The Basic Rules of Golf

Golf is a complex game with many different rules and principles. The game is so complex and the rules are so hard to grasp, that fans watching at home and on the golf course can alert course officials to inconsistencies and mistakes made by PGA players.

Golf takes pride in being an honest game, in which it is up to the players to report their true score. Today, on the PGA Tour, you can be disqualified even for unknowingly signing a false scorecard.

The basic rules of golf start with a round being 18 holes. One of the great concepts of golf is that every course is different. The ease of playing the course, hole design, bunkers and hazards, the length of the course and the types of rough are just a few of the ways that golf courses differ from each other. All of this adds up to a score of par for a particular golf course.

Par for a golf course is the designated number of strokes to play each hole and to play the entire round. Typically between 70 and 72, the total par score is the sum of all of the par scores of each hole. If a hole is a par 4, that means it should take 4 strokes to complete the whole.

If you do it in one less stroke, you get a birdie. Two less strokes is an eagle and getting it in on your first shot from the tee is the legendary hole in one. If you take one more stroke than the par score you get a bogey, two more is a double bogey and so on.

So the objective in a round of golf is to get the lowest score that you can. If you finish under par, your score is given as being -4, 4 representing the actual number of strokes that you finished under par. If you finish over par your score is given as +5, 5 being however many extra strokes over par it took you to play all 18 holes.

Typically, PGA Tour golf events are played over the course of 4 days with 4 different rounds of golf. The scores are totaled with each other, not averaged, to find your final score under, over or equal to par.

The first shot on a hole of golf is done from a tee just about an inch off the ground. This is usually done with a driver, a club that is used for maximum distance. Driving distance is one of the key measurements of players.

Depending on how far you have left to the hole and where your ball landed, golfers have a variety of clubs to help get the ball to the green, where the actual hole is. These include sand wedges if you fall in a sand bunker or trap and different woods and irons for distances. On the green, you use a putter to stroke the golf ball, rolling it towards the hole.

The best way to learn the game of golf is to either watch it on television or to go out and play it. The great thing about golf is that you don’t have to be physically gifted to pick up a club and go play. Anybody can do it, making it extremely accessible and popular.