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Enter score, we’ll do the rest

We want you to focus on golf. Whether you want full shot tracking or just a simple AI Caddie, our goal is to be there when you need us and stay out of the way when you don’t.

We believe we’ve had the best Apple Watch golf experience for a while now, but our phone only experience has lagged behind. Doing what we do at our core with just a phone is difficult… there are so many use cases.

We have users that play alone, users that play with friends, users that keep their phone in their pocket, and users that leave the phone in their bag or golf cart. This is fine when you are wearing an Apple Watch that can fill in the details, but for those users that don’t like to wear a watch… it can be challenging for us to track a shot when you are 40 yards away from your device.

So we have decided to tackle that two ways in v3.0.3+:

1) Shot tracking is now optional for phone only users! Our novel score entry system will extract enough information for powerful analytics without the need to track every shot. Best in class analytics without having to track shots.

2) When you do want to track shots, we’ve made it easier than ever to do in just seconds with our new shot editing mode.

Let’s dive in!

New score entry on the TANGENT PHONE app

The next time you enter score on your phone, you may notice some subtle changes from the screenshot above. Let’s detail each of these changes and what they mean.

For starters, we got rid of the ‘Fairway’ column. You can still set the ‘Fairway’ miss in the lower right, but hopefully our AI guesses that correct most of the time. It’s easy enough to tap and override if needed. Instead of ‘Fairway’, we’ve moved to ‘Drive Quality’.

What is ‘Drive Quality’ and why is it better than tracking fairways?

Drive quality is exactly what it sounds like, tell us how well you think you hit that tee shot. Is it slightly subjective? Of course. But only you know what is a ‘good’ drive for you and the first goal to improvement is just to hit more ‘good’ drives and less ‘poor’ ones.

Another way to look at it is… A drive in the rough is not always bad. Depending on the course conditions and your target, sometimes cutting the corner and ending up in the rough… but closer to the hole… is a much better result than laying back. Here is our quick suggestion for when to use each emoji for Drive Quality:

• 😀 - Great - This is a drive that is about as good as you can hit it. Generally in the fairway and in a great spot to attack the second shot. Great distance and great lie.

• 🙂 - Good - This is a drive that ends up in a good spot. Generally in the fairway. You probably didn’t get as much distance as you could have, but there is nothing wrong with it. We’d gladly take this drive every time.

• 😐 - Okay - This is a drive that probably missed the fairway. It’s likely in the rough, but there is nothing in your way. You have a pretty good lie and a reasonable chance to hit a good second shot.

• 😕 - Poor - This is a drive that got you into some trouble. It might be in the trees or in a fairway bunker. You can’t directly advance your ball with a stock shot. It is most likely in a recovery type of lie. Not quite a penalty, but not where you wanted to be.

• 🫣 - Trouble - This drive was bad. It’s a penalty shot. You may have hit it into a lake, into an unplayable, or out of bounds. It’s not a good result and you’re going to have to really scramble the rest of the way.

These simple guidelines let you focus on the outcome of the drive. It feeds our data analysis after the round so that we can guide your focus for improvement.

How’d you putt?

We always ask for number of putts. Why? Because even the best shot tracking systems today can’t reliably track putts. Let’s be honest… you probably don’t ALWAYS tap the ball in. Your buddy might throw it back to you after that near chip in, or you scoop that generous gimme putt on your way to the next hole. We can’t track strokes that didn’t happen, so we ask you to tell us how many putts you had.

Well, why do you ask for putting distance? Because raw number of putts doesn’t tell you much about how well (or poorly) you putted.

Scenario 1: A golfer 2 putted 18 times from 20 feet for a total of 36 putts.

Scenario 2: A golfer 2 putted 18 times from 3 feet for a total of 36 putts.

Which golfer putted better? Well the golfer from scenario 1 had a CAREER day! The golfer from scenario 2 is probably considering giving up the game, despite the two golfers having the same number of putts.

We have two methods for entering first putt distance. Easy / Simple mode… and Full mode.

In Easy / Simple mode, you’ll just simply tell us which category your first putt was:

• Tap in - This is a putt most would consider a ‘gimme’. A putt you’ll almost never miss.

• Short - This is a putt you feel like you SHOULD make. Generally inside 6 feet or 2 paces.

• Medium - This is a putt that you’d like to make, but a 3 putt would be a disastrous result (generally under 25 feet or 8 paces).

• Long - This is a putt where a 2 putt is a great result and you’re not going to make these very often.

• Very Long - This is a putt where the goal is to not 3 putt, but a 3 putt is very realistic given the distance from the hole.

In full mode, you’ll generally pace your putts and log the distance in feet or meters. A simple rule of thumb is a good size pace is equal to 3 feet or 1 meter. Just pace between your ball and the hole and do the math to log in feet. It’s what I do on The Good Miss if you watch any content on my channel.

Did you have any penalties?

You’ll let us know if you had any penalties (unplayable, hazards, or out of bounds) and which shot caused each penalty. This lets us quickly know whether driving or approach was the reason for the penalty. You’ll see this in your post round report.

Two chips?

Depending on your score, TANGENT will ask you if you ‘two chipped’.

A two chip is any time it takes you more than one shot to get on the green from inside 50 yards / meters. This could be a duffed chip, or leaving it in a bunker… But we want to prioritize getting it on the green from this range.

Alright. We’re done. We’ve entered all the info, now what?

You get to decide whether you want to track shots… or just enter scores. Take it as deep or as shallow as you want to go.

If you hit the ‘Done’ button, we’ll save your score, we’ll use the info you gave to prepare a more slimmed down post round analysis that still contains critical information to help you improve fast! It’s not quite as good as shot tracking, but its the next best thing. A simple way to build next level golf stats without shot level data.

New guided shot tracking

Pressing ‘Track’ at score entry walks you through shot by shot and gives you the chance to edit what happened on the hole. TANGENT will make a guess as to each shot, but it couldn’t be easier to long press and drag to move shots around, tap on a shot to add meta-data like club, or hit the table button on the right to do more advanced things like reordering shots. I’ll cover this in more detail in a separate post, but the key takeaway is our phone users now get to choose if they want to track shots or just scores.

Tracking shots is the best way to unlock the full capability of TANGENT, but now you have even more options to fit TANGENT into your flow on the golf course.

Let us know how we did. Let’s improve together.

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