Would you play money games on golf simulators? This company is betting on it

Simulator golf is all the rage, ranging from the spread of elaborate home setups to the rise of TGL, and money games have been around forever. Might there be a market to combine the two?

A new company is betting that there is.

Evenplay, a Las Vegas-based venture, aims to bring the kind of competitions most of us know from our local courses to the game’s expanding virtual landscape. The challenge, should you choose to accept, is to plunk down dough in a digital account, then smack a ball into a screen toward a target, with the understanding that, depending on the outcome, you will either become richer or poorer. 

Evenplay is not the first operator in this space. An app called PinSeeker has been around since early 2020, allowing users to take part in virtual closest-to-the-pin competitions against players from around the world. But the technology behind Evenplay is different, as are its contests. PinSeeker deals exclusively in tournaments and head-to-head competitions. Evenplay offers those options, but it also lets individuals play against the house. And it has what amounts to a handicapping system, with odds and challenges that shift in accordance to the player’s performance and skill.

Still, both companies belong to the same category: simulator golf, with money on the line.

At home, you would probably call this gambling. But that’s not the legal term. “Contests” is more like it. To earn the stamp of approval from state gaming commissions, Evenplay, like PinSeeker before it, has had to establish that its challenges are skill-based games, and thus deserving of the same legislative exemptions granted daily fantasy sports.

So far, it has made that case persuasively.

Evenplay now operates in six states (California, Colorado, Florida, New York, Ohio and Washington), and according to Bryan O’Reilly, the company’s co-founder and CEO, the expectation is to have the green light from more than 40 states by year’s end. 

“We clearly fall within the exemption,” O’Reilly says. “Every shot is based on your skill level. And it’s your choice whether to put money on it.”

A Vegas native whose father was the head of the Nevada State Gaming Commission, O’Reilly grew up fluent in the language of the biggest local industry. He also played some golf, but his interest in the game didn’t peak until years later, when Topgolf started gaining traction in the U.S. By then, O’Reilly had carved his own path as an entrepreneur and was well-positioned to serve as a consultant for Topgolf when the company opened a flagship location on the Strip in 2016. 

In Topgolf’s driving range-meets-entertainment concept, O’Reilly got a glimpse where he believed the industry was headed. He also saw an opportunity to bring money games into an alt-golf setting. There were just two catches.

“As a big corporation,” O’Reilly says, “(Topgolf) didn’t want to go through the regulatory process to create a regulated gambling game.”

Also, he says, the technology for what he envisioned “didn’t exist.” In 2019, O’Reilly connected with a tech-savvy entrepreneur named Sameer Gupta, who had helped develop exactly that.

“I went to Sameer and I said, I think you’ve solved the riddle,’” O’Reilly says. “We can create a gaming vertical unlike any out there.”

Like a lot of startups these days, Evenplay relies on artificial intelligence, or AI. In addition to built-in player recognition technology, the system has the tools to assess a player’s skill. Every user gets 10 free swings before they are required to play for money. As those shots are struck, AI takes stock of how good the player is (the golf-simulator equivalent of a handicap) and generates challenges and odds to match. The better the player, the tougher the target.

Could a player sandbag the system? He or she could try. But Evenplay has safeguards, Gupta says. For starters, $20 is the most you can risk on any shot, and you can only play the maximum once the system has gotten a chance to know you. When you’re playing against the house, the target changes from shot to shot.

“You might get the advantage on us once early on,” Gupta says. “But let’s say you’re a scratch golfer and you intentionally hosel a few. The first time you hit a good shot, the system is going to know and adjust. We’re Vegas. We understand edge players.”

Just as the house doesn’t want to get hustled, players need to feel like they’re getting a fair shake. (The same psychology that might prevent an avid blackjack player from playing an online version of the game might also make a golfer wary of a simulated challenge with money at stake) To that end, O’Reilly says, Evenplay is designed to “meet players where they are” with challenges customized to their skill. The decision to risk money is up to the user.

“It’s your choice as to whether the challenge is believable or achievable,” O’Reilly says.

Evenplay comes at a time of propulsive change in golf, driven partly by tech-infused, non-traditional forms of the game. The recreational golf sector, having boomed since Covid, has also shown a growing interest in such off-course golf experiences as driving ranges, simulators, and golf-entertainment venues. Of the 47 million people who played some form of golf in the U.S. in 2024, some 19 million did so exclusively off the course, a roughly 20-percent jump from the year before, based on data from the National Golf Foundation. Coupled with the rise of legalized gambling and daily fantasy sports, those trends would seem to suggest a business opportunity. But that doesn’t make a concept like Evenplay a gimme. (PinSeeker, for its part, was acquired last March by Revelyst, the parent company of Bushnell and Foresight Sports; a PinSeeker representative says its gaming platform has seen significant growth in bars and commercial establishments, with play seen in more than 300 locations, and that its pays out millions in prizes annually).

As some experts see it, the challenges are steep.

Gear

“I think it’s a tough hill to climb to create a successful business around cash money games in the golf-simulator space,” says Lincoln Silver, a golf industry veteran and former vice president of Topgolf Callaway who is now an independent consultant. “You start with golfers, who represent a niche sport to begin with, and then you layer on golfers in a simulator environment and the low percentage of that small set who would be willing to put real money on the line with either people in the same room or people they don’t know in the simulator network globally. The numbers get very small, very quickly.”

Throw in other obstacles, Silver says — like getting people to create and fund an account when other bet-settling methods, such as Venmo and PayPal, already exist — and the pool shrinks even further.

“And because you are taking a small rake on each transaction, you need a huge and loyal audience willing to perform repeat transactions,” Silver says. “Then you need to split that rake with your simulator partners, so now the money gets diluted even more.”

On the flip side, Evenplay has found some bullish backers, including EP Golf Ventures, an investment partnership between the PGA of America and Elysian Park Ventures, the private investment arm affiliated with the owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers. A recent cash infusion from that outfit pushed Evenplay’s total money raised to more than $10 million. (Pinseeker, for its part, was acquired in March, 2024 by Revelyst, the parent company of Bushnell and Foresight Sports; a representative for PinSeeker said its money-game platform has a growing presence in bars and commercial facilities, with play in more than 300 locations around the U.S., and that it pays out millions of dollars annually).

Evenplay is currently operating in commercial establishments only, in the six states where it has been approved. But its plans call for expansion into the U.S. home-simulator market, and, eventually, overseas. The company also sees the potential for other golf-related uses for its technology, including instruction. When you’re getting a lesson, it’s hard to recreate the pressure of competing in an actual match. But imagine taking a lesson on a simulator with money on the line. That, the thinking goes, might do the trick.

And then there’s the market beyond golf. Evenplay hopes to apply its technology to other sports. For instance, bowling. 

First, though, the company has gone all in on golf. As with every wager, time will tell if it pays off.