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It’s a sport of fine margins, so it shouldn’t come as a big surprise to find that the Apple Watch app store is bursting with tools claiming to help you reduce your golf handicap.
From GPS rangefinders and game trackers, it’s a crowded market, but V1 Game sets itself apart from many golf companion apps by offering auto shot detection and real-time shot measuring.
V1 Game does all this without the need for additional sensors, instead leveraging the motion tracking features built into Apple’s device to allow players to gain valuable insights.
Hit a shot with the app running and your watch will detect it, triggering a vibration along with a prompt for you to tell the app which club you used. Where things get really clever is when you miss one of these prompts, with V1 Game then using artificial intelligence and breadcrumbs to approximate data for that shot.
Compare performances across different rounds
Real-time shot measurements made from your last recorded location are impressively accurate, and with data from over 40,000 courses around the world, so are the distances it provides for greens, tees and hazards.
Arguably the most useful feature for serious players however comes with V1 Game’s statistics dashboard.
From fairways hit and greens in regulation to putting averages and scoring trends, it tallies up your post-game data and shares which areas of your play you’re losing the most shots from along with which aspects you should be spending your precious practice time on.
All these features unsurprisingly come at a further cost – with V1 Game offering two pricing tiers. The app’s "Birdie" option is priced at $59.99 per year and provides all of the Apple Watch sensor functionality, as well as shot tracking and Strokes Gained analytics. The premium "Eagle" tier ($119.99 per year) meanwhile offers "Virtual Coach" and "Virtual Caddie" with in-round assistance based on your swing history and post-round analysis.
