Look at your own three-putts honestly and you will find very few of them involved a badly read line. The first putt finished a long way from the hole, and the second was a genuinely hard putt.
Distance control, not direction, is what makes long putting good.
What controls distance
Length of stroke, not force
Consistent putters change the length of the backstroke and keep the tempo identical. Inconsistent putters keep the stroke the same length and hit it harder or softer, which changes strike quality and makes pace unpredictable.
Strike location
A putt struck off the toe comes out dead. If your strike wanders across the face, your pace will wander too, no matter how good your feel is. This is worth checking with a strip of tape across the putter face.
The drill that fixes it fastest
The ladder. Put a tee at fifteen, thirty and forty five feet. Putt one ball to each in order, then back down. You are not trying to hole anything. You are trying to finish within a club length.
Do this for five minutes and you will learn more about your pace than an hour of holing three footers.
The target that actually matters
Aim to finish twelve to eighteen inches past the hole. Short putts never go in, and putts hit far past leave you the same problem in reverse. That window is where most makeable second putts live.
Where setup comes back in
Poor strike location is usually a setup problem rather than a stroke problem. If your eye line and shoulders are inconsistent, your strike will be too, and your pace goes with it. Fix the address position first and distance control improves without you working on it directly.
