Clarifications

The Rules of Golf are deliberately concise. Most questions on the course are answered by the Rules themselves. Where the text alone is not clear enough, The R&A and the USGA publish Clarifications. They sit with the Rule they belong to and are numbered after it: Clarification 6.1b(1)/1 is the first Clarification to Rule 6.1b(1).

An example: in match play, you play from in front of the tee-markers and hit your ball out of bounds. If your opponent lets the stroke stand, you drop for your next stroke instead of teeing the ball. This is not in the text of the Rule but in Clarification 6.1b(1)/1 (rules question on this).

Until 2018 this role was played by the Decisions on the Rules of Golf, a thick book of hundreds of individual cases that was published every two years. When the Rules were rewritten in 2019, it was replaced by a much smaller set of Interpretations, now called Clarifications. New Clarifications are also added between editions of the Rules.

You can read them on randa.org with each Rule. On the rules questions on this site, the line ‘Based on’ below the explanation shows which Rule or Clarification the answer relies on.