As the professional women begin competing in the AIG Women’s Open this week, we all dream about taking a trip over to experience links-style golf in Scotland. Before we can discuss the 5 most important items you must pack for your next excursion, it’s important to understand what makes links golf so different. The phrase “links golf” was coined based on the type of soil courses are played on. It doesn’t mean there are no trees or near the water.

Courses are considered links-style because they are built on the land that “links” the agricultural (farming) land to the seascape. The soil composition is terrible for farming but great for building firm and fast surfaces. Combine that feature with a commonly windy location along the water and you get a better appreciation for how to prepare.

In this video, Joel Tadman tests the TaylorMade 300 Mini Driver - a curious new offering that sits in between a 3-wood and a driver - but does it offer the perfect blend of distance and accuracy? That's what he wanted to find out so he hit it on a launch monitor and then took it to the 17th hole at Wellingborough Golf Club to see how it performed against a TaylorMade SIM2 driver and SIM2 Max 3-wood. The results are interesting so be sure to watch right to the end!

In The Good, Bad & Unusual, Teryn Gregson recaps the World Golf Championships- FedEx St. Jude Invitational, where Abraham Ancer prevailed in the three-man playoff with a clutch approach shot, Bryson DeChambeau and Harris English lost their lead at the par 3, 11th, where Si Woo Kim carded a 13 and Erik van Rooyen won the Barracuda Championship.

Nobody that plays the game is immune to one bad shot. Nobody that plays the game is immune to a series of bad shots, or a bad hole or two. Certainly not a 20-something handicap, or a 12 or a single-digit or even a world-class, top-ranked professional. What do we do when things start to go bad during a round? How do we preserve a round and keep it from being far worse than it has to be?

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1. Stay Calm
I've been there...many, many times, when things are just going off the rails and no matter what I do, it doesn't seem as though I can ever get things back on track. A big part of this happening has to do with the expectations I have for what a "Good Round" looks like for me or what a "Good Shot" looks like. If I don’t pull that "Good Shot" off, then my brain almost always goes into panic mode. Sometimes I can calm down and gather myself and other times, especially after a series of bad shots, it's tougher. When in panic mode, I get tense, start to hurry things up and my normal flow gets knocked off. Learning how to stay calm, mentally, will help the physical manifestations of this from taking over.

In this video, Neil Tappin is joined by Golf Monthly's Rules Guru Jezz Ellwood to discuss the 6 Rules Most Golfers Don't Know. Even though the rules of golf were revised back in 2019 and most golfers were aware of the revisions that were made, it is still easy to miss some of the changes made, and therefore you could be proceeding under the wrong versions of the rules if you're not careful!