Methodology

Every player's nine attribute ratings are a 1–10 editorial judgment, informed by publicly reported per-category performance data and recent form. They are not pulled from a live feed, they do not update in real time, and they are not published by any tour. Think of them the way you'd think of a magazine's power rankings: an opinion built from real numbers, not a number itself.

That distinction matters for how the rest of this page reads. Nothing downstream — the season simulation, the Season Score, the all-time comparison — claims to predict what a real golfer will do next week. It only asks a narrower question: if a player's game looked like this rating card, how would a season of that game play out against a realistic field?

Each attribute maps to one zone on the golfer figure and one specific lever inside the simulation. None of the nine is decorative — every chip you place changes a real number in the season that follows.

• Power — hips. Drives distance off the tee, with a small carry-over into approach play — long hitters gain strokes off the tee and are left with shorter, easier approach clubs into the green.
• Accuracy — arms. Keeps tee shots in play. It adds strokes off the tee in its own right and lowers the odds of a blow-up hole — an out-of-bounds ball, a lost-ball penalty, the kind of number that wrecks a card.
• Iron play — hands. The single biggest driver of expected score. It governs approach-shot strokes gained, which carries roughly a quarter of the total weight in the model — more than any other attribute.
• Short game — wedge. Recovers strokes around the green after a missed approach. It matters most on the hardest set-ups, where greens get missed more often and scrambling separates a good week from a rough one.
• Putting — eyes. The second-largest scoring lever in the model. It converts good approach shots into birdies and turns a missed green into a saved par instead of a bogey.
• Course IQ — head. Has a small direct effect everywhere, but its real job is softening a bad fit for the week's course and adding a bonus at the toughest, major-calibre set-ups, where thinking your way around matters more.
• Nerve — heart. Only matters when it matters: in contention over the closing holes of the last two rounds, and outright in a sudden-death playoff, where it sets the win probability.
• Consistency — shoulders. Narrows the spread of a round's score. A high-consistency build has fewer disaster rounds — but also fewer career-best ones; a low-consistency build swings harder in both directions.
• Engine — legs. Governs fatigue. A low-engine build fades in final rounds and late in a long season and withdraws more often; a high-engine build holds its level from the first week to the last.

The nine attributes combine into an expected strokes-gained contribution per round, split across the categories golf analytics already uses: off-the-tee, approach, around-the-green, and putting. That expected value, plus a spread that narrows with higher consistency, defines a probability distribution for every round a build plays.

A season is not one dice roll — it is 24 scheduled events, simulated one at a time, in order, with course-fit adjustments, 36-hole cuts, closing-round pressure for anyone in contention, and late-round or late-season fatigue all applied on top of the base distribution before a round's score is drawn. The random draws themselves use a seeded, high-quality generator (not a low-bit shortcut), so the tails — the occasional 63, the occasional blow-up — look like real golf rather than a flat curve.

Your build doesn't play in isolation — it plays against the same rated pool of real PGA Tour and LIV golfers used everywhere else in the game, each run through the identical rating-to-performance model. Below the rated pool, a procedurally generated ladder of filler golfers fills out realistic field sizes for every event; their skill tapers off smoothly by rank, and their names never appear on a share card or in a headline result. They exist so a 150-player event has 150 players, not so anyone builds a season around beating "M. Bergqvist."

Field size, cut line, and prize structure vary by event tier, the same way they do on a real tour calendar: majors carry the largest fields and the most demanding cuts, a flagship championship sits just below that, regular events are the bulk of the schedule, and a season-ending playoff stretch — three events, narrowing the field each round — is reserved for builds that rank high enough in the season standings to qualify. Ties for a cut line or a title are resolved honestly, including a nerve-weighted sudden-death playoff when two scores land level at the top.

The scoring average shown on results is adjusted for the model's own field-strength baseline, the same spirit as a tour's adjusted scoring average: it isolates how many strokes a build is gaining or losing relative to that baseline, then converts the result back into a strokes-per-round number so it reads naturally next to a real scoring average. A raw average — the plain mean of the actual strokes a build shot — is also tracked and shown as a secondary, tooltip-only number.

One number rolls a whole season up into a single, comparable score:

Season Score = 100 · wins + 150 · majors + 40 · flagship finishes + 12 · top-10s + 3 · cuts made + 60 · max(0, 70.5 − adjusted scoring average)

Wins and majors carry the most weight because they're the rarest outcomes; cuts made carries the least, because simply playing on is the easiest bar to clear. The scoring-average term rewards a build that plays well even in weeks it doesn't win. That single score then maps to a letter grade:

• S1,500+
• A+1,150+
• A850+
• A-620+
• B+450+
• B300+
• B-200+
• C+140+
• C95+
• C-60+
• D30+
• Fbelow 30

The all-time table runs the same Season Score formula against a set of historically great seasons, so the comparison is apples-to-apples rather than a list of trivia. Two rows on that table carry an asterisk and deserve context rather than a raw ranking: a 1945 season played during wartime, when only one major was contested all year, and a 1953 season built from just six starts — the result of a near-fatal accident that permanently limited how much competitive golf its player could handle, in a year where he entered and won three of the four majors on the table. Both seasons score extraordinarily high on the formula for reasons the raw number alone doesn't explain, which is exactly why the asterisk is there: to carry the context the number can't.

Every simulated season is fully determined by three things: the mode, the date (for Daily and Versus), and the nine picks that make up the build. Given the same three inputs, the simulation produces the exact same season, down to every round of every event, on any device. That is what makes a shared link trustworthy without a server: the link carries the picks and the seed, not a recorded result, and opening it re-runs the identical simulation in front of the viewer.

The 24-event schedule follows the shape of the current professional season — the rhythm of regular events, a flagship championship, four majors spread across the year, and a season-ending playoff — and uses the real tournament names, purses, field sizes and cut rules so a season reads the way a fan would tell it. Every result is simulated: no real leaderboard, prize or ranking is depicted or implied. The players a build competes against are real, rated by editorial opinion, and never claimed to be anything but that. Tournament names are used for identification only; this game is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or licensed by any tour, tournament, sponsor or venue.