Rules & Scoring

The rules that come up in a normal round, the penalties that follow, and how the formats work.

12 guides

Golf Rules Explained: How the Rulebook Works

Most golfers never read the rulebook because they picture hundreds of pages of legalese. The structure underneath is small enough to hold in your head, and it is what turns a rules question into a thirty second lookup.

9 min read

Beginner

Golf Penalty Strokes: What Every Breach Costs

Golfers routinely take penalties they do not owe and miss free relief they are entitled to, because the penalty structure is guessed at rather than learned. It has only three levels.

9 min read

Beginner

Golf Scramble Format: How It Works and How to Win One

A scramble is the format every charity day and society outing runs, and the one the Rules of Golf never actually defines. What governs it is the sheet on the first tee.

9 min read

Beginner

How to Take a Drop in Golf: Rule 14 Step by Step

Every relief option in golf, free or penalty, ends in the same procedure. Getting the height right is the easy part, and the relief area is where the strokes actually go.

10 min read

Beginner

Lost Ball Rule: Three Minutes, and the Provisional

Almost every argument about a lost ball is really an argument about the clock: when it started, whether it ever stopped, and whether the ball was ever lost at all.

10 min read

Beginner

Match Play vs Stroke Play: How the Two Formats Differ

The two formats share almost all of the same rules, then differ on the handful that decide how a bad hole, a missed short putt and a penalty are actually paid for.

10 min read

Beginner

Out of Bounds Rule: Stroke and Distance Explained

Out of bounds is the most expensive ruling in golf and the one amateurs get wrong most often, usually by dropping a ball where they should be walking back to the tee.

9 min read

Beginner

Penalty Area Rules: Red vs Yellow Stakes

Water hazards stopped existing in 2019. What replaced them is wider, more generous and marked in two colours that mean genuinely different things.

10 min read

Beginner

Stableford Scoring: The Points Table and How It Works

Stableford is the format most weekend club golf is actually played under, and it is built around a single mercy: a hole you have wrecked scores nothing rather than everything.

9 min read

Beginner

Unplayable Lie Rule: Your Three Options Under Rule 19

An unplayable ball is the one penalty in golf you choose to take, and the golfer who knows the three options usually pays less for a bad lie than the one who hacks at it twice.

10 min read

Intermediate

Golf Tournament Formats: What Each One Actually Means

A club fixture list mixes formats written into the Rules of Golf with formats somebody made up in a bar, and nothing on the sheet tells you which is which.

9 min read

Intermediate

How to Calculate a Golf Handicap: The Actual Arithmetic

Every app does this for you, and every golfer still wants to know where the number came from. Four calculations sit between a card in your hand and the figure on your phone.

9 min read