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 — but 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 really 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 there’s a clear winner.

Important: it’s not the center of the pellet hole that counts, but 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 borderline shots, this often makes a full tenth of a ring difference.

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 — the inner diameter is just 0.5 mm, and each ring band is 2.5 mm wide. For air pistol, the ten is more generous: 11.5 mm inner diameter, with each ring band measuring 8.0 mm.
3. Subtract half the pellet diameter. Your pellet is 4.5 mm across, so subtract 2.25 mm from the measured distance. This tells you where the outer edge of the pellet sits — and that’s the scoring-relevant point.
4. Read the ring. Check which ring the corrected distance falls into. For air rifle, a distance of 0 to 0.25 mm means a clean 10.9 (inner ten). Between 0.25 mm and 2.75 mm, you’re somewhere in the 10 — the decimal comes from your position within the 2.5 mm band.

This works well for a single shot. But for a full 10-shot series, it gets tedious. Measure, calculate, write down — ten times over. And 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. Hold the strip against a light source (window, lamp, screen). The backlighting makes the pellet holes clearly distinguishable 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 supports 10 m air rifle and 10 m air pistol under ISSF rules. All processing runs entirely on your device — no images are uploaded to a server. The app is free to use, and you don’t need an account or a download.

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 just 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 — but one sits at 5 Teiler (almost perfectly centered) and the other at 25 Teiler (barely on the line). 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 actually 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. You’ll be surprised how different shots are that all used to be called “a ten.”