It wasn't really a guess. If you go to the Boone & Crockett website they have a spreadsheet that you simply enter the measurements into and it does all the math for you. When I did my own score back in December I used a simple seamstress flexible tape and got pretty close. The official scorer used a combination of a small diameter flexible cable, a folding ruler and a 1/4" wide steel tape. He also used masking tape whenever he needed to hold the cable in place as he went around curves or if he needed to mark reference lines. He used the cable to get the length dimensions and then transferred those onto the wooden folding ruler. The 1/4" steel tape was used only for circumferential measurements.

The flexible tape I used was really too wide to get accurate circumferential measurements and that is where we had most of the differences between his and my numbers. I took a print-out of the chart with my scores and it was fun to compare numbers. I was within an eight of an inch on almost every measurement and quite a few were right on. I did have one brain fart where one of my measurements was like 3/4" too long but it evened out in the end because the rack was actually more symmetrical than I had it so that meant there was less of a difference from side-to-side and therefore a smaller deduction from the overall (gross) score. The B&C method places a lot of emphasis on the symmetry of typical racks. Mine had only 2-3/8" of side-to-side deductions.

Here's a link to the B&C typical whitetail scoring chart:

https://www.boone-crockett.org/score...whitetail_deer