Few shots in golf look more impressive — or feel more intimidating — than a high, soft flop shot that drops onto the green and stops dead. It’s the shot you reach for when there’s a bunker between your ball and the pin, when you’re short-sided on a tight pin, or when the green slopes hard away from you. This guide walks you through the setup, swing, drills, and common mistakes so you can pull it off with confidence instead of fear.
What Is a Flop Shot — and When Should You Use One?
The flop shot is a short, lofted swing designed to send the ball nearly straight up and drop it down with very little forward roll. It’s a specialty shot, not your default greenside option. Most of the time you should choose a chip or a pitch, both of which are higher-percentage shots for the average golfer. The flop is what you bring out when something is in your way, when you have very little green to work with, or when the lie genuinely won’t allow a lower-trajectory shot.
It helps to know exactly where the flop sits in the hierarchy of short-game shots. A chip flies low and rolls out a long way. A pitch carries higher and releases a moderate distance. A flop should carry almost all of its distance in the air and stop within one or two yards of where it lands. If you’re still fuzzy on the chip-versus-pitch distinction, our breakdown of chipping vs pitching is a good primer before you start adding the flop on top.
Use a flop when:
- You’re short-sided with a hazard between you and the pin.
- The pin is cut close to your edge of the green.
- The green slopes away and a low shot will release past the hole.
- You have a fluffy lie in the rough that supports an open face.
Avoid a flop when the lie is tight, hardpan, or wet. Skinny lies don’t give the wedge anywhere to slide under the ball, which is the entire mechanism that makes the shot work.
The Right Wedge for the Job
The flop shot is almost always played with a 58° or 60° lob wedge. You can get away with a 56° sand wedge if that’s what you carry, but the steeper face on a true lob makes everything easier — there’s simply more loft to throw the ball up with. If you’re considering whether to add one, our lob wedge guide walks through who actually benefits from carrying one.
Bounce angle and grind matter as much as loft. A wedge with too little bounce will dig into the turf when you open the face, leading to chunked or thin contact. A wedge with high bounce and a wide sole skims through the grass and lets you swing aggressively without fear. If you’re unsure what those terms mean, our piece on wedge grinds explained covers the categories and how each behaves out of different lies. For the flop specifically, a mid-to-high bounce wedge with a versatile grind (Vokey S, M, or D; Cleveland Mid or Full) will be far more forgiving than a low-bounce, narrow-sole tour-grind wedge.
Setup: Build the Shot Before You Swing
Most failed flop shots are decided before the club ever moves. The setup creates the trajectory; the swing only delivers it.
Stance and Ball Position
Take a stance slightly wider than your standard pitch shot — roughly the width of your hips — and open it up so your toe line points 20 to 30 degrees left of the target (for right-handers). Play the ball forward, off your lead heel. The forward ball position raises the effective loft at impact and helps the club bottom out behind the ball, sliding the bounce under it instead of digging.
Open the Clubface — Then Grip It
This is the step amateurs most often get backwards. Open the face before you take your grip, not after. Lay the wedge down so the face points well right of the target — sometimes nearly skyward — and then wrap your hands around the now-open shaft. If you grip first and rotate the face open afterwards, the shaft and the face don’t separate; the moment the club moves, the face squares up again and you produce a normal pitch.
Weight and Hands
Settle 55 to 60 percent of your weight onto your lead foot and keep it there throughout the swing. Hands should sit even with or slightly behind the ball at address — never ahead. Forward hands de-loft the club and turn your beautiful 60° wedge into a 50° pitching wedge. The shaft should look slightly leaned away from the target. This feels strange the first few times, but it’s the only way to keep loft on the face through impact.
The Swing: Long, Soft, and Aggressive
If there’s one thing tour pros stress about the flop, it’s this: it is a long, full swing for a short distance. The first time you watch Phil Mickelson hit a flop from 20 yards, you’ll see what looks like a three-quarter pitch motion to send the ball all of 60 feet. That’s by design.
Backswing
Take the club back with soft hands and a slightly steeper plane than your normal swing. Let the wrists hinge naturally — you want vertical leverage so the club drops on the ball steeply. Most flops require a swing that’s at least three-quarter length, sometimes nearly full. The length is what generates the clubhead speed needed to splash the bounce through the grass when the face is wide open.
Downswing and Impact
The single most important feeling on the way down is that you are maintaining loft. Resist the temptation to roll the hands or rotate the forearms through the ball — both close the face and produce a low, hot, screaming shot that flies the green. Instead, feel like the back of your lead hand stays pointing at the sky as long as possible. The club should slide under the ball with the face still open, almost as if you’re cupping a tray and walking it through the grass.
Follow-Through
The follow-through finishes high and short, with the shaft pointing back toward your trail shoulder rather than wrapping around your body. The toe of the club should still be pointing skyward at finish. If your follow-through ends with the toe pointing left of target and the shaft horizontal across your chest, you rolled the face shut — which means a thin shot. Watch for this in slow-motion video; it’s the single biggest visual cue.
