Sure, Erick!
The trick to reading putts is to work backwards from near the hole, where you KNOW in advance what speed the successful putt will have, as this allows you to read the final piece of the puzzle. Once the last piece is read, you start working backwards to your ball to make sure the in-between pieces of the putt make this last section happen as planned.
If you take care to visualize the last three to four feet or so of the putt into the hole, this gives you a basic curve into the hole. The surface right around the hole is very nearly always flat-but-tilted without serious changes in contour for anywhere out from the hole from three to ten or more feet. If you can visualize your touch rolling the ball over this last flat-but-tilted surface, you're in business. First see the putt into the hole and then retrace backwards out of the hole. When you retrace this same piece backwards out of the hole and start extending it from the hole towards your ball, you simply observe the rule that there are no "kinks" in putting paths and there are usually no sharp corners either, so retracing the curve backwards makes a smoothly changing curve.
The basic unit to imagine is a twenty foot putt with about two feet of right-to-left break, slightly uphill, over green surface that is tilted a little up at the hole with down-tilt to the left, but otherwise the surface between hole and ball is uniformly flat (planar). Seeing the last four feet into the hole would depend on: a) the exact tilt in space (i.e., tilt from ball position compared to tilt from a straight uphill putt directly below the hole), the green speed, and the rolling speed of your ball over specific patches of the whole pathway from ball to hole. You really only know the anticipated speed of the ball at or near the end of the putt, so start with that. Using this basic unit, you can imagine exactly the last 3-4 feet using intuition and experience, to the point where you could walk over to the hole and draw the final curve into the cup on the ground with your fingertip. Retracing the curve out of the hole backwards over a "unit" like this, the curve will smoothly bend to the point it parallels a "baseline" (the direct, straight line from ball to center of cup) at the apex and then curves back downhill towards the ball's starting position at address. Once the hump at the apex is retraced, and shortly thereafter, the curve on this "unit" putt more or less straightens out for the remainder of the way back to the ball. This part of the putt path closest to the ball establishes the start line for aiming the putter and starting the roll of the ball. This initial aim will always be higher uphill than the apex, so don't use the apex as an aiming point for the startline -- remember that the ball's path is changing at the apex from uphill to downhill and the roll direction at the apex is really parallel to the baseline, so "starting the putt high so it rolls over the apex" is a better way of thinking.
With this "unit putt" in mind, lets talk about big contour changes in between the ball and the hole, to get a handle on what's different on greens like those in Korea.
The process is still the same, except that now as you retrace backwards from the successful final piece, you hit complications (humps or valleys or shoulders or ridges or swales or tiers etc.). The trick here is to treat each separate feature of contour as a new piece of the putt. Every separate piece (like a hump) is retraced backwards exit point first (point off hump closest to hole) and then entry point next (point onto hump closest to ball at address). This means you have to draw mental boundaries on these features by noting the distinctive changes is slope at their margins, where the green surface contour at an exit off a hump, for example, changes from somewhat sharply downhill back to smoothly along the usual tilt of the basically flat surface. So every feature is handled backwards by visualizing the exit point that keeps things on track and then visualizing how the ball retraces over the feature to indicate its entry point.
If you have a protective shoulder contour near a bunker uphill to your right and the hole is further along past the shoulder, so the putt is uphill and right-to-left but has to transit the shoulder along the way, the read goes like this: start near the hole and see the final 3-4 feet with standard delivery speed of your touch into the cup, and then start retracing back out over the flat-but-tilted area around the hole backwards until you encounter the margin of the shoulder. That's the exit point off the shoulder. Now visualize the rolling path of the ball backwards over the shoulder until the visualization shows you an entry point. From this entry point continue retracing the path back to your ball at address to get a startline. Then your job standing over the putt is to make the pieces fit by pulling the trigger with the right touch.
What is the right touch? The "usual" touch is the only touch that will work, because that is the touch that was used to visualize the path of the putt to begin with.
This backwards-reading process works the same way for a putt with one feature in between ball and hole or with several -- just work backwards over each separate feature in succession.
The read always comes down to what speed you give the ball at the end of the putt, and this speed defines only ONE successful path into the hole. If you can see this last piece of the path, the overall idea is "make it happen by delivering the ball onto this final section with the usual end-of-putt delivery speed." Doing this is really all that matters, and failing to do this pretty much insures you will miss. In that sense, you can either just be intuitive when you pull the trigger with the idea of putting to "make it happen" at the end, and let your intuition handle the in-between complications, or you can work carefully backwards over each feature all the way to getting a specific startline. Either way, it boils down to "use the regular touch" when you pull the trigger.
To help with this process, it often is valuable to stand a few feet behind the hole looking back towards the ball and to visualize the arrival of the ball near and into the hole with the usual delivery touch. This sharpens the last piece and also gives you a good perspective for retracing the curve back out of the hole back towards the ball.
Another suggestion is about using the fall-line as a touch reference. The fall-line is the only straight uphill-downhill putt thru any cup (there is always only one). The highest point around the rim of the cup serves as 12 o'clock, so the line down thru the cup's center and out the lowest opposite point on the rim shows the 12-6 line across the cup that is the fall-line. With this fall-line in mind, and also with a "baseline" (direct straight line from ball to hole regardless of contour), the two lines define a situation for reading longish putts by intuition alone. There are three "rules" to keep so that the intuition gets unleashed for a good read. First, NEVER allow your putt to "leak lowside" across the baseline between the ball and cup (short and low). Second, ALWAYS putt at the fall-line as if the putt were straight and flat and level like a putt-putt mat with the idea of rolling the ball all the way at and to the fall-line exactly and not short and not long ("at and to but not thru" the fall-line) -- this is your only "touch" idea. Third, AIM HIGH ENOUGH AND NO HIGHER THAN NEEDED at a spot up along the fall-line on the 12 o'clock high-side for a startline that will guarantee, given your touch also being the fall-line as in rule 2, that the putt cannot and will not "leak lowside" but will at worst end up a little high but also exactly on the fall-line. This is the approach used by both Ben Crenshaw and Loren Roberts, sometimes expressed as "high and slow".
To "lag" successfully with this approach, a little too high for the startline is preferred, since the ball at the end will trend downhill towards the hole closing out the remaining second putt to a final resting place on the high side of the cup very close. To "sink" one of these longish putts using this method, it boils down to how much guts you have when finding exactly when to STOP aiming any higher, since the least high startline that keeps the ball from leaking lowside is the perfect startline, with the usual touch. This takes guts and a lot of experience, so in the meantime, err to the high side for your startline but keep everything in the ballpark with touch that putts at and to but not thru the fall-line.
Never putt across the fall-line and never putt short of the fall-line. I like to visualize the fall-line like a miniature brick wall stretching straight uphill from the cup on the 12 o'clock line, and then putt a straight, flat, level putt mentally as if there were no slope (this is the mental idea of "committing to your line", with my addition of also "committing to your touch").
So, to summarize, go behind the hole to visualize the last 3-4 feet, retrace backwards from this to get a startline for aiming, and always putt to the fall-line with usual touch as if the putt had no slope but was straight and flat and level, handling in-between features one at a time, or handling the whole putt intuitively with the three rules for intuition.
Let me know if this is helpful.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
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