Can you play a provisional if your ball might be in a penalty area?

Provisional balls cause lots of grief, don’t they? If it’s not players failing to correctly announce one, and inadvertently ending up putting another ball in play, it’s when and where you’re allowed to utilise the provisions of Rule 18.3.

Ian James emailed me with just such an example. “A fellow player thought he was in a penalty area and played a provisional ball, despite me telling him that it would immediately become the ball in play,” he wrote. “His ball was found in the penalty area but in a playable position.

“A referee allowed him to play the original ball without penalty. Was this the correct decision?”

Rules of Golf explained: Provisional ball rule and penalty areas

This is a rule that’s sometimes misunderstood, mainly because golfers know part of it and then enforce what they know without the overall context.

It is true that if your ball is in a penalty area then you can’t play a provisional. For that to be the case, it’s got to be found in the penalty area or be known or virtually certain that it’s in there.

In Ian’s example, the player thinks they are in a penalty area. Do they know, or are virtually certain? If not, then Rule 18.3 allows you to save time and play a provisional ball when “a ball might be lost in a penalty area but also might be lost somewhere else on the course”.

A clarification to this rule adds that when a player is deciding whether they’re allowed to play a provisional, “only the information that is known by the player at that time is considered”.

So it doesn’t matter if the ball is subsequently found in the penalty area. As long as it wasn’t known or virtually certain it was there at the time the provisional was played, there is no harm done.

But once the original is discovered in that penalty area, then the provisional ball must be abandoned, and you would proceed using the options available to you under Rule 17 (stroke-and-distance relief, back-on-the-line relief, or lateral relief in a red penalty area at the cost of a penalty stroke).

Have a question for our Rules of Golf expert?

Despite the simplification of the Rules of Golf, there are still some that leave us scratching our heads. And as I’ve passed the R&A’s Level 3 rules exam with distinction, I’ll try to help by featuring the best in this column.

You can read all of Steve’s Rules of Golf explained columns here.

What do you think of the provisional ball rule when it comes to penalty areas? Let me know with a tweet.

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