Cockle Bay Petanque Club Auckland New Zealand
Our terrain is divided into 12 stringed pistes 12.5m x 3m. how close to the side strings can the coch be on the initial throw?
We allow a displacement of the coch to the piste either side & subsequent boules to the same area is this allowed?
With the length of our pistes I cant see how we can throw coch to coch & still throw a legal length.
I presume the rules governing distances are primary aimed at 15m x 4m pistes, if so is there any rule of thumb for playing smaller pistes?

It's really for you to decide when running competitions. For narrow terrains, the norm is 0.5m from the string. It's usually up to both teams, but generally "common sense" prevails and teams will simply agree to centre the jack if it's thrown too near the string.

If common sense doesn't prevail, you have to rethrow.

You also need to decide if a boule or the jack crosses the string during play, is it "live" or "dead"?

If it's live you may have a problem in interfering with adjoining games. If it's dead, you may get a lot of void ends.

Again, for the competition organisers to decide.

If you're playing a KO competition, remove strings where possible to give players a larger area to play on, *especially* for finals. Very silly to play a final on a narrow 3m terrain where nobody else is playing!

And finally, when playing "social" games, play open terrain whenever possible. It's very sad to see players using a 3m terrain when a much larger area is available to them.

If you want to play to the rules, I assume you have a copy of the international rules as amended at the World Congress in 2002. If not, they can be found on this forum. Otherwise, it's up to the organisers to decide the rules of play and relay to the players before the competition starts. The main thing is not to "move the goal posts" after the competition has started.

The usual rule is, as Ray says, that the coche should be thrown half a metre from the string. For narrow pistes, it can be 30 cm from the string.