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The post What’s your simulator skill level? Handicapping has arrived for screen golf appeared first on Golf.

They call it alt-golf for a reason.

It’s not the game Ben Hogan knew. It’s a modern-day alternative, adapted to an age of simulators, launch monitors, gamified driving ranges and other high-tech platforms.

It also happens to be wildly popular.

Consider these numbers from the National Golf Foundation. Of the 48.1 million Americans who play golf, some 38 million play some form of alt-golf, while roughly 19 million have never even pegged it on an actual course.

Like traditional golf, alt-golf lends itself to competition. There are tournaments, leagues, long-drive contests and closest-to-the-pin games. Players of every ability take part, from first-timers at Topgolf to Tour pros in TGL.

Unlike traditional golf, however, alt-golf has lacked one of the game’s defining innovations: a common way to measure ability across players of different skill levels.

Until now.

On Thursday, Evenplay, an AI-powered gaming platform, introduced the Evenplay Index, a skill-rating system designed specifically for golfers who play on high-tech platforms.

Rather than relying on posted scores from rated golf courses, the index evaluates players based on the shots they actually hit. Using data gathered by launch monitors and simulators, the company’s AI analyzes each swing, develops a skill rating on a 1-to-100 scale and then converts that rating into a handicap tailored to whichever platform a golfer is using.

There is no cost to sign up for an Evenplay Index. You get one automatically when you create an account on any of the company’s affiliated high-tech platforms. According to Evenplay, the system can generate a reliable assessment within roughly the first 10 shots — that’s all you need to establish an Index — and continues refining its evaluation as more swings are recorded. Ratings are locked during competitions, preventing players from manipulating their handicaps mid-round. Beware of hustlers, whether they’re hitting into greens or screens.

“The handicap is one of the great inventions in sport, but it was built for posted rounds on rated courses,” said Sameer Gupta, Evenplay’s co-founder. “It was simply never meant to reach the garage sim, the indoor league or the Friday-night bay. The Evenplay Index fixes that — your skill, measured shot by shot, turned into a handicap built for wherever you play. Whether you shoot 72 or 120: game on.”

The launch reflects how dramatically golf’s off-course landscape has evolved.

The NGF estimates that nearly four out of every five golfers now participate in some form of off-course golf, and millions play exclusively in those settings. Yet only a fraction of all golfers maintain a traditional handicap, which is designed specifically for rounds played on rated courses.

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Evenplay isn’t positioning its Index as a replacement for the USGA Handicap Index. Rather, it’s meant to fill a gap by providing a standardized skill measurement for formats the existing system was never intended to cover.

The company also announced a broad list of launch partners, including Full Swing, X-Golf, aboutGolf, Dryvebox, Indoor Golf Alliance and Women’s Golf Club. Together, Evenplay projects that those partnerships could eventually bring the Index to more than 200,000 simulator bays and practice stations serving tens of millions of golfers.

For Evenplay, the announcement marks an expansion of technology upon which the company was built.

At its birth in early 2025, Evenplay focused on AI-powered skill-based competitions, allowing simulator golfers to compete for prizes in contests calibrated to their ability. To make those competitions fair, the company built software capable of evaluating players almost immediately and adjusting challenges based on their demonstrated skill.

The Evenplay Index grows out of that same concept, extending it beyond the company’s own competitions into a broader rating system that participating simulator and range operators can adopt.

As off-course golf continues to evolve, the company is betting that a common competitive language — a handicap for the digital age — will become as fundamental indoors as the traditional Handicap Index has long been outdoors.

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The post Average U.S. handicaps, best states plus 7 other facts from 2025 handicap report appeared first on Golf.

The post Average U.S. handicaps, best states plus 7 other facts from 2025 handicap report appeared first on Golf.

How’d you play last year? Don’t give us your gut feeling. Supply us with hard numbers, the kind of stats you get from counting every stroke and posting every score. That’s what is required to keep an accurate handicap. It’s not hard. Lots of people do it—3.68 million golfers in the United States alone. (Don’t have a handicap? You can sign up for one here.)

In 2025, they posted 82 million rounds under the World Handicap System, a domestic record. The USGA counted every one and crunched those numbers to produce the 2025 Golf Scorecard, a compendium of data-driven findings that provide a snapshot of trends in the game. Here are seven that caught our eye.

More Golfers Are Keeping Score

The 3.68 million golfers who kept a handicap in 2025 represent an 8.2 percent bump from 2024, and a 46 percent jump since 2020. Another way to put it is that the number of golfers who keep handicaps has increased by around 1.16 million since Covid hit.

Average Handicaps Haven’t Budged

With so many new golfers taking up the game, you might expect handicap averages to go up. But there hasn’t been dramatic change in those numbers. In 2025, the average handicap was 14.0 for male golfers and 28.8 for female golfers. In 2020, those numbers were 14.2 and 27.7, respectively. The more things change, the more they reveal that this game is really hard.

