Why I Upgraded SimCap's Mulligan System

A few weeks ago I played a round at Fescue on Spyglass Hill. Shot 3 over, took two mulligans, and walked away with an adjusted differential that felt way too good. The index didn't feel earned. And I built the thing, so that bothered me.

The problem was simple. SimCap's mulligan system was binary. On or off. If you logged a round with mulligans allowed, the app applied a flat difficulty multiplier to your adjusted differential regardless of how many you actually took. One mulligan on the first tee? Same penalty. Six mulligans across 18 holes? Same penalty. That's not right.

Taking one mulligan and taking six are completely different rounds. The handicap system should know the difference.

I've been thinking about this for a while. In real golf you don't get mulligans at all, which is part of why the WHS formula works cleanly. Simulator golf is different. Mulligans are part of the culture, casual rounds, group outings, facility events, and most importantly misreads. The sim doesn't always read your swing the way you hit it. A mulligan after a misread is almost a rule of the game at this point. Pretending they don't exist wasn't an option. But a blunt on/off switch wasn't good enough either.

The fix was straightforward once I committed to it. Four tiers instead of two.

None means no mulligans, no penalty, baseline modifier. One mulligan carries a light penalty, the right call for a single replay. Two mulligans steps it up meaningfully. Three or more is aggressive but appropriate. If you're taking three or more mulligans a round, your differential should reflect that.

The way mulligans work in SimCap is worth explaining briefly. They don't touch your gross score. What they do is affect the difficulty modifier that scales your raw differential. A higher modifier means a higher adjusted differential for the same gross score, meaning your index gets less credit for that round. The more mulligans you take, the more that modifier climbs, and the less that round helps your handicap.

The migration was clean. Rounds logged under the old system with mulligans on map to the one tier automatically. Nothing in the database changed, the normalization happens in the app on read.

SimCap shipped version 2.18.8 with this change on July 7, live on both iOS and Android.

If you play sim golf and you've been logging rounds with mulligans, your index going forward will be more granular and more accurate. That's the whole point.

Graham