

I once heard a coach say that spin in a bunker is something you must "feel with your hands." That phrasing is right as a sensation but wrong as physics. Since the 2026 groove rule, spin-generating sharpness has been deliberately capped. Grooves are no longer sharp enough to "grab" the ball as they once did. That means most bunker spin comes from strike quality and from the sole's interaction with sand, not from a player deliberately twisting the wrists.

Armitage points in the right direction here. He de-emphasizes manufactured spin and elevates setup and strike quality. Technically, this advice is far more durable than the old spin-centric instruction. Advice built on correct physics outlives advice built on a false sensation.

But there is a gap. Weekend golfers do not fail for lack of spin. They fail for unstable contact. That is the crux the article brushes past. If the primary error source is hitting the ball instead of the sand, or thinning it with an open face, then a nine-distance matrix solves nothing. It merely categorizes the error more neatly.

An unstated risk: a two-o'clock lob wedge on firm sand

This is the part I want to give the most words to, because it is the most dangerous and it is entirely absent from the original.

A lob wedge has the highest loft, and its sole usually has low-to-mid bounce. When you open the face toward two o'clock, you raise effective loft very high while lifting the leading edge and putting the sole in a position prone to sliding. On soft, deep sand, the sole digs, the leading edge goes under the ball, and the result is a gentle, high shot. On firm, thin sand, the sole does not dig. It slides. And when it slides, the leading edge meets the ball before it meets the sand.

The result is a thin shot flying flat across the green at speed. In player language, that is a "blade" — the worst shot in a bunker, because it turns a rescue situation into a two-stroke loss.

The article does not warn about this. It does not distinguish that the lob-wedge-times-two-o'clock combination is only safe in a specific sand type. For a reader who implicitly believes that "opening the face more means a shorter, quicker-stopping shot," this is a trap set in advance. The player will try the hardest step first, because it sounds most attractive, fail at it, and conclude the whole method does not work.

I have seen exactly this failure in my own profession. When a club reads a financial model, they always want to start with the most optimistic scenario, because it is the prettiest. And when it fails to materialize, they do not fix the assumption. They throw out the model. The death of a good model rarely comes from the model. It comes from the wrong order of testing.

A lesson from a ten-million-euro signing

In 2026, after the Qatar World Cup, the board of the club where I worked wanted to sign a striker who had scored four goals at the tournament, for a fee up to ten million euros. I built an evaluation framework with five criteria: fee value, wages, adaptability, opportunity cost, and payback period. The numbers said the deal was too risky. I proposed buying a young South American for one and a half million euros.

Six months later, the expensive striker had scored two goals. The young player was sold to a Thai club for four million euros.

I tell this story not to praise myself. I tell it because it illustrates exactly how I read Armitage's bunker matrix. In both cases, the trap is identical: a glamorous item priced by fame rather than by opportunity cost. The lob wedge is the striker who scored four goals at the World Cup. It is famous, it is flashy, it is what everyone wants to use. But if it does not fit the sand in front of you, the investment is negative.

The square sand wedge is the young South American. It is less attractive, it offers no sense of adventure, but it has a higher success rate across most sand types, and its error cost is lower. In a bunker, error cost is what decides the score. A square sand wedge that flies slightly long still keeps you on the green. A two-o'clock lob wedge thinned can send you across the green, and from there you begin a spiral of lost strokes.

This is why I keep writing this line in my deep analyses: "Cash flow never lies, but the balance sheet knows." In a bunker, cash flow is the shot you can actually execute under pressure. The balance sheet is your score after eighteen holes. You can boast a nine-distance matrix on the practice range. The scorecard is what tells you which step you actually used.

The paradox: the simpler the method, the more wrong the expectation

This is the part I want to call the counter-intuitive angle.

The entire power of the article lies in the word "easy." Changing distance is easy. Just change the club and open the face. No swing change needed. No manufactured spin. This message is highly shareable, highly memorable, and perfectly suited to how instructional content is consumed today: one tip, one line, one short video.

But that very simplicity creates a false expectation. The article says two contradictory things at once. It says changing distance is easy, and it says amateur players lack practice and lack understanding of the bunker shot. If you lack practice and understanding, then no matrix is easy. A method that is easy for someone with a foundation is a hard method for someone without one.

