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GPS Yardages

Distance to the green, a satellite view of the hole, and a way to measure any shot you're thinking about — from the scoring page, while you're standing over the ball.

Opening it

During a round, look at the Hole Tools row just under the hole selector. Tap the GPS chip and the yardage panel opens right there on the scoring page: your three distances to the green, a club read-out, and a small Map tile.

Tap the Map tile to open the full-screen hole view. That's where you measure shots, turn on your club distances, and move around the imagery — everything below that mentions the map means the full-screen one.

Only one tool is open at a time. Opening GPS closes Game Plan and My Caddie, and opening either of those closes GPS — so the numbers you just asked for aren't competing with anything else for the screen.

What the numbers mean

The headline shows three distances to the green:

  • Front — the near edge
  • Middle — the middle, and the number most players want (the full-screen map labels this one Center — same distance, different word)
  • Back — the far edge

They're measured from where you're standing to that point on the green, following the shape of the earth rather than a straight line on a flat map.

These are not the yardages on the scorecard. A scorecard yardage is measured along the fairway — around a dogleg if there is one. GPS measures from you to the green. On a bent hole the two will disagree, and both are right.

Measuring a shot

Open the full-screen map from the Map tile first — measuring happens there.

Tap anywhere on the map to drop a target. The panel switches to answer one question: how far is that point, and what's left to the green after it.

You can tap a second point to plan a route — a lay-up and then the approach, for example.

While a target is up, the club read-out measures against the target, not the green. Standing 188 yards from a lay-up spot, it would be unhelpful to still be told which club reaches the center 250 yards away.

Layers

The full-screen map has a Layers menu with two switches: My club distances and Hazards. It's the only place to turn either of them on or off.

Your clubs on the map

If you've set distances in My Bag, switch on My club distances in the Layers menu — it's off until you ask for it. The map then draws three arcs: the club it suggests, plus the next club longer and the next club shorter. Three, not fourteen, because a full fan of arcs is a diagram, not an answer.

Gaps are phrased with their unit — "leaves 7yds short", "leaves 1yd long", or "right on the number" when it's exact — because a bare number read at arm's length in sunlight sits next to two other bare numbers and has to be decoded.

Distances you haven't filled in simply don't appear. The map won't quote you a gap your bag can't act on.

Moving around the map

  • Pinch to zoom
  • Drag with one finger to pan
  • Reset returns to the whole hole and clears any target you've dropped — one button for both. It only appears once you've actually changed something

The hole is always drawn tee-at-the-bottom, green-at-the-top, whichever way it actually runs. Markers and lines stay the same size on screen as you zoom — the imagery gets bigger, the annotations don't.

Looking at a course before you play it

On a course's details page, a Course Preview button opens the same hole maps with next/previous hole navigation, outside of any round. It only appears on courses that have map data, and like the rest of GPS it's premium.

Preview measures from the back tee, since you aren't standing anywhere yet.

Why you might not see it

It's a premium feature. GPS lives inside live scoring, and that whole page is premium — including trials, founding buddies and one-foot buddies. Being invited to score someone else's round doesn't change that.

The course needs map data. Coordinates come from a golf mapping provider and have to be checked in before a course can show a map, so the GPS chip simply won't be there on a course we haven't added yet. Ask support if a course you play is missing — adding one is a manual step on our side, not something that happens automatically.

Being a spectator is not a reason — spectators do get GPS. If you're following a round rather than playing in it, you still see the yardage panel and the hole map, along with live dots for anyone in the round who's sharing their position. The one thing you don't get is the club-distance layer, since it would be measuring your bag from someone else's ball. It's Game Plan and My Caddie that are hidden from watch-only spectators, not GPS.

Hazards

Bunkers and water are shown only on courses where we've checked them by hand, and only when you switch Hazards on in the map's Layers menu.

That's deliberate, and it's the most important thing on this page to understand. Our mapping provider's hazard data is unreliable and varies wildly by course — on one course we checked against the ground, a hole with three bunkers and a lake returned nothing at all, and another listed hazards a thousand yards off the hole.

An empty hazard list would read as "there's nothing there" when the truth is "we don't know" — and the worst omissions were water in front of par-3 greens. So rather than show you a list we can't stand behind, we show nothing until someone has verified that course.

Greens are a different matter and are reliable — they're checked to within a few yards of published distances. Trust the yardages; don't assume the absence of a bunker means there isn't one.

Battery

The location tracking behind the yardages only runs while the GPS panel is open. Close it and it stops.

Sharing your position

Separately from the yardages, there's a Share position toggle that broadcasts where you are to the other people in the round. That's what puts the live player dots on the hole map — yours for them, theirs for you.

  • It's off by default. Nobody sees your location until you turn it on.
  • You turn it on for that round, not permanently. The next round starts off again.
  • You can turn it off at any time during the round and the broadcasting stops.

The yardages work exactly the same whether it's on or off — sharing is only about letting the group see where each other are.

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