Etiquette for Reporting Competitor's Wrong Score?

[iacas]

9 minutes ago, DaveP043 said:

I'm no expert with Golf Genius, but I'm pretty sure the system can be set up to assign a specific marker to each player.

Yep.

The way it works in what I'm calling "serious" tournaments is this:

• If mobile scoring is used (and paper backups are almost always issued), like in Hurricane Tour events, you have the "scorecard" of someone else and you get to write your own score down too. The systems often check and notify you if there's a conflict between what you wrote for yourself and what your marker has for you. Players "sign" these mobile app scorecards at the end of the round.
• If mobile scoring is used for the group, two or more people score for the group so that, by default, nobody is solely keeping their own score.
• Finally, if mobile scoring is used for the group and there's only one mobile scorer, it's typically treated as secondary and everyone still uses paper scorecards. The mobile score might count officially just to make leaderboards, scoring, etc. easier but the mobile score is checked against the signed, counted paper cards. They're the "scorecards of record," so to speak.

The latter example is how we've done it at some college tournaments. The paper cards are the official ones; we're just using the mobile scoring for live scoring and to make leaderboards, etc. easier.

[reidsou]

6 hours ago, iacas said:

I'd wager that doesn't happen, and the guy isn't DQed. The "committee" let him keep his own score.

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@reidsou, this isn't really a rules question, because the language and the Rules aren't unclear:

By what you've written it wasn't a penalty stroke or two, it was that he wrote down a 4 instead of a 5 while he was keeping his own card.

If I were you, I'd chalk it up as a learning experience. You screwed up, the club screwed up, the guy screwed up. There's likely more to be lost in going forward with it than in bringing it up.

And I'm almost as "rules are rules"* as they'll come.

* Which is not to say all rules are good. Just that they should be applied in almost every situation… when playing an actual serious competition where players don't keep their own scorecards. 😛

Thanks! Very helpful.

Yes, there were no penalty strokes involved. And yes, he was keeping his own score. 

Agree that the rules are clear. Not as clear on my responsibility to be part of enforcing rules after the event is over. Also turned out to be relevant that we were ignoring rule 3.3b (penalty for that is DQ). Not sure where the original question should have been posted. 

You are probably right that the player will not be DQ'ed, cannot be certain. Either way, I think I still have a responsibility to inform the committee. They may be able to make adjustments for future events (as Dave suggested). 

Appreciate the caveat on "rules are rules"! 

[reidsou]

The player with the wrong score acknowledged his error and gave his first place tie money to the player he tied. Given the informality of the event, discussed above, this seems like a good resolution.