How the game changed.

From ten, seven and eight a side to four

Team sizes have varied across the game's history:

• At Akbar's court around 1580, Abul Fazl wrote, no more than ten players were allowed on the ground at once (Lapham's Quarterly excerpt).
• Manipur's sagol kangjei is played seven a side, Scroll reports, and The Sentinel says British-period teams in Assam were also seven a side, with the first team to seven goals winning.
• The early English game, The Field says, was played eight a side.
• The Bridge says the founders of the Calcutta Polo Club changed the game to four players a side and added goalposts. Historic UK says the 1874 Hurlingham Rules limited team numbers.

Outdoor polo today is played four a side; the positions page explains what each of the four does.

The pony height limit

Early polo set a maximum height for ponies, and every source agrees that the limit was later abolished. They do not agree on the figures or the dates.

A search summary of the USPA's history timeline (the page itself could not be opened) describes a rise from 14.0 to 14.2 hands and a later abolition, with no year visible. We found no primary source for the exact year the limit ended in the United States.

The limit left a mark on the language. The HPA says the term "polo pony" survives from the original 14-hand rule, and that polo horses today usually stand 14.3 to 15.3 hands. Wikipedia puts most modern polo horses at around 15.1 hands, says horses over 16 hands are not unusual, and says "pony" describes their agile type rather than their size. The HPA's current rules, as given in its 2024 year book, allow ponies of any height.

The Polo Pony Stud Book Society

The height rule also shaped British pony breeding. The National Pony Society says it began in 1893 as the Polo Pony Stud Book Society, formed in a tent at the Royal Agricultural Society's show at Chester, with a basic rule that stallions and mares must not exceed 14.2 hands. Its first stud book, in 1894, listed 57 stallions and 316 mares. It published a detailed document on measuring polo ponies in 1907, and on 30 July 1913 voted to rename itself the National Pony Society.

Handicaps

Handicaps, which rate each player in goals so that unequal teams can play a fair match, arrived in stages. The HPA says the United States introduced them in 1888, and England and India in 1910. The Museum of Polo and Hall of Fame says H. L. Herbert devised the American system in 1888. Wikipedia's polo handicap article instead links the system's start to the founding of the US Polo Association in 1890.

Wikipedia describes the scales as running from -2 (novice) to 10 in England, 0 to 10 in Argentina, and in the United States from letter grades at the bottom up to 10. Team handicaps are added together, and the difference is given to the weaker team as a starting score. The top of the scale was reached in full in 1975, when Coronel Suárez became the first team to play the Argentine Open at 40 goals, four 10-goal players, according to Wikipedia's records of the event. The HPA now also runs a separate women's handicap alongside the mixed one. For how handicaps work in a match today, see handicaps, or try the handicap calculator.

Mallets

The Field says England's first players used heavy sticks held upside down before moving to a single stick held in the right hand. Historic UK says left-handed play was banned in 1975 for safety reasons, without naming a governing body; it is the only source in our research for that date, and we have not confirmed it. The Museum of Polo and Hall of Fame's FAQ, also a single source on its dates, says left-handers were banned for safety in the mid-1930s, that the restriction was relaxed after the Second World War, and that the USPA reinstated the ban in 1974. Today's rulebooks require the right hand: the HPA's 2026 rules (Rule 2c) allow only the right hand to hold the stick to hit the ball or hook another player's stick, and the USPA's 2024 Outdoor Rules (Rule 28e) require it except for left-handers registered with the USPA before 1 January 1974. The USPA revises its rules each year, so check the current book.

The craft of making mallets has its own history. The People's Archive of Rural India (PARI) profiled a Jaipur family in April 2023 that has made polo mallets for about a hundred years. In the 1920s, it says, Keshu Ram made sticks for the rulers of Jodhpur and Jaipur, and he travelled with the Jaipur team to England in 1933. PARI reports that the family sources cane from Assam and Rangoon by way of Kolkata, uses beech and maple for the heads, regards Argentine tipa wood as better, and has seen demand fall as Argentine sticks took over the market. We found no dated source for when fibreglass or carbon-fibre shafts were introduced. The mallets page covers today's construction.

Balls

Wikipedia lists bamboo, leather-covered cork, hard rubber and willow root among the materials used for polo balls over the years. It says the British first played with a white-painted, leather-covered cricket ball, and that plastic balls were introduced in the 1970s. A single magazine report, which we could only see as a search summary, says a Dallas businessman developed a plastic ball and began distributing it in 1976; we have not confirmed it. Far earlier, Akbar's night polo used balls of palas wood set alight, according to Abul Fazl. The balls page describes what is used now.

Style of play and match format

Wikipedia credits the American Harry Payne Whitney with leading a shift to a faster, long-hitting game in the early 20th century, and Walter Scanlon with introducing a shorter, four-period match in the late 1950s.

Patrons and professionals

At the top level, polo is now often played by teams built around a patron. Glion's guide describes patrons as amateur players who fund a team and play alongside professionals, usually three of them in higher-handicap tournaments. Cowdray Park's report on the 2026 Gold Cup final names Jean Paul Luksic as Best Patron for the winning team, Gaston, a current example of the format. Wikipedia's handicap article says players rated 5 and above are generally professionals.

When and how that system grew up is not well documented. We found no reliable, dated history of the rise of professional polo or of the patron system, so we do not offer one.

Breeding

The horses have changed too. Wikipedia says Thoroughbreds and their crosses dominate modern polo, with Thoroughbred and Criollo crosses popular in recent years. In Argentina, La Nación reported in July 2024 that about 90 percent of recent registrations in the Polo Argentino studbook involved embryo transfer, cloning or ICSI, and it counted about 300 clones in the season. Wikipedia says Adolfo Cambiaso's first clone, made from skin cells of his horse Aiken Cura, was produced in 2010 with Crestview Genetics. The cloning and breeding page reports the debate around these methods.