“The original lie-angle-balanced design that became L.A.B. Golf, milled from 6061 aircraft aluminum with weight ports tuned so the face returns square with far less effort. Its off-axis grip and zero-torque balance suit any stroke and quiet the hands.”
Before it was a L.A.B. Golf product, the DF 2.1 was the 'Reno 2.1,' built by Bill Presse, a former mini-tour player and aerospace engineer who founded Directed Force in Reno, Nevada in 2015. Presse bored the shaft hole into the head at an angle matched to the player's lie, then balanced the head with high-density steel and tungsten weights until the face stays square through the stroke with minimal hand manipulation — Lie Angle Balance (L.A.B.), genuinely different from face-balancing or toe-hang. The company struggled until 2017, when Sam Hahn (his own Reno 2.1 had broken) partnered with Presse; by 2018 the brand relaunched as L.A.B. Golf, and the DF 2.1 became its flagship, milled from 6061 aircraft aluminum with each head hand-tuned to its zero-torque balance point.
Adam Scott put a Directed Force putter in play in 2019 with no endorsement deal driving it, and Lucas Glover, Will Zalatoris and Phil Mickelson followed for the same reason — the technology, not sponsorship money. That organic tour adoption is documented independently by SI, TheStreet, PGATour.com and Colorado AvidGolfer, and it fueled the company's reported ~18,000% growth from 2018 to a 185-employee, 64,000-sq-ft factory and a subsequent nine-figure private-equity investment. Few putter designs of the last decade have this level of independently-verified, unpaid pro adoption.
Best for players who struggle to keep the face square through the stroke or who putt with a lot of hand/wrist action they can't fully control — the zero-torque design does the squaring work for them. A player who deliberately manipulates face rotation as part of their stroke (an arced, toe-hang putter) will feel fought by the design rather than helped.
Launched into a putter market dominated by face-balanced mallets and toe-hang blades; Lie Angle Balance was a genuinely novel third category. It predates L.A.B. Golf's broader model range (Mezz.1, Link.1, OZ.1) that followed once the company scaled after 2018 — the DF 2.1 is the original proof-of-concept made mainstream.
Forgiving in a specific, non-traditional way: Lie Angle Balance is engineered to eliminate face rotation (torque) through the stroke rather than to maximize raw MOI against off-center strikes the way a giant mallet does. Players with inconsistent hand action see the biggest benefit — the face returns square with far less manual timing — but the head is a standard-ish mallet size, not an oversized MOI-chasing shape, so it isn't the most forgiving putter on the shelf by MOI alone.
Calibrated across the whole catalog — a tour blade scores low here on purpose; it means control, not ease.
Because it remains L.A.B. Golf's current flagship stock model with strong ongoing demand (tour-proven, still in production), used pricing holds up close to retail: roughly $280-370 against a $389 MSRP for a clean example, well above the depreciation curve typical of a 2015-era putter.
Reading is one thing — hitting is another. Book a bay and see the numbers for yourself before you buy anywhere.
