Take a stroke of eighty yards and one of forty, the mashie or some sort of lofted iron would be used for both these shots; and yet a player knows that at one distance he has a good chance of making a good stroke, at the other distance his heart goes into his boots. It was my good luck to meet all sorts of men, from sober-travelling missionaries and deserters flying from British Regiments, to drunken loafers who threw whiskey bottles at all who passed; and my still greater good fortune just to escape a maternity case. But in this case the putting of both these distinguished players was never "up"; they failed where nearly every player who is "off" his putting fails; they were short. To ingenuous youth I observe that all these fads are absurd, and nobody who possesses any self-discipline need fall a victim to them. The major and his hostess played against Captain Livingstone Tuck and an old gentleman who came from Lambeth, with the result that the gallant captain and his partner rose up poorer and sadder men, which was rather a blow to the former, who reckoned upon clearing a little on such occasions, and had not expected to find himself opposed by such a past master of the art as the major.

In the lab you'll find a collection of small (12 inch by 18 inch) lock boards, each containing six specially pinned locks with a given keyway. Intuitively visualizing the inside of a lock takes a bit of practice, but will pay off as you start picking locks in earnest. Some holes are in a sort of pot, which, though small just where the hole is, nevertheless has widely expanding sides, and you probably will find your ball dead if you get it into it at all from any distance; but another is on a table-land, where the chief difficulty is not to get the ball on the table-land but to keep it there. You should be able to confidently find each pin and push it all the way up, without jamming the pick against anything or moving other pins. Observe that after you set the first pin, your three pin cylinder has one pin in each of three different states: set/not-binding, unset/not-binding, and unset/binding. Three of the picks are of a "hook" design. The Peterson picks are more sturdy, at the expense of being bulkier (but they still fit easily in many of the keyways you'll be picking).

The keyways include Arrow ("AR1"), Ilco-Schlage-multiplex ("SX"), Schlage-C ("SC"), and Yale-8 ("Y1"). When you feel confident visualizing and using picks to maneuver around the pins in the AR1 and SX keyways, you're ready to start actually opening locks. You'll probably end up deciding that the small Peterson hook works best, but experiment with all the picks. That said, the Peterson hook picks are a bit too large to fit comfortably in more tightly warded keyways, especially those found on higher-security locks. You'll probably find the large hook or deep curve pick works well here. This keyway is more "open" than the Arrow, what is billiards and there aren't really any "platforms" on which to pivot your pick. This keyway is common in commercial and residential locks in the US, and is close in shape and size to a number of other common keyways, including that used by Kwikset, a very popular (and easily defeated) line of US residential locks.

If you're not in my seminar, the references to the lock boards in the lab don't apply, of course; you will need to configure your own training locks to follow these exercises. The boards should be held vertically (e.g., in a vice or against a wall on a table) when used, simulating a typical door. The large rectangular table typically is twice as long as it is wide. Small digits represent short bottom pins (that must be pushed up more to reach the shear line); large digits represent longer bottom pins (that need only be pushed up a bit). The most common security pins are the "spool" and "mushroom" top pin designs, which are thinner in their mid-section. The following is a series of self-paced exercises to help you master the basic techniques of pin tumbler lock picking. Most of the esoteric pick designs in the huge, overpriced sets you see on the web and from locksmith suppliers are useless, and eventually end up being discarded in favor of the basic hooks. That means being able to reliably pick the lock, both clockwise and counterclockwise, and being confident that you know how you opened it.