Ask the Ref: What do the different coloured stakes mean on a golf course

By Sheila Waltham

My ball was lying in a Penalty Area, but there was a red stake in my way. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to move it. There seem to be different rules dependent on the colour of the stakes, please could you explain.

There can be a number of different coloured stakes used for marking on a golf course, e.g. Ground Under Repair (GUR), staked trees, cordons to protect areas from trolley wear, line of play indicators on blind holes etc, but the three principal types of stakes are white, red & yellow.

White stakes are used to identify and often to define out of bounds (OOB): these are boundary objects. When defined by stakes the boundary edge of the course is defined by the line between the course-side points of the stakes at ground level, and the stakes themselves are OOB. A player is not allowed to move, bend or break any boundary object (Rule 8.1a(1)). The penalty for this is the General Penalty (two strokes in stroke play and loss of hole in match play).

However, there is now a “get out of jail free card” on this rule. If, before making the stroke, the original object is restored, as closely as possible to its original position and condition, the penalty may be avoided. If you broke or bent it when removing it, sticking it back together with tape won’t help you and the penalty cannot be avoided.

Red stakes and yellow stakes may be used to mark Penalty Areas. If the colour of a penalty area has not been marked or indicated by the Committee, then it is treated as a red penalty area. A player may play their ball from a penalty area or take penalty relief. (Rule 17.1)

Yellow stakes identify and/or define penalty areas which offer two different relief options under penalty of one stroke:

• Stroke and distance: playing again from where the previous stroke was made
• Back on line: dropping a ball on a line keeping the point where the ball last crossed the edge of the penalty area between the hole and where the ball is dropped. If the exact point is not known it can be estimated.

Red stakes identify and/or define penalty areas which offer three different relief options under penalty of one stroke. The first two are the same as available with a yellow penalty area, plus an additional option:

• Lateral relief using the estimated point where the original ball last crossed the margin of the penalty area as the reference point for taking two club lengths relief.

Both red and yellow stakes are obstructions and normally movable (Rule 15-2). However, on occasion, they are fixed in place, in which case they are immovable obstructions and there is no relief for a ball lying within the penalty area from interference by an immovable obstruction (Rule 16.1a(2)).

About the author

Sheila Waltham has been a qualified rules official for over 15 years and joined the England Golf Tournament Panel of Referees in 2019. A keen golfer since 1995, Sheila’s interest in the Rules was born out of the realisation that a lot of the information she received as a novice golfer was incorrect. So, she took matters into her own hands!

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