The bits
worth knowing.

A social golf app for everyday golfers. Score live as you play, your real WHS handicap recalculates every round, and your group sees what you're shooting in real time. Self-deprecating, British, honest about the fact that golf is hard.

Club golfers and casual players who play with the same group. If you've ever lost count on the back nine, argued about handicap with a clubmate, or wanted your friends to see your eagle live - that's the audience.

Deeper analytics are there for players chasing single figures, but the default experience is built around the everyday golfer.

Two tiers - Free and Pro. Pro is £4.99 a month or £49.99 a year (about two months free).

To keep one source of truth, full pricing and the feature comparison are on the homepage: see pricing →

A "shank" is a hosel rocket - when the ball comes off the heel of the club instead of the face. We've all hit one. Some of us hit several per round. The app is named after the moment that defines amateur golf.

Hit the green button on the home screen. Search for your course, pick a tee colour, choose your format (Stroke / Stableford / etc.), and add playing partners if it's a group round. Course par, slope, rating and the satellite hole layout load automatically.

• Score - your gross strokes
• Putts - number of putts on the green
• FIR - fairway in regulation (par 4/5 only)
• GIR - green in regulation
• Penalties - penalty strokes incurred

Score is the only required field. Everything else is optional - skip it if you don't want to fiddle with the buttons. Skipped fields don't drag down your stat percentages.

Tap the same button again to cycle through: hit → miss → skipped. Three taps gets you back to "no answer". The skipped state is treated as null and doesn't count toward your FIR% or GIR%.

Yes. Scroll the round screen down to the scorecard preview, tap any hole, change what you need, save. The handicap differential and round totals recalculate automatically.

Everything keeps working. Shanked is offline-first - rounds, your bag and notifications are cached locally. Writes queue and flush automatically when you reconnect.

Standard WHS algorithm.

Step 1 - score differential per round:

Step 2 - pick the best N differentials of your last 20 rounds using the WHS table:

• 3-4 rounds → use best 1
• 5-6 rounds → use best 2
• 7-8 → best 3 · 9-10 → best 4 · 11-12 → best 5 · 13-14 → best 6
• 15-19 → best 7 · 20+ → best 8

Step 3 - average those differentials and truncate to one decimal place:

There's no 0.96 multiplier - the old USGA "Bonus of Excellence" was retired when the World Handicap System launched in 2020. A small adjustment is applied when you have only a few rounds, and soft/hard caps limit how fast your index can rise above your recent low. Maximum index is capped at 54.0 per WHS.

Three. Below three you'll see your individual round differentials but no index - the WHS doesn't recognise an index calculated from less than that.

Immediately. The moment you submit a round, your index recalculates against the new last-20 set. There's no overnight job and no committee approval.

Any round you submit with a real course rating and slope. Casual practice tracker rounds, partial rounds (less than 9 holes scored) and rounds tagged as "social only" don't count. The "Counts for hcp" badge on the round card tells you straight away.

Stableford rounds are converted to a WHS-compliant adjusted gross score using the R&A formula:

Then differential is calculated as normal. So your Stableford round still counts for handicap, on equal footing with stroke play.

Your playing handicap on a specific tee, used to assign strokes per hole and calculate net score:

You hit the fairway with your tee shot. Calculated for par 4 and par 5 holes only - par 3s have no fairway, so they're excluded from both numerator and denominator.

Holes where you didn't tap the FIR button (skipped) are excluded - they don't count as misses.

You're on the green in two strokes less than par (so 1 stroke on a par 3, 2 on a par 4, 3 on a par 5).

Same skip handling as FIR - only the holes you actually answered are counted.

Sum of putts logged per hole, averaged across rounds. A par round of perfect ball-striking would be 36 putts (2 per hole). Most amateurs land between 32 and 40.

How often you save par or better when you miss the green in regulation:

A real measure of short-game and recovery skill.

Per-hole comparison of your actual score vs your handicap-adjusted expected score:

Sum the holes for round-level strokes gained. A consistent SG of zero means you're playing exactly to handicap; positive means you're playing better.

Two checks: (1) par 3s are excluded from FIR - if your course has lots of them, FIR% is calculated from a smaller base than 18; (2) any hole you didn't tap the FIR button for is treated as skipped, not missed. Tap the FIR button on a hole and cycle through if you want to log it explicitly.

Only the friends you've added. There's no public feed - no strangers, no follow-ers, no algorithm. The Clubhouse leaderboard is scoped to your friend list.

If you're online, your friends see the course you're playing, current hole and your running net (e.g. "+3 thru 14"). They don't see your individual hole scores until you save the full round.

If you'd rather play offline-only, just keep your phone in airplane mode - the round saves locally and posts when you reconnect (or you can choose not to share at all).

Tap an emoji on a round card to react. Tap the speech bubble to comment. The original poster gets a notification. That's it - no quote-replies, no DMs, no shared rooms.

Friends are 1-to-1 connections. You add someone, they accept, you see each other's rounds.

Groups are named sets of friends - your regular fourball, your society, the lads from work. You'll see a group leaderboard for whoever's in it.

• Account: email, name, profile photo (if you upload one)
• Golf data: rounds, scores, putts, FIR/GIR, your bag
• Optional: GPS coordinates while a round is live - used only while the round is active, and never stored unless you explicitly track a shot
• Basic error and diagnostic logs so we can fix what breaks. No third-party ad tracking and no cross-app tracking

We don't sell data. We don't use third-party advertising. Full details in the privacy policy.

Yes - Profile → Settings → Export data. You'll get a JSON file with every round, your bag, your friends list and your handicap history. Sign in once on a new device and import it back if you want.

Profile → Settings → Delete account. We schedule a 14-day soft delete (in case you change your mind), then wipe your account and all linked data. Your friends will see your rounds disappear from their feed at that point.

Encrypted cloud storage in EU regions, with row-level security at the database - meaning a query for your data can only return rows that belong to you, even if a query is somehow malformed or injected.

Try searching by club name only (drop the "Golf Club" suffix). If still nothing, you can manually enter par, slope and rating to create a one-off round - it'll still count for handicap.

If your course should be in our directory but isn't, email us and we'll get it added.

This happens occasionally near multi-course resorts when course geometries overlap. Tap the satellite view, drag-and-zoom to your actual hole, and the round will frame off your GPS position instead of the course centroid.

Open Profile → Handicap to see exactly which differentials are being used. If a round has a wrong slope or rating, tap the round, edit it, save - the index will recalculate.

Check Settings → Notifications on your phone has Shanked enabled. Then in the app: Profile → Notifications → enable the categories you want. Push works on native iOS / Android only - the web app uses in-app notifications.

Email admin@shanked.app. We read every message. Even the spicy ones.