Three Drills to Build a Reliable Flop
Reading about technique is one thing; building the feel takes reps. Here are three drills that work in sequence — start with the first and only progress when you’re hitting it cleanly.
1. The Towel-on-the-Wrist Drill
Place a small towel under your lead armpit and a second one across the back of your lead wrist. The goal is to swing without dropping either. The wrist towel teaches you to keep the lead wrist cupped (extended) through impact instead of letting it bow forward and shut the face. The armpit towel keeps your arms connected to your body, which prevents the hand-rolling miss. Hit 30 short flops with both towels in place before progressing.
2. The Slap Drill
Make practice swings without a ball, focusing on letting the bounce of the wedge slap the turf at the bottom of the swing. You’re trying to make a “thump” sound, not a “thud.” A thump means the sole skipped through the grass; a thud means the leading edge dug. Once you can make the thump consistently with the face wide open, place a ball in front of where the thump occurs and just keep making the same swing. The shot will lift itself.
3. The Coin Drill
Place a coin on the ground and try to flop a ball over a target line — a club, an alignment stick, anything six to eight feet in front of you that the ball must clear. Start with the line at hip height. As you build confidence, raise the line: prop a stick on a stack of headcovers, then on a riser, until the line is up to your shoulder. Forcing the ball over a visible obstacle makes you commit to opening the face and accelerating; trying to flop over thin air is what produces tentative, decelerating swings.
Common Mistakes — and the Fix for Each
1. Decelerating Through Impact
The biggest reason amateurs chunk or thin a flop is fear-induced deceleration. The ball is right there, you’ve got an open face, and your subconscious yells “don’t hit it too hard.” You ease up. The club slows, the bounce stops working, the leading edge digs in. Fix: commit to the length of the swing before you start it. A flop from 15 yards needs roughly the swing length of a 50-yard pitch. Make a few rehearsal swings to commit to that length, and accept the bigger swing as the price of admission for the height.
2. Rolling the Face Shut
If your flops fly low and run out hot, you’re closing the face on the way down. Often this is unconscious — the brain panics about the face being so open and tries to “save” the shot at the last second. Fix: after impact, check your finish. The grip should point at your trail hip and the clubface should still be pointing at the sky. If the toe has rotated past vertical, that’s the leak. Two reps with the wrist towel from the drills above will usually re-train this within a session.
3. Trying to Flop a Tight Lie
From hardpan, packed sand, or a fairway-cut lie, the flop is a low-percentage shot even for tour pros. There’s no grass under the ball for the bounce to slide through, so the leading edge contacts the ground first and you blade it across the green. Fix: learn to recognize when a lie won’t support a flop and substitute a different shot. A bump-and-run with a 9-iron, or a low-flighted pitch with a 54° wedge played back in your stance, will get the ball to the hole far more reliably from a tight lie. Save the flop for when the ball is sitting up.
4. Choosing the Flop When You Don’t Need It
Even when the flop is technically possible, it’s often the wrong choice. If you have green to work with and no obstacle, a putt-from-off-the-green or a chip with a 9-iron will produce a tighter dispersion and lower scoring average than the highest-variance shot in the bag. Reach for the flop when nothing else can get the job done — not because it looks impressive on social media. Sound short-game decision-making is part of broader course management strategy and tends to lower scores faster than any single technique.
A Practice Plan: From First Reps to Course-Ready
If you’ve never seriously practiced the flop, here’s a four-session plan that builds it from scratch:
- Session 1 — Setup only. No full swings. Take your address position 30 times, opening the face before gripping. Build the muscle memory of the open-face address before you ever try to hit a ball.
- Session 2 — The slap drill. 50 swings without a ball. Listen for the thump. Don’t move on until eight out of ten swings produce a clean turf interaction with the face wide open.
- Session 3 — Short flops. 30 balls from 10–15 yards with a target line in front of you. Goal: get every ball over the line and stopping within five feet of its landing spot.
- Session 4 — Pressure flops. 20 balls with consequences attached: pick a target, and any ball that doesn’t land within a 6-foot circle around it costs you a “lap” of putts to a far hole afterward. Recreate the in-round pressure of needing to execute on a meaningful shot.
One of the best ways to evaluate where your flop currently stands is to combine it with green-reading practice — the shot is wasted if it lands in the wrong spot. Pair these sessions with our guide on how to read a green so you start picking landing spots based on what the ball will do once it touches down, not just where the pin is.
The Bottom Line
The flop shot is the most theatrical shot in golf, but it’s also one of the most misunderstood. It’s not about flicking the wrists or “lifting” the ball — it’s about a wide-open face, a long aggressive swing, and the discipline to maintain loft when every fiber in your body wants to scoop. Build it slowly, practice it with drills that enforce the right feels, and use it sparingly. Once you can pull it out when you actually need it, you’ll start to feel like you have an answer for every short-side situation — and you’ll save strokes you used to give away.
