
The History
If you’re like me, you used the Solo Society feature in the past Golf Club titles to create your own PGA Tour experience that gave you more control over the schedule and courses than the official career mode. If you’re like me, you’re not really impressed with the career mode in 2K21, nor are you impressed with the decision to remove solo societies.
I’ll be honest—while solo societies were a nice feature to have, they were incredibly poorly done. Having to individually rename players was painful, and even though it appeared that you had control, you really didn’t. If you set an event to have certain restrictions based on current standings, for example, it didn’t always function correctly.
While you could select any user-created course to include in your schedule, there was of course the massive scoring issue. Want to play at Augusta? Be prepared for the best AI to shoot several rounds over par, because that’s how poorly implemented the handicap and slope system was.
So, now we’re at 2K21, and the option of a solo society has been removed. The only option is to play through the official career mode, but to me, this is still very underwhelming and not what I’m looking for. Yes, there are more licensed courses and there are real golfers already named. However, there’s again no control over the schedule, or the courses you play—at all.
Near the end of The Golf Club 2019’s cycle, I began doing something different. I decided to come up with a way to randomly generate scores for the AI, based on their skill/rating, and compare my score against that. I’d then track all of this, and essentially create my own offline PGA Tour world, using the game to play my rounds on whatever courses I wanted. It’s great.
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The Overview
So, what is this thing, exactly? It’s spreadsheets! Technically it’s spreadsheets, but to me it’s a system that allows you full control over your own PGA Tour experience that is not bogged down and restrictive. You can enter who you want in whatever events you want. You can play on whatever courses you want. You can have players improve or regress if you want, or even base it on their performance.
The 2K21 PGA Tour Simulation System is centered around splitting professional golfers into different tiers (1–5) and generating scores for each of their rounds based on how they’re likely to perform. The higher the tier, the better chance to have a better score generated. However, a high tier player could have a poor round, and a lower tier player could have a great round. The odds or percentages will always favor better players having better rounds, but there is randomness to it.
To me, this is the best thing I could think of that I could easily create to simulate tournaments that I can play along with, and track entirely on my own. I’ll play all my rounds within PGA Tour 2K21, then I track them along with the AI scores to create leaderboards and overall rankings.
With the spreadsheets I’m providing, you can also do the same thing.
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The Scores
The heart of this is built around score generation. When I first set out to do something like this, the thing that was stopping me was generating scores for the AI. Thankfully, Excel makes this fairly easy.
Disclaimer: I’m not an Excel expert—I know enough to be dangerous. If you know of better ways to do things within these spreadsheets, go for it—this is what I was able to come up with over the past week.
To generate scores, I split players into five different tiers. Tier 1 being the best players on tour and Tier 5 being players who are just holding onto their tour card, or actually who are not even currently on the tour. Any player has the chance to score the same, but a Tier 1 player has a better chance of scoring well compared to a Tier 5 player. Below is Version 1 of the score generator for each of the five tiers. So, on the left is the scores generated, and next to it is how likely it is that a player will get that score, based on the tier.

How did I come up with these? Well, I used 72 as a baseline par of sorts, but I also looked at scoring average for several players. Scoring average, which is calculated on each event leaderboard, and in the overall rankings, is to me the metric that will drive this. That will determine where adjustments need to be made.
I’ll tell you right now—the score generator is not perfect. I have not tested it extensively, but I’m fairly happy with it right now. If anything, I think currently Tier 4 and 5 might need to be adjusted to have their scores a little better…but not by too much.
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Downloads
Version 2.0 [2.16.24]
https://www.mediafire.com/file/9jlaf...em_V2.zip/file
'Streak Tracking' system/sheet added.
Version 1.1 [8.25.20]
This includes all four spreadsheets, as well as font files for Roboto and Roboto Condensed. Install these if you'd like the spreadsheets to appear in the style I created them (modeled after the leaderboards/stats on CBS' website).
Previous Versions:
Upcoming Revisions
Version 3.0?
Might entirely revamp the tiers, using 2024 rankings of players, put in the 2024 schedule, and add a Korn Ferry tour tracking system of some kind.
Version 1.1
I think I'm going edit the score generator for Tier 3, to give them less of a chance of low scores as they're doing really well right now. Might even adjust Tier 2, also. Basically, in the tests I'm doing, I'm not seeing Tier 1 do as consistently well as I'd like. But, I know more testing will help reveal more.
This change might come fairly quickly—within the next few days, I'm sure.
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