Anyone that has ever had them knows putting yips are the worst thing that can ever happen to your golf score. My yips were so bad at one point a green in regulation only guaranteed a bogey. It got so bad I literally quit the game for almost five years.
In my efforts to beat the yips, one thing became clear. No matter what you do to your stroke, the results will be temporary at best. Whether it be a new putter or a change in grip, in the end it was still me putting the ball. Whatever was wrong always came back because nothing I did addressed the real cause of the yips, which was something even the experts did not agree upon.
After having gone through everything from several new putters and grips and stances, I finally gave up. Golf is no fun if you can not even hit the hole from 3 feet, no matter how many greens you might hit.
Having no where else to go, I just quit playing. I started playing pool instead. Not only is it a lot of fun, but I never had to use a putter. In the early stages of my learning the game, I got a tip from a nice old man who told me where I should be looking when I hit the cue ball. From there, my game took off.
Then one night several years later while I was playing in a pool tournament, right in the middle of a key shot, I realized exactly why I could not putt a golf ball. I suddenly understood the yips, both the cause and the cure, all while looking down an eight ball shot on a pool table.
As it turned out, what I had discovered was unique. I still can not find anyone else who mentions it anywhere on the web, or in any book on putting I have read. The bottom line is that I was playing the wrong kind of game. I was trying to play golf with my putter.
Putting is a target game, more like pool than it will ever be like golf. I started over by building a putting system based on the fundamentals of all other target games. Once those fundamentals were applied, putting became easy.
And best of all, once the average player adapts the target game fundamentals they can not help but putt better. Proper application of the fundamentals eliminates the cause and provides the cure for the yips with one simple move.