I call this the mismatch between promise and capability. In financial analysis, I meet it every transfer window. A club announces a signing as a solution. Fans read it as a promise. The player arrives, and three months later, when results do not come, both sides feel cheated — though nobody lied. The promise was not wrong. The expectation placed on it was.

With bunkers, the correct expectation should be this: in a first practice session, you will find two or three repeatable distances, not nine. The remaining steps of each wedge will appear gradually, session by session, sand type by sand type. If you wait for all nine steps before trusting the method, you will abandon it before it has a chance to work.

Opportunity cost: what the matrix does not count

An analyst does not just ask "does this work." They ask "does this work better than what, and at what trade-off."

The nine-distance matrix has a clear opportunity cost: practice time. Every hour spent calibrating nine steps is an hour not spent fixing contact errors. And for an amateur, contact error is a far larger source of lost strokes than distance-selection error. You can pick the right distance and still lose a stroke by hitting the ball. You cannot pick the wrong distance without losing a stroke, but you also cannot pick the right distance if you cannot strike the ball correctly.

This is why I rate the advice "focus on setup and strike, do not chase spin" as the most valuable part of the article, stronger than the matrix itself. It is not flashy. It does not produce a pretty number to share. But it addresses the single biggest bottleneck for amateur players.

In my work, the best decisions are rarely the most talked-about ones. They are the ones nobody wants to mention, because there is nothing to show off. A young player at one and a half million euros generates no headlines. A square sand wedge generates no sense of adventure. But those are usually the profitable investments.

Ecosystem: who benefits from an instructional piece

Zooming out, this article sits in a very specific ecosystem. GOLF.com produces instructional content. The "Top 100 Teacher" designation is both a source of editorial authority and a supply of experts. The "Top 100 Teacher Sessions" series turns a list of coaches into a long-term exploitable video asset.

Transmission flows downstream. Upstream is coaching credibility and club products. Midstream is instructional media. Downstream is amateur behavior and wedge demand.

There is one commercially notable detail. The article names three specific club types — gap, sand, and lob wedge. It advertises no brand. But by asserting this trio is the standard toolkit, it inadvertently boosts the entire wedge category. This is the kind of transmission I track in other industries: when instruction becomes standard, it pulls demand for the equipment that instruction assumes.

There is no large capital flow, no betting, no governance conflict here. It is a small, low-risk ecosystem with a long lifespan. And in an industry where results news expires in days, an instructional piece with a multi-year lifespan is no small asset.

What to watch over the next six to twelve months

There are three signals I will be tracking.

First, whether the "Top 100 Teacher Sessions" series expands into a recurring content brand. If it does, competition in instructional media heats up, and expert quality becomes the main competitive edge.

Second, whether the "do not chase spin" message spreads into standard amateur instruction. If multiple instructional outlets shift to the "constant swing, variable setup" framing, the method becomes normalized, and that is a small but durable cultural change.

Third, whether club brands use this kind of instructional content to market their wedge lines. If so, the category will receive a mild but steady tailwind.

None of these signals produces breaking news. They produce a slow trend. And slow trends are the kind I trust most, because they are not inflated by the news cycle.

The bottom line

David Armitage's 3×3 matrix is a legitimate and useful framework. It teaches one important thing correctly: the biggest variable in a bunker shot is not wrist strength, but how you set the club and how you contact the sand.

But it lacks three things. It lacks data to prove efficacy. It lacks a warning about the thin-shot risk when opening the face on firm sand. And it lacks an acknowledgment that sand condition is a bigger variable than the club.

I still write this line every time I finish building a model: "It takes three months to build a valuation model, and three years to understand where it is wrong." The bunker matrix is the same. It is not wrong. It just needs time for you to understand where it is right, and how right.

A thought to take home

The next time you stand over a bunker shot, try asking a different question than the one the video suggests. Do not ask "how much should I open the face." Ask "is the sand here firm or soft, and which step can I actually repeat." The answer to the second question will decide your score. The answer to the first only decides how clever you feel as you take your stance.

And if you remember only one thing from all of this, remember this: the best investment in a bunker is not the prettiest club. It is the club that costs you the fewest strokes when you miss. That is also the principle I use every time I sit across from a transfer contract — and so far, it has never made me regret it.