Sometimes – all too often in my case – you play a shot and just know the ball is dead. I have a particular fascination with finding gorse bushes. I know it’s going to be unplayable, and I don’t really want to be rooting around in there. I will come off worse.
I thought of that situation when this email popped into my inbox:
“If I hit my ball into deep rough, do I have to look for it or can I just declare it unplayable without looking for it and play another ball from the same place with the appropriate penalty?”
Let’s get into the nitty gritty of the unplayable ball rule. There are a couple of interesting things worth talking about.
Unplayable ball relief: What do the Rules of Golf say?
You – the player – are the only person who can decide your ball is unplayable under Rule 19.2 or 19.3.
You are allowed to take unplayable ball relief anywhere you want on the golf course – EXCEPT in a penalty area. If your ball is in a fine mess in red or yellow stakes and you can’t play it, penalty area relief is your only recourse.
To take back-on-the-line relief, or lateral relief of two club lengths, as part of unplayable ball relief you need to know the spot of the original ball.
So in the situation our emailer describes, those options wouldn’t be available. But while you can’t declare a ball lost in this scenario either, you can play under penalty of stroke and distance by teeing up another ball – not saying it’s a provisional – and hitting it.
Once you do that, the original ball is no longer in play. Even if you subsequently decided to look for it and found it, you couldn’t play it. You would be playing a wrong ball if you did. The penalties for that are severe.
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The other issue I wanted to raise with unplayable balls is the expectation some golfers have that if they take this penalty they should be entitled to a decent lie afterwards.
Let the rules dissuade you of this. Even if your ball freakishly bounced back into the same unplayable spot, you’d have a new problem on your hands.
This is all laid out in a Clarification to Rule 19.2 which says when taking unplayable ball relief “a player must accept the outcome even if it is unfavourable”.
They use the specific examples of when a dropped ball comes to rest in its original location or in a “bad lie in another location in the relief area”.
What to do? You have a new situation. If you don’t want to play it as it lies, you can take unplayable relief once more – but it is an additional penalty.
Got a question for our expert?
Despite the changes to the Rules of Golf in 2019 and 2023, there are still some that leave us scratching our heads. I’ll try to help by featuring the best of your queries in this column.
What do you think about these unplayable ball relief rules? Let me you what you think, and send me your own rules questions, by emailing me at s.carroll@nationalclubgolfer.com or by leaving us a comment on X.
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