Golf Techniques: Rules and Etiquette
Everyone who plays golf knows that there is almost a rule for anything. But a lot of people have trouble understanding the rules. Here is a little lesson on some of the rules that might be confusing for us, or ones that we just didn't even know.
A player is no longer penalized for picking up a flagstick lying on the green if a fellow competitor's ball is going to hit it. And if a player's ball in motion hits him (anywhere on the golf course), it's now a one-stroke penalty instead of two.
There's still a penalty for carrying a nonconforming club, but the penalty is not longer disqualification. For example, if you discover a bent club in your bag on the second tee and you haven't used the club yet, you're only going to have to take a two-stroke penalty instead of packing up and going to the parking lot.
If you play from a wrong place and by mistake, substitute another ball for the original ball, you now only get a two-stroke penalty instead of four penalty strokes.
Many of us have discovered that we happen to be playing the exact same ball as our fellow competitor, and we want to change it so that we can tell them apart. That is against the RULES!! In the past, you received three strokes for this, now it's only two.
An exception has been added to Rule 16-1e to keep a player from being penalized for inadvertently stepping on or astride his own line of putt when he is trying to avoid stepping on a fellow competitor's line.
Under the old rules, if you hit your original ball and then a provisional ball, and they both came to rest in a water hazard and you couldn't tell them apart, you had to go back to the tee – now hitting 3. But under the new rules, you can take relief from the water hazard and hit 3 from the spot instead of losing the distance back to the tee.
And this last one we owe to Mr. Vijay Singh, a new exception has been added to Rule 13-4. At Doral, he played from bunker A and his shot came to rest in bunker B. He then proceeded to take practice swings in bunker A and was penalized for "testing the condition of the hazard (in which the ball lies) or any similar hazard." Now, if the player makes a stroke from a hazard and the ball comes to rest in another hazard, Rule 13-4a does not apply to any subsequent actions taken in the hazard from which the stroke was made.