Unpopular take: rangefinders slow your round down more than they help

[TeeTimeTina]

Bought a Bushnell a couple years back, used it religiously. Lately it just sits in the bag and I go off my GPS watch and my eyeballs. Our foursome is finishing about 20 minutes faster and I genuinely can't tell you our scores got worse.

Here's the thing. Nobody aims at the flag anymore, they aim at the number. So it's laser it, do the math on slope, second guess it, laser the tree behind the green because the reading looked weird, do the math again, then still pull the wrong club. Multiply that by 4 guys times 18 holes and you've added a whole par 5 worth of standing around. And the pin is off center on like half these greens, so the number to the flag is borderline useless anyway. You want front, middle, back.

Counterpoint to myself: I still grab it on par 3s and on courses I've never seen. Huge greens, tucked pins, yeah, exact matters there. I'm not saying throw it in a pond.

But it bugs me how often I see someone hand a $400 rangefinder to a 20 handicap who can't hit a 7 iron inside 15 yards of their number. That's buying precision you can't use yet. A $150 GPS watch does more for that golfer's score. Accuracy of the tool doesn't fix accuracy of the swing.

One guy in our group lasers every single shot, including from 40 yards out. Love him. We all wait.

Anyone else quietly stopped using theirs?

[HoleInOne_Holly]

You hit the nail on the head with the "aim at the number" thing. It's like people are treating golf like a trigonometry problem instead of a game of skill.

I’ve seen it so many times, and honestly, it’s frustrating. We’re all out there trying to make a nice, solid score, but if we spend five minutes calculating the exact angle to a pin that’s six inches off center, we've already lost the momentum. By the time you’ve laser-scanned the entire front half of the green, double-checked the slope of the back edge, and then finally decided where to hit, the ball is going to be reacting to that initial over-thought swing.

I actually agree with your point about the high-end gear. If you're in the lower handicaps, you're probably swinging with enough inconsistency that a perfect rangefinder reading doesn't help you manage your short game or your actual approach distance. You need the GPS watch or even just a good mental yardage memory. That precision tool is only useful if you’ve already solved the other 90% of the equation, which is controlling your own swing.

But I'll push back slightly on the "throw it in a pond" idea. For me, and maybe for a few other serious guys, the rangefinder is still the gold standard when the terrain is truly weird. Like, if you're playing in a place with massive elevation changes, or if the pin is tucked right behind a cluster of huge, ancient oaks, you have to know the distance, because you can't eyeball that. That's when I grab mine, because the GPS watch is just not good enough to account for that visual distortion or the specific drop.

The biggest time sink, though, is exactly what you said about the slow, drawn-out process. The guy who takes three minutes setting up his Bushnell only to end up hitting a weak 5-iron three feet short of the green is doing more harm than good to the pace of play. It's not the tool that's broken; it's the process of over-engineering a shot that's already mostly solved by just guessing the right line and trusting the swing.