Despite the major revisions to the Rules that came into effect in 2019, there’s no doubt that many golfers still find certain elements a little confusing – some Rules more than others.
The Golf Monthly Rules query Inbox is testament to this, so in this article and accompanying video below, we pick out seven Rules, definitions or scenarios – including the ones we get asked about most frequently – where there is the potential for confusion, misunderstanding or misinterpretation, …
Is there a penalty for accidental movement of my ball?
It’s important to remember that the default position under Rule 9.4b is that there is still a penalty if you move your ball, whether accidental or not. The confusion has probably arisen following a couple of Exceptions that came in via the 2019 Rules revisions in which you are no longer penalised for accidental movement of your ball when searching for it or on the putting green. But elsewhere, there is still a one-stroke penalty if you accidentally nudge it with your club or drop something on it, for example, causing it to move. We get lots of emails about this from readers who perhaps know about those new Exceptions and then read too much into them.
There is still a penalty in the general area if you move your own ball even by accident
(Image credit: Kenny Smith)
But if you cause your ball to move in the general area, a bunker or a penalty area, you still get a one-stroke penalty and must replace the ball in its original spot before playing on. If you fail to replace the ball before playing, the penalty escalates to the general penalty for playing from a wrong place.
What does ‘known or virtually certain’ mean?
This phrase ‘known or virtually certain‘ crops up a number of times in the Rules whether to do with determining if your ball is in a penalty area, whether or not it moved or what caused it to move. While ‘known’ is fairly self-explanatory, what does ‘virtually certain’ mean? We cover this in the video attached to this article.
‘Known’ means there is conclusive evidence that your ball did go into a penalty area, for example, perhaps because you saw a splash, or another player saw it go in and tells you it did. ‘Virtually certain’ means that all available information points to it being in the penalty area, but there is a very small degree of doubt about it – perhaps there’s a small patch of rough where it could also conceivably be.
This Definition of this phrase in the Rules says that it must be at…
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