When you’re learning to play the basic game fundamentals of golf and you start going out on the golf course and playing your first few rounds, there’s a lot of sort of worry and concern about how you score, sometimes about the rules and the etiquette, but you throw somebody a score card and a pencil and say, you score today, you’ll really see them come over white and a bit scared about what they actually need to do. And you know sometimes on the golf course it doesn’t need to be that complicated. Your job when you’re scoring your own score card is just to simply write down the number of times you’ve hit the golf ball. You get a score card, you open it up, you’ll see it on the left hand side, holes numbered one to eighteen. If you can write next to there the score that you had on each hole, the number of times you hit the golf ball, write it down on there, add it all up at the bottom, that’s your score.
You have to include some penalty shots which maybe a more experienced person that you’re playing with would tell you about or if you can get a rule book, have a look through the rule book, try and work out some of the basic rules. But generally find the hole that you’re on, the number of shots that you hit, write it in there, add them up at the bottom and that will be your gross score. There’s lots of different playing formats where you play Stableford points, or Texas Scrambles, or Match Play and all different complicated things like that. The basic, most fundamental way of scoring on the golf course, hit it, count it, write it down, add it at the bottom. And if you can adhere to that that would work really fine. Make sure you’re honest with yourself and if you’re struggling to actually count the number of shots you’re hitting, you’re either hitting too many or you need to find a way of actually counting them as you play the hole.
Some people have little clickers that just go on the side of their golf bag or little string of beads, and after they’ve hit a shot, just draw a bead down, hit the next one, draw another one down, add them up again, then that’s how many you took on that hole, then write that down on the scorecard. Either way that works, you just got to make sure that every time you hit the golf ball before it goes in the hole that it gets written on the score card, add them up at the end, that’s your gross score. That’s golf scoring as simple as I can possibly make it for you.