From the Clubhouse
Welcome to Rainy Day Golf
From a rainy-day clicker to career sims, predictions, and daily mini-games — and what this blog is for.
I'm Matt. I work with data for a living, play a lot of golf, and live somewhere that seems to rain every time I have a tee time.
Rainy Day Golf started as something to do when I couldn't actually go play.
It has turned into a few different things since then.
It started as a tiny golf game
The first version was basically a clicker game.
Very simple. Play a little golf, make a few choices, kill some time when it was raining outside.
I wasn't trying to build some huge golf platform. I just wanted to make something fun.
Then I kept adding to it.
Then I built a career game
The clicker game eventually turned into a full golf career management sim.
You could create a golfer, play tournaments, train different parts of your game, improve over time, and try to build a career.
That version taught me a lot because people actually started playing it.
They found bugs I never would have found myself. They told me where the game dragged. They showed me which parts they cared about and which parts they skipped.
And the more I worked on it, the more interested I got in the numbers underneath golf itself.
Then I started messing with predictions
At some point I decided it would be fun to see if I could build a model that predicted PGA Tour results.
So I did.
I started pulling together strokes gained data, recent form, course fit, rankings and whatever else seemed useful, then running simulations and comparing the results against what actually happened.
Sometimes it worked.
Sometimes it was very wrong.
The wrong weeks were usually more interesting.
They made me go back and figure out whether I had weighted something badly, missed an important variable, or just gotten fooled by normal golf randomness.
That ended up becoming its own part of Rainy Day Golf.
Now I'm back to smaller games
After building the bigger career sim and spending a lot of time on the prediction model, I started realizing that the stuff I had the most fun making was smaller.
Quick golf decisions.
Little puzzles.
Things you could play in a couple minutes and immediately understand.
So that's what I'm working on now: daily mini-games built around golf.
Some might be based on real golf situations. Some might use the same data I've been digging through for the prediction model. Some might just be dumb golf ideas that seem fun enough to build.
I'm trying not to overcomplicate it.
That's what this blog is
This is basically where I'm going to document all of it.
- GamesDaily builds
- ModelsPredictions
- GolfQuestions & data
- MissesThings that go wrong
The mix this blog is meant to cover — games, models, golf questions, data, and mistakes.
The games I'm building.
The prediction model.
Questions I have about golf.
Things I learn from the data.
Things that go wrong.
And probably a few rabbit holes that have nothing to do with what I originally sat down to work on.
Rainy Day Golf has already gone from a tiny clicker game, to a career management sim, to a golf prediction model, and now back toward small daily games.
- ClickerTiny rainy-day golf game
- Career simTournaments, training, long careers
- PredictionsPGA models & simulations
- Daily gamesQuick puzzles & decisions
Not a roadmap — just the unplanned route this project has already taken.
I didn't really plan that path.
I just kept following whatever part seemed interesting next.
That's probably how this whole thing is going to keep working.
Up next: short game or approach shots — and what happened when I asked a bunch of golfers where they'd actually spend their practice time.