The Basic Golf Rules

The rules of the game are governed internationally by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews (R&A), which was founded 1754 and the United States Golf Association (USGA). Generally, most countries follow the lead of these two bodies as the rules evolve and adapt. The official rule book is then amended and printed every four years to be distributed and implemented across the globe. The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews and the United States Golf Association hear and make formal case decisions on the new and revised rules of golf every two years. The basic precept of the rules is that of fairness. Or more specifically, as is noted on the back of the rule book, “Play the ball as it lies, play the course as you find it, and if you can't do either, do what is fair". Golf’s rules make mention that a player must play the ball from the position where it has come to rest, unless the rule allows or insists otherwise. A player should not receive assistance when playing a stroke and should definitely not alter the ground, course or surrounding area to their advantage, unless the rules allow it. The ball may only be replaced if it is destroyed, lost, unplayable or permitted by the rules.

Golf etiquette also plays a major role in the game and its image as a gentleman’s sport. These guidelines exist in addition to the rules of golf and cover things like safety, fairness, easiness, pace of play, and a player’s obligation to care for the course he or she is playing on. Of course since these are not golf rules, there is no penalty for those who do not adhere to the golf etiquette but generally players follow the procedure in order to allow everyone a pleasant playing experience.

There are also two basic forms of playing, called stroke play and match play. Stroke play is rather simple. Here every player counts the total amount of strokes played over the allocated number of holes (or in the case of a team all the strokes of all the players are counted) for the tournament. The player or team with the lowest score then wins the tournament. There are variations to this method, for example the Stableford scoring system in which each hole has a number of points. The less shots you take on the hole, the more points you get. This means it is seemingly opposite to the usual form of stroke play in that here the more points you have the better you are doing. There is even the Modified Stableford method that has points in relation to the par on every hole and then adds the point over the whole round. Match play consists of, two players or teams playing every hole as a contest against each other. The winner of the hole is the one with the lowest score, unless of course the scores are tied in which case the hole is tied or “halved”. In this kind of play the player or team that wins the most amount of holes wins the game. If the situation arises that the leader is winning by more holes than are left to be played, the leader automatically wins. In other words even if the player trailing won every hole remaining they could still not win the match. So if the leading player or team is leading by four holes and there are only three holes remaining to be played, the match is won by the leader. If the lead is equal to the amount of holes left to be played it is played until the leader has a one hole lead or if ending in a tie it is played until there is a one hole lead. The golf rules that apply to the game are actually quite simple with very few areas for discrepancies.