TheRules
The Rules
Knowing Your
Penalty-Area Options
If you’re a high-handicap golfer like me,
there are places on the golf course with
which you’re probably intimately familiar:
Penalty areas.
Marked red or yellow and defined by stakes,
lines or physical features, the penalty area is
defined as an area from which relief with a
one-stroke penalty is allowed if the player’s
ball comes to rest there. A penalty area is:
• Any body of water on the course (whether
or not marked by the Committee), includ-
ing a sea, lake, pond, river, ditch, surface
drainage ditch or other open watercourse
(even if not containing water), and
• Any other part of the course the Com-
mittee defines as a penalty area.
That second bullet point was written in
the 2019 version of the Rules of Golf to
give committees latitude on what can be
18
marked as a penalty area. For instance, an
area of thick, waist-high grass and brush
or a thickly wooded area along the edges
of a hole can be defined as penalty areas,
even if there is no water involved.
Penalty areas marked yellow offer
players two relief options. Penalty areas
marked red offer those same two options
plus an extra lateral relief option. Rule
17 of the Rules of Golf covers your penal-
ty-area options. Let’s take a look.
YELLOW PENALTY AREA OPTIONS:
Committees will generally mark penalty
areas yellow when playing across a body
of water that is integral to the playing of
the hole, like when a stream or lake is sit-
uated in front of a putting green. If you’re
150 yards out and your approach finds its
way into the yellow penalty area, you have
three options, two of them involving relief
under the penalty of one stroke.
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1. Play it as it lies. Say your ball lies inside
the yellow line but is still playable, like if
it sits on the edge of the water. Congratu-
lations! You may hit away with no penalty.
Depending on stance and area of intended
swing, this may still not be a great option,
however. So the following two options
may be better alternatives.
2. Take stroke-and-distance relief. When it
is known or virtually certain that a ball is in
a yellow penalty area and the player wishes
to take relief, for one penalty stroke the
player may play the original ball or another
ball from a relief area based on where the
previous stroke was made.
3. Take back-on-the-line relief. The play-
er may drop the original ball or another
ball in a relief area that is based on a ref-
erence line going straight back from the
hole through the estimated point where
the original ball last crossed the edge of
the penalty area. To determine this relief
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by CHRIS LANG