Provisional styles are independent of the published style guidelines. We introduced this mechanism to allow for the development of new styles between published editions of the guidelines, and to allow for exploration of styles in a draft form. Sometimes styles published as provisional will be incorporated into future editions of the style guidelines, sometimes not.
These styles are considered draft, but may be used by competitions as official styles. Suggested groupings are included with the styles. Competition software should allow for these styles to be mentioned in a comment field, and judges should use these style definitions as a reference during judging.
Hopefully this will make it easier for entrants and judges to use a common definition for these new styles. Comments should be addressed to the BJCP style committee.