The best putters on Earth practise with cheap plastic — and you keep buying putters

Walk any tour practice green — and in just over a week, when the 154th Open sets up at Royal Birkdale, it will be no different — and you will find the best putters on Earth surrounded by cheap plastic. Mirrors. Metal gates. String stretched between two pegs. Chalk lines. A full tour putting station costs less than a dozen premium golf balls, and these are players putting for millions. Now walk any club car park and watch what amateurs do after a bad putting month: they buy a new putter. The professionals treat putting as a skill you drill with feedback tools; amateurs treat it as an equipment problem. One of these groups holes more putts, and it is not the one with the receipts from the pro shop. Here is what each piece of plastic on that practice green actually does — and the order in which to buy it.

The mirror: proof you're aimed where you think

The most common object on any tour green is a putting mirror, and the EyeLine putting mirror is the classic of the genre: a flat, pocketable mirrored plate you putt over. Look down and it shows you, without flattery, whether your eyes are actually over the ball, whether the putter face is square at address, and whether your ball position wanders day to day. That matters because your eye line largely dictates what a straight putt looks like to you — if your eyes drift inside the ball, 'square' starts to look pushed, and you compensate without knowing. Tee slots let you build a gate for centre-face contact, too. It only trains setup, but setup is where most amateur misses are born, which is exactly why the pros check it every single day.

Gates: the skill that actually separates handicaps

If you buy one thing in this piece, make it a gate. Start line — the ability to roll the ball on the line you chose — is the putting skill that most cleanly separates handicap levels, and it is trainable in a hallway. The PuttOUT Pro Putting Gates are three powder-coated steel gates in narrowing widths, from a forgiving 70mm down to a brutal 50mm that demands your face be within half a degree of square to pass through cleanly. Roll putts through the gate and your start line was true; clip a post and you know instantly. The feedback is ruthless, immediate and impossible to negotiate with, which is precisely what practice needs and what casual putting drills lack. The narrowest gate will demoralise a shaky stroke — work down to it, not from it.

The Pelz Putting Tutor: putting as physics

Long before launch monitors, Dave Pelz — the ex-NASA researcher who turned short-game coaching into physics — worked out that putts are decided in the first few inches, and built a tool to test exactly that. The Pelz Putting Tutor is a flat aim-line board with two steel marbles forming a narrow gate just ahead of the ball. Start the putt on line and it rolls cleanly through; push or pull it even slightly and a marble rattles away in accusation. It is pass-or-fail feedback the eye cannot argue with — a mirror tells you your setup looks right, the marbles tell you whether the ball actually left the face on line, which is the bit that decides whether putts drop. Decades on, it still shows up on tour greens, because physics has not changed.

Arc trainers and the ball from hell

Two more tour-green regulars round out the station. The Putting Arc T3 is a curved guide you stroke along, teaching your hands the gentle inside-square-inside arc that most tour strokes follow — the correction is physical and instant, because the putter head bumps the guide the moment you drag it offline, and feel sticks faster than video ever does. And the PuttOUT Devil Ball is the auditor: a ball with flat edges machined in, so any face angle error at impact sends it wobbling off line like it's had six pints. Three difficulty levels are built in and the hardest is genuinely savage. It diagnoses rather than fixes — pair it with the gates or the mirror — but as a two-minute pre-round honesty test, nothing beats it.

Master start line before green reading

Here is the order of operations most golfers get backwards. Green reading is seductive — it feels like expertise — but a perfect read is worthless if the ball does not start on the line you picked, and the data tools all agree that amateurs leak most of their putting strokes through start line and face control, not misread breaks. So the sequence is: setup first (mirror), start line second (gates, Tutor), stroke shape third (arc, Devil Ball), and green reading last, once the ball reliably goes where you aim it. This is also why a putting aid outranks a putter upgrade for almost everyone: a new putter aimed with the same drifting eye line misses in exactly the same place, just with a nicer headcover. We've laid out the home drills in how to practise putting at home.

Who should buy — and who should skip

Buy the station if you three-putt more than you would like and your practice currently consists of rolling balls at a hole until boredom wins — the mirror-plus-gates pairing costs beer money and attacks the exact skills the tour drills daily. Skip it if you are a single-figure player with a grooved stroke and a coach who already runs your putting practice: you have feedback systems, and another gadget is clutter. Everyone else should put the putter-upgrade money away for a year and spend a tenth of it on plastic. The full ranked list, including mats and speed trainers, lives in our best putting aids guide, with more drills across our training coverage.