Scratch Golfers Are Unicorns

A lot of golfers dream of getting down to scratch. Very few do. Only 2 percent of male golfers have handicaps of 0 or lower. Female scratch golfers are even harder to come by. They make up just .85 percent of girls and women who keep handicaps.

Florida Posted the Most Rounds (Ok, no shock there)

When you’ve got year-round weather and courses on every corner, the numbers add up. Florida golfers logged more total rounds than any other state in 2025. The Sunshine State’s dominance in raw volume comes as a shock to absolutely no one who’s ever spent January anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Maine Crowned the Northeast’s Most Golf-Obsessed State

Here’s one we didn’t see coming. Despite having one of the shortest seasons in the country, Maine claimed the title of the Northeast’s golfiest state. The USGA’s formula divided total rounds posted by the number of golfers keeping a handicap, then divided again by the number of days the scoring system was open for posting. Turns out when you can only play half the year, you make every available day count. Florida led the Southeast, Wisconsin topped the Midwest, Colorado ruled the Central region, and Arizona won the West.

Arkansas Golfers Are the Best in America (By the Numbers)

If you’re looking for the lowest handicap average for men in the nation, head to Arkansas. Golfers in the Natural State posted better numbers than anywhere else in the country. Whether it’s the quality of instruction, the courses, or just a particularly dedicated group of players grinding away at their games, Arkansas earned bragging rights as home to America’s best golfers by average handicap (10.6). For women, Mississippi had the lowest average (22.0).

Nine-Hole Rounds Are the New Normal

Among golfers who established a handicap in 2025, half of all women’s posted scores came from nine-hole rounds. For men, that figure was about a quarter. The data confirms what many already suspected: shorter formats are attracting players who don’t have four hours to spare, and nine holes is just as legitimate a way to enjoy the game.

Career Days Were Surprisingly Common

“I never play that well,” your opponent tells you as he pockets your money after the round. We’re not saying you were sandbagged. The USGA isn’t saying that either. But the governing body does track unusually low scores—rounds that fall well below a player’s established pattern. These “exceptional score reductions” trigger a handicap adjustment to keep things fair. In 2025, golfers posted plenty of outlier rounds, the kind where everything just happens to click. The system flagged them and made the appropriate tweaks to keep handicaps a more accurate reflection of ability.

To browse the entire report yourself, click here.

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The post How do you handicap 9-hole rounds? Reddit users wanted to know appeared first on Golf.

The post How do you handicap 9-hole rounds? Reddit users wanted to know appeared first on Golf.

If you want to take the pulse of the golfing populace, Reddit is a pretty good place to go.

The digital platform brims with online communities, or subreddits, devoted to all manner of golf-related topics. Simulators. Swing tips. Architecture. Etiquette.

Name an area of the game and you’ll likely find a subreddit for it. Handicapping? Yep. It’s a popular topic, too.

Just ask the folks at the USGA.

Earlier this year, the governing body hosted a Reddit AMA on handicapping. AMA stands for Ask Me Anything. 

The questions came fast and furious. One, in particular, was posed repeatedly — what’s the deal with handicapping 9-hole scores? Inquiring minds wanted to know.

Which makes sense. Nine-hole rounds have been on the rise, especially among newbies to the game. In recent years, 9-hole loops have accounted for more than 45 percent of scores posted by female beginner golfers, and around 21 percent of scores posted by male beginner golfers. Experienced golfers log lots of them as well. Of the 300 million scores recorded by the governing body since 2020, when the World Handicap System (WHS) was established, around 45 million were for 9-hole outings. 

Over that same time, the WHS has evolved in response to the growing popularity of 9-hole rounds.

The upshot is: The system has gotten more accurate. The big change came in 2024.

Before then, a score from a 9-hole round could not be posted in isolation. It either had to be combined with an existing 9-hole score, or set aside until you played another 9 on another day, maybe even on another course — factors that introduced all kinds of variables. Research has shown, in fact, that combining 9-hole scores from separate days produced handicaps that were artificially low. In other words, golfers who played a lot of 9-hole rounds were put at a competitive disadvantage.

That needed to change.

On Jan. 1 of last year, as part of other changes to the WHS, modifications were made to the handicapping of 9-hole rounds.

Thanks to those updates, when you play a 9-hole round on a course that has been assigned a Course and Slope Rating, there’s no need to wait to combine your score with a score from another 9-hole round. You can post that score immediately, and, using that score, the WHS will automatically produce an 18-hole tally based on your “expected score” for the 9 holes you didn’t actually play. As the term suggests, your expected score is what a player of your ability — based on your handicap — would be expected to shoot on a course of standard difficulty.

The result of the automatic calculation is a more faithful indicator of how a player would perform over 18 holes on a given day than you would get by combining 9-hole scores from different days under different conditions.

But don’t just take our word for it. Check Reddit, too.

Don’t have a handicap? You can sign up for one here.

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