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.
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.
