The bits
worth knowing.

A social golf app for everyday golfers. Score live as you play, your WHS-calculated 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. Open the round from Your rounds, go to Hole by hole, and tap Edit scores at the foot of the card. Change what you need and 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.

Your SHANKED Handicap Index, worked out with WHS rules from full 18-hole rounds. An estimate, not an official England Golf Handicap Index.

Step 1 - cap each hole at net double bogey (par + 2 + the shots you get on that hole). That gives your adjusted gross score.

Step 2 - score differential per round:

Step 3 - pick the best N differentials of your last 20 rounds using the WHS table:

• 3-5 rounds → best 1 · 6-8 → best 2 · 9-11 → best 3 · 12-14 → best 4
• 15-16 → best 5 · 17-18 → best 6 · 19 → best 7 · 20 → best 8

Step 4 - average those differentials and round to one decimal place:

With only a few rounds a small adjustment comes off (2.0 at three rounds, 1.0 at four and at six), and soft and hard caps limit how fast your index can rise above your lowest of the last year. The maximum index is 54.0. There's no 0.96 multiplier - that was retired when the World Handicap System launched in 2020.

What it leaves out: there's no playing conditions calculation (PCC), and nine-hole and part rounds don't count yet. SHANKED is not affiliated with or endorsed by The R&A, the USGA or England Golf.

Three full 18-hole rounds. Until then you play off the club index you gave us when you signed up, or a starting estimate of 36. If you gave us a club index, we ask which one you want to play off once your SHANKED Handicap Index arrives.

Immediately. The moment you save a full 18-hole round, your index recalculates against the new last-20 set. There's no overnight job and no committee approval.

Complete 18-hole rounds with a real course rating and slope. Nine-hole and partial rounds are scored, but they don't count toward your index yet. On Your rounds, the "In your best 8" badge marks the rounds your index is worked out from right now (fewer than 8 while you have fewer than 20 rounds).

Your index is built from each hole's adjusted score, capped at net double bogey, whatever format you played. So a full Stableford round counts 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.

Each full 18-hole round against a mark of par plus your course handicap there, worked out from the index you played off, the slope and the course rating:

Positive means you scored better than the mark. Your index comes from your best 8 of your last 20 rounds, so most golfers average 2 to 4 shots worse than this mark. It's an estimate from your scorecard, not shot by shot.

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.

Two things can be seen by anyone with the link. When you share a round, the link shows a preview with your first name, the course and your score. And when a friend shares a month's Clubhouse result, the page names the champion by first name and merit points, but only while that champion's discoverability is set to Everyone and Share stats is on. Turn either off in Profile → Privacy and sharing and your name comes off those pages.

If you're online, your friends see the course you're playing, your current hole and your running score, and they can open your live card hole by hole as you go. Turn off Share stats in Profile → Privacy and sharing if you'd rather they didn't.

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.

Not in the app yet. Email admin@shanked.app from the address on your account and we'll send you a copy of your rounds, bag, friends list and handicap history.

Profile → Account → Delete account. It's immediate and permanent: your account and its rounds, stats, profile photo and scorecard images are deleted straight away, and they can't be recovered. Your rounds disappear from your friends' feeds at the same time. Photos you added to a group stay with the group. No app? Email admin@shanked.app from the address on your account. If you pay for Pro, cancel it in your App Store or Play Store settings too.

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.

Tap your handicap on Home to see exactly which rounds 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 → App → Push notifications. 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.