How the Game Is Played: Types of Golf
February 10, 2010 by admin
Filed under Beginners Guide
Golf appears deceptively simple to outsiders. ‘Where’s the challenge,’ you might ask, ‘in knocking a ball around with a club?’ Ah, but it’s so much more than that!
We can get an inkling of the true challenge of the sport by looking at the “official definition” set out in “The Rules of Golf” published by the United States Golf Association:
“The Game of Golf consists in playing a ball from the teeing ground into the hole by a stroke or successive strokes in accordance with the Rules”
The key phrase here is “in accordance with the Rules.” If golf were merely a matter of ‘holing’ a ball within the least amount of strokes (aka, swings of the club), there’d be no challenge.
But that’s not all there is to it. There are special rules in place for the order of play, for scoring and for dealing with the various obstacles and hazards of the course that make the game much more exciting and challenging than it would be otherwise.
So, yes – at heart, your goal is to get the ball into all 18 holes in as few strokes as possible; but to say that’s all there is to it is to ignore all of the variables that make this ancient sport one of the most popular of sports worldwide.
Let’s shed some light on this now by looking at the different types of golf you can play.
Match Play
In match play, you can play against one other person or as team against team. The goal in match play is to ‘win’ more holes than you have left to play. In order to ‘win’ a hole, you must sink the ball into it in fewer strokes than your competitor.
“A match is won by the side which is leading by a number of holes
greater than the number of holes remaining to be played.”
So, for example, let’s say you’re on the ninth hole and it takes you 4 strokes to sink the ball, but 5 strokes for your competitor to sink it. In that case, you win the ninth hole.
Further, let’s say you’ve both played 15 holes so far, leaving 3 left to play. Your competitor has won 10 holes, and you’ve won 5. In golf, this is not stated as a score of “10 to 5.” Instead, it phrased in terms of “up or down”, relative to the total.
You would be considered “down by 5”, while your competitor would be “up by 5”.
To clarify this a bit more, let’s look at the definitions of some of the most common, ‘final’ match-play scores:
1-up: After a full 18 holes, the winner finished with one more hole than
the runner up. In order for this to work mathematically, some of the holes
must be scored as “halved” or “tied”.
2 and 1 (or “3 and 2”, “4 and 3”, etc): This type of score indicates that the
winner got an early lead, and won the match before all 18 holes were played.
Three-Ball
Three-ball is a type of match play involving three competitors who compete against one another, and each plays his own ball.
Technically, you have six separate matches going on at once because there are two distinct matches per person, e.g.:
John –> In a match against Linda and Robert
Linda –> In a match against John and Robert
Robert –> In a match against John and Linda
Best-Ball
In a best-ball match, one player plays against the ‘better ball’ of two players, or against the best-ball of three players. Sound confusing? It’s actually a type of team ’stroke-play’ where the score for each team is determined by player with the lowest stroke count on that side.
For example, let’s say that your team consists of 3 players (A, B and C) and you each play the hole in succession like so:
Player A: 4 strokes
Player B: 5 strokes
Player C: 3 strokes
The ‘best-ball’ in this case is that of Player C, and your team’s score for that hole is deemed to be ‘3 strokes’. Your competitor now has to “match” or “beat” your side by sinking the ball in 3 strokes or less, otherwise he’ll end up adding to his total number of strokes for the round, which is how the game will be decided.
Four-Ball
This is essentially the same thing as a best-ball match play competition, except you play for holes instead of total strokes. There are 2 people per ’side’ or ‘team’.
The scoring would work as in the following example:
Team ‘A’
Player 1: 6 strokes
Player 2: 4 strokes
Team ‘B’
Player 1: 5 strokes
Player 2: 7 strokes
Team A’s lowest score is 4 strokes, and Team B’s is 5 strokes. Since this is a match-play, the hole goes to the side that sank the ball in the fewest strokes. Team A would then win the hole.
Stroke Play
In stroke play, you win by playing all 18 holes in the fewest strokes. It sounds suspiciously like match play, but it’s not — so, what’s the difference?
Consider the following scenario: let’s say that you’ve completed 5 holes in 10 strokes, and your competitor has completed 5 holes in 20 strokes.
If this were a match play game, you’d be in the lead because it took you only 2 strokes per hole to sink the ball compared to your competitor’s 4 strokes. Your competitor could still win, though, since you are both up by 5 and have 8 holes left to play.
However, in stroke play, your position here would be much stronger. Let’s say that it took you 16 strokes to complete the remaining 8 holes, while your competitor got straight “holes-in-one” the rest of the way.
If you tally up the total strokes, you still win:
You: 10 + 16 = 26 strokes
Competitor: 20 + 8 = 28 strokes
Also, keep in mind that you move on from each hole in a match play once the winner is determined. If you were to sink the ball in one stroke, your competitor in a match play would have to cede that hole to you the moment his first stroke missed the hole.
Not the case in stroke play, though. You and your competitor both keep swinging to sink your own balls before moving on.
Bogey, Par and Stableford Competitions
Each of the above is a type of stroke play, but with some special ‘twists’. The competitors play against a fixed score at each hole.
Players are allowed a maximum of 14 clubs with which to play, and must ‘keep up the pace’ of the game. Any delay or slow-play results in having one hole deducted from your overall score.
Bogey and Par
The reckoning of scores in bogey and par competitions is similar to match-play. The winner is the player who finishes in the fewest strokes across the aggregate of all holes.
Each hole is assigned a gross number of strokes, and the competitor must shoot a net score that is equal to or less than the gross, fixed score.
Stableford Competitions
In a Stableford competition, points are awarded in relation to a fixed score at each hole:
1. More than one over fixed score or no score returned — 0 points
2. One over fixed score — 1 point
3. Fixed score — 2 points
4. One under fixed score — 3 points
5. Two under fixed score — 4 points
6. Three under fixed score — 5 points
7. Four under fixed score — 6 points
So, let’s say that the fixed score at a hole is ‘5 strokes’, and you hole the ball in 4 strokes. This would be reckoned as “one under fixed score”, and you’d earn 3 points.
The winner of this type of competition is the competitor who scores the highest number of points.
