Inside the ropes at Augusta National with Tim Barter

PGA Member Tim Barter is a veteran of the Augusta National fairways. His first visit came in 2000 when Vijay Singh won and he's walked the fairways for Sky Sports Golf and spoken to all the greats ever since. Here he shares some brilliant insights into some of the more untold stories as we all look ahead to the year's opening Major.

On TV it looks twice the size of that and that just staggered me. Some greens look so big on TV and yet they are not. I remember getting to 17 I’d walked 100 yards off the tee and I was on the left-hand side and I looked to the left and there was another green there, a little tiny green. It was so small and sloping that I thought that it must be the par 3 course but it was the 7th hole on the main course. You know the greens are slopey because you see players putting with their backs to the hole at times but I don’t think you can appreciate how slopey they are and, combined with the speed, that means they are a completely unique challenge. The players don’t play anything like that anywhere else in the world – they face extremely fast greens, and they face slopey greens, but they do not face the combination of both.

Obviously the pins are quite often historic, they know where they are going to go – there are only so many flat spots so there are only so many places that they can put them. Knowing how a pin position plays is incredibly valuable. That is why those who don’t know the course well don't play with their mates when they go for a practice round, they will play with the guys who know the course, their guidance is more valuable than on any other course they play. You watch the experienced players and they will take the rookies to certain places and say you need to chip from here because this is the best place to miss to that particular pin. You can’t afford to go over there, so you need to miss here. And if you are going to miss here you need to be familiar how this chip behaves. There is a lot of education that goes on in that respect. The experienced guys don’t shoot at that many flags at Augusta unless the greens are very receptive, they use the contours to feed the ball into the pin, and avoid, like the plague, short-siding themselves on certain holes.

Phil Mickelson has said that if you are unsure whether to chip or putt from certain situations, then you should do that work as late on Wednesday as you can. Because they will closely mow a swale at the last minute, or allow a closely-mown area to grow changing the possibilities. Historically they say the greens get so much quicker Wednesday night to Thursday morning, and firmer. So, again, it is another one of the unique challenges there, that they do just change the examination on almost a daily basis. Quite often we've seen a very scorable set-ups for the first and last rounds and really testing set-ups for the middle two.

When Charl Schwartzel won, he asked Nick Price for advice on how to prepare for Augusta, and Nick said for several weeks before the tournament, whichever events that he was playing in, to find the fastest putt he could find. It might be an almost ridiculous putt to a pin position that wouldn’t actually be there but stick a tee in the ground and actually go and putt that putt over and over and try and get some feel for the incredibly fast and sloping greens you're going to face. Many players also ask the greenkeepers at their home clubs to make their greens super, super quick in the week before the Masters to help them dial in their feel.

Every player that you talk to says that they have tried everything and they can’t figure out a safe way to play it. many have told me they would take four fours in a heartbeat because you are almost certainly going to make a five on one day when you get out of position. If you lay up off the tee you leave yourself a fuller shot in which is ideal to get to the front pins because you can spin it. But if you pitch it on the green and spin it off, it will go down the steep bank. If you miss it left it will spin down the steep bank, and again very difficult to get up and down from there. And if you miss the fairway with a lay up you are almost guaranteed to make five.

Mickelson would have been fascinating to watch because, again, his understanding is extraordinary of the place. He can turn up there not being competitive, as he did last year, and he finished second because he understands Augusta. He walks in there thinking I have got a one shot a round advantage over everyone else before I even start because I understand where to miss, where not to miss and how to get up and down if I do miss in the wrong place. So guys who don’t understand it struggle and guys who do understand it plot their way around it in a very effective way.