Min Woo Lee is one of golf’s elite chippers around the green.
The self-nicknamed “Dr Chipinski” ranks in the top 2% of players around the green in strokes gained, and was the best player at scrambling between 10-20 yards on the PGA Tour this season.
He gained 0.49 strokes around the green in 2025, and in Lee’s first PGA Tour win, he gained a full stroke.
The short game is key to quick improvement for amateur golfers due to the high percentage of times they miss the fairway on approach. And there’s no one better to learn from than Lee when you’re looking to get it up-and-down from off the putting surface.
What Min Woo Lee has been doing his whole life to improve his chipping
Where amateurs can go wrong when practicing their short game comes from the shots they give themselves on the chipping green. They either practice the same shot over and over, or practice with a perfect lie.
But on the course, you’ll rarely see the same shot twice, and the ball won’t always be sitting up nicely for you to chip it out. Lee says the key to practicing chipping is to give yourself deliberately bad lies.
Speaking on Callaway Golf’s YouTube, he explained: “I think the main thing you guys have to practice is on tough lies. I did that as a kid all my life.
“I put myself in in lies like this (divots) because you know there’s going to be nice lies. But if you make it hard it’s going to be easy when you get the easy lies.
“(Points at ball in a divot) I know this lie is pretty terrible. It’s plugged, pretty much. You can hit it a lot of ways. I can hit it high or I can hit it low. I can get the back of it. But it’s just all practice. You’ve just got to learn how to adapt.
“Just try to make it tough, and learn. You’ve got to learn every time you put in a lie. Put yourself in amazing lies and see how it comes out too.”
When you practice with the difficulty ramped up, the simple shots become second nature. And that doesn’t just apply to chipping. Bryson DeChambeau explained how to hit out of bad lies in bunkers, which is something you should also practice.
On the range, most amateurs practice on forgiving surfaces, and on the chipping green they practice on good lies. But when practice becomes harder than the course, you can see fast improvement.
Why chipping is so important for improving your handicap
Stats show how important the short game really is when you want to improve your handicap to single digits.
According to Shot Scope data, the average scratch golfer gets it up-and-down 54% of the time. That’s 18% higher than the average player.
Meanwhile a 10 handicapper, 50 yards and closer, gets it up-and-down only 39% of the time. And that decline continues the higher your handicap gets.
| Handicap | Up-and-down % within 50 yards |
| Scratch | 54% |
| 10 | 39% |
| 20 | 31% |
A 20 handicapper manages to one-putt in those scenarios under a third of the time, at 31%. When you compare that to a scratch player, who does it more than half of the time, you can clearly see where the dropped shots come from for high handicappers.
So if you want to see your scores come down consistently, follow Lee’s advice and improve your short game.
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