Evenplay Launches AI‑Generated Handicap Index for Alt‑Golf Platforms

Alt‑golf has earned its name.

The sport Ben Hogan once played has evolved into a modern alternative, one that thrives on simulators, launch monitors, gamified driving ranges and other high‑tech platforms.

It is now wildly popular.

According to the National Golf Foundation, of the 48.1 million Americans who play golf, roughly 38 million engage in some form of alt‑golf, while about 19 million have never playedisering on an actual course.

Like traditional golf, alt‑golf offers competition across a variety of formats—tournaments, leagues, long‑drive contests and closest‑to‑the‑pin games—drawing participants of all skill levels, from first‑timers at Topgolf to premier‑tour pros in TGL.

However, until now alt‑golf has lacked a shared metric to compare players of differing abilities.

That began to.TreeNode the weekend.

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

Instead of relying on posted scores from rated courses, the Index evaluates players based on the shots they actually hit. Leveraging data from launch monitors and simulators, Evenplay’s AI analyses each swing, assigns a skill rating on a 1‑to/service‑scale, then converts that rating into a handicap that applies to whichever platform a golfer uses.

Signing up for an Evenplay Index is free; the system is automatically provisioned when a user creates an account on any of the company’s partner platforms. The company claims the Index can produce a reliable assessmentවන within roughly the first ten shots, continuously refining its evaluation as more swings are recorded. Handicap ratings are locked during competitions to prevent manipulation.

“The handicap is one of the great inventions in sport, but it was built for posted rounds on rated courses,” said Evenplay co‑founder Sameer Gupta. “It was never meant to cover garage sims, indoor leaguesComm. or Friday‑night bays. The Evenplay Index fixes that—your skill, measured shot‑by‑shot, becomes a handicap tailored to wherever you play. Whether you shoot 72 or 120, the game continues.”

The launch reflects the dramatic shift in golf’s off‑course landscape.

The NGF estimates that nearly four in five golfers now play at least one type of off‑course golf, with millions playing exclusively in those settings. Yet only a fraction maintain a traditional handicap designed for rated courses.

Evenplay does not position its Index as a replacement for the USGA Handicap Index; rather, it seeks to fill a gap by providing a standardized skill measurement for formats the existing system was never intended to cover.

The company announced a broad slate of launch partners—including Full Swing, Golftec, SkyTrak, X‑Golf, aboutGolf, Topgolf, Toptracer, Dryvebox, the PGA of America and the Indoor Golf Alliance. Together, Evenplay projects that these 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 the technology that underpinned its original platform.

Since its inception in early 2025, Evenplay has focused on AI‑powered skill‑based competitions that let simulator golfers compete for prizes in contests calibrated to their ability. To ensure fairness, the company built software capable of evaluating players almost immediately and adjusting challenges based on demonstrated skill.

The Evenplay Index builds on that 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, Evenplay believes a common competitive language—a handicap for the digital age—will become as fundamental indoors as traditional handicap systems have long been outdoors.

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