Scoring Targets: How to Calculate Your Ring Count

February 28, 2026 · 5 min read

When you pull your target strip from the carrier after a series, you want to know immediately what you shot. Most shooters count the rings by eye. If you know your results in decimal scoring, you see the real differences between your shots for the first time.

What is decimal scoring?

With traditional scoring, you say: “That’s a nine” or “That’s a ten.” Whole ring counts might suffice during practice, but they hide how close a shot was. Did the ten barely touch the line, or was it a solid center shot? With whole rings, you can’t tell.

Decimal scoring solves this. Each shot is scored to one tenth of a ring, for example 10.3 instead of just 10. A shot scoring 10.7 was significantly closer to the center than one scoring 10.1, and you can see it immediately in the number.

The ISSF (International Shooting Sport Federation) uses decimal scoring in competition because it virtually eliminates ties. Instead of “both shot 104 rings,” it’s 104.3 vs. 103.8, and the winner is clear.

Important: what counts is the outer edge of the pellet. A 4.5 mm pellet has a radius of 2.25 mm. If the outer edge touches or crosses a ring line, the shot gets the higher value. For a borderline shot, this rule decides whether it still counts as a ten or already as a nine.

Scoring by hand

If you want to be precise, you can score your targets without electronics. The result is surprisingly accurate if you work carefully. Here’s how:

1. Hold the target up to light. Hold the strip in front of a lamp or window. The pellet hole appears as a bright spot and you can clearly identify the perforation.
2. Measure the distance. Using a scoring gauge or a fine ruler, measure the distance from the center of the target to the center of the pellet hole. For air rifle, ring 10 is tiny, its diameter is just 0.5 mm, and every further ring is 2.5 mm wide. For air pistol, the ten is more generous: 11.5 mm in diameter, and every further ring measures 8.0 mm.
3. Account for the outer edge. Because the outer edge of the pellet counts, every ring reaches half a pellet diameter further out than the printed line shows. For air rifle that is the 0.25 mm radius of the ten ring plus the 2.25 mm radius of the pellet: the ten reaches out to 2.5 mm from the center. After that the next ring follows every 2.5 mm, so the nine ends at 5.0 mm and the eight at 7.5 mm.
4. Read the tenth. Within a ring, each tenth is 0.25 mm wide. Up to 0.25 mm the shot is a 10.9, up to 0.5 mm a 10.8, and up to 2.5 mm it is still a 10.0. An inner ten on the air rifle target is any shot within 2.0 mm of the center, a 10.2 or better. On the air pistol target the ten reaches out to 8.0 mm, and a tenth is 0.8 mm. The complete tables for both faces are in the air rifle Teiler table and the air pistol Teiler table.

This works well for a single shot. But for a full 10-shot series, it gets tedious. Measure and calculate ten times over, while at the club the next shooter is already waiting for the carrier. In practice, almost nobody does this regularly.

Automatic scoring with Ring Reader

That’s exactly what Ring Reader is for. The web app runs directly in your smartphone’s browser, no installation needed. Here’s how:

1. Open ringreader.app on your phone.
2. Photograph your target strip. Lay the strip on a white sheet of paper, with light from above and no backlight. That way the pellet holes stand out clearly from the paper. Ring Reader detects the entire strip with all targets in a single image.
3. Read your results. Within seconds, you see the decimal score, shot deviation (Teiler), group size, and mean point of impact (MPI) for each target. The entire series is automatically summarized.

Ring Reader recognizes 10 m air rifle, 10 m air pistol, 50 m smallbore rifle and 50 m pistol targets in a photo, each also as a supported (Auflage) target. Paper targets are scored directly on your device, and the photo stays on your phone. Photos of result printouts and range screens go to the server for text recognition. You need no account and no download to scan, and up to ten results stay on the device without Pro. What else to check when comparing apps is in Target scoring apps: what matters.

I use Ring Reader myself after every training session to record my results. It saves time, and I have a complete history of all my training series on my phone. When I want to know three weeks later whether my group size has improved, I look it up.

What is the Teiler?

Besides the decimal ring count, there’s a second metric widely used in German shooting clubs: the Teiler (literally “divider”). The Teiler measures the distance of a shot from the target center in its own unit:

1 Teiler = 0.01 mm

A shot that lands 2.50 mm from the center has 250 Teiler. The lower the Teiler, the better the shot. The Teiler unit is also used by electronic shooting systems. Many clubs keep Teiler rankings, and for best-shot lists the Teiler is often the deciding factor.

The advantage over ring counts alone: two shots can both be a 10.0, one at 230 Teiler, the other at 250 and barely still on the line. On the air rifle target the 10.0 runs from 225.1 to 250.0 Teiler. The Teiler makes this difference visible.

Ring Reader shows the Teiler automatically for every shot. No conversion needed, the app calculates it as part of the scoring.

Conclusion

Decimal scoring and Teiler tell you far more about your shooting than whole ring counts. Whether you score by hand or use Ring Reader: what matters is that you take the precision of your results seriously. Only then can you tell whether your training is producing progress or whether you’ve been treading water for weeks.

If you’ve only been counting whole rings until now, try decimal scoring once. Shots that all used to be called “a ten” then each get their own value between 10.0 and 10.9.