Hi guys. My name is Bernhard Langer and we’re doing Basics with Bernhard. Today we’re talking about the vocabulary and the scoring system in the game of golf. We have something called par, which is the number of shots a good player would use to get the ball from the tee box into the hole. There is three different kinds of holes. We have par 3s, par 4s and par 5s. Now the very good players, they hope to make birdies, which would mean one better than par, one below par, or eagle, two below par, or something called an albatros, double eagle, which is very rare. That would be three under par. Very hard to achieve. There’s also something called hole-in-one, which usually happens on a par 3 when the player knocks the ball from the tee shot into the hole in one stroke. Let’s have a look at the overall scorecard for the whole golf course. So we have 18 holes. Most courses have four par 3s, four par 5s and then ten par 4s. I’m a professional and professionals don’t have a handicap. We just go by being under par or over par.
So if you see my name on television and it says -11, that means I’m eleven under par. But most amateur golfers don’t shoot on the par. They have a handicap. Handicap is really how many strokes they play over par. So let’s take somebody that has a handicap 18, would mean he’s 18 over par 72, so he would probably score around 90 on an average day. So that’s why he has a handicap of 18. Next time on Basics with Bernhard, we will talk about the rules of golf..