magicman wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 9:23 am
Thanks for the replies.
So in summary, it appears someone made up the rule we use, of dropping and taking 2 penalty strokes ?
I'm a bit of a legend, when it comes to spotting and finding balls, so it's a pretty rare occurrence.
The problem we face is when one of us, slices our tee shots into the woods, then hits the provisional massively left.
Zig zagging, which not only slows things down, but is tiring.
That does happen quite often at our level !
Regards Steve
Hi Steve,
This is my understanding of it - The 2 penalty shots was not "made up" by someone but was created by the controlling golf associations (R&A, USGA, PGA etc) to allow any golf course to use as a local rule if they wish to, e.g. to speed up pace of play by reducing search times or similar. Each individual course can decide if they want to add it to their own local rules. The local rules will be printed on the reverse of the score card so if it's not on the card then that rule can't be used for a competitive round or any from which official handicaps will be calculated.
If your group want to use the 2 penalty shot in rounds purely amongst yourselves that's down to you as far as I'm aware. However you should not use any resulting handicaps when playing in competitive rounds outside of your group.
There are plenty of Youtube videos regarding this and other rules and any Pro should be able to answer questions about rules incidents, even if it's after the round. I wish some of the members of my course would improve their basic rules knowledge as some have weird ideas about what can be done as I discovered when playing against them in recent club knockout games and I had to inform them of their errors. I dread to think what they are doing in the Monthly Medal and Stableford competitions.
As before, if anybody thinks I have it wrong or have other incidents for discussion then I'll always welcome education re. golf rules because there are some that benefit rather than penalise.
Best of luck Steve when you play that full course - Is it somewhere nice?