How LooperScore works.

LooperScore starts from golfer-experience signals for a course — how golfers who have actually played it describe conditioning, layout quality, pace, value, and staff — drawn from the playing record BogeyMap maintains for that course. Those signals are normalized onto a 0–100 scale and blended, with the deepest signal carrying the most weight:

• Aggregate golfer sentiment — 45%. The broadest read on how the course actually plays.
• General visitor rating — 25%. Broad-audience rating for the facility as a whole.
• Golfer-specific rating — 20%. Ratings left by golfers on golf-specific platforms.
• Recognition — up to +6. A bounded bump for courses that repeatedly show up in serious golf conversation, scaled by the square root of that recognition so a long tail of mentions cannot run away with the score.

Weights are renormalized when a signal is missing, so a course with thin data is scored on what exists rather than penalized against zeros. The blend is then clamped to 55–99: we don't publish a 12/100, and we don't publish a 100.

Ratings submitted on BogeyMap — 1–100, from a signed-in account, attached to a review or a standalone rating — are the only ratings that touch a course's LooperScore. They are deliberately bounded so a small, motivated group cannot swing a course:

• Floor. Under 5 ratings, golfer input moves the score by exactly zero.
• Confidence ramp. Between 5 and 25 ratings, influence scales linearly with rating count, reaching full weight at 25.
• Hard cap. The total golfer adjustment is capped at ±5 points, no matter how far the golfer average sits from the signal blend.
• Accredited weighting. Ratings from The Loop raters count double in the golfer average — they carry a verified handicap, a minimum rounds-per-year bar, and a public review history.

The adjustment is the gap between the weighted golfer average and the rest of the score, damped by that confidence ramp and then capped. In practice a course that golfers love more than its signals suggest climbs steadily as ratings accumulate, instead of jumping on one enthusiastic afternoon.

Every score carries a sourced flag. If the evidence behind a course's number doesn't hold up — imported value with nothing to support it, a signal blend that can't be reconstructed — the score is withheld and the course displays no rating at all. A blank is more honest than a guess, and an unscored course is still fully searchable with its facts, access level, and Access Intel intact.

Unscored courses are also excluded from every ranking list, so a list is never padded with numbers we can't defend.

The formula proposes; it does not publish. When the computed value diverges from a course's live score, the course lands in an internal review queue with its inputs side by side. Nothing moves until it's approved by hand, and each approval is written to an audit log with the before-and-after value.

Scores confirmed against first-hand play or direct course contact are marked owner-verified and are held to the same evidence standard as everything else.

National, state, and city lists are generated live from current LooperScores — they aren't hand-arranged and they aren't frozen snapshots. Lists include only courses that are publicly playable (public, municipal, resort, semi-private) and carry a sourced score. Category lists such as walkable, historic, hidden gems, and short/par-3 apply the same score ordering within a course attribute.

Private clubs are catalogued for context and reachable through private course access, but they never appear in a playable ranking list.

• Sell rank, placement, score adjustments, or removal from a list.
• Republish, mirror, average, or rescale another publisher's ranking. LooperScore is computed here from the inputs above.
• Let advertising, affiliate, or subscription relationships touch a rating.
• Invent a score, a review, a rating count, or an access guarantee.

Rating disputes are welcome, and specifics beat outrage: a recent renovation, a conditioning turnaround, new ownership, a closed nine. Email support@bogeymap.com or use the contact form. The fastest way to move a course you know well is to rate it yourself — golfer ratings are the one input that responds directly to people who've played it.

What is LooperScore?

LooperScore is BogeyMap's own 0-100 course rating. It blends golfer-experience signals about a course with verified ratings and reviews submitted on BogeyMap, then gets reviewed by a human before it is published. It is original to BogeyMap and is not a republished, rescaled, or averaged version of any magazine ranking.

How are golfer ratings weighted in LooperScore?

Golfers rate courses 1-100 from a signed-in account. Ratings have no effect until a course has at least 5 of them, reach full influence at 25, and can move a course's score by at most 5 points in either direction. Ratings from accredited raters in The Loop count double.

Why does a course show no LooperScore?

A score is only shown when the evidence behind it holds up. If a course's imported score cannot be supported by golfer-experience signals or BogeyMap ratings, BogeyMap hides the number instead of publishing a guess. The course still appears in search with its facts and access details.

Can a course pay to raise its LooperScore or ranking?

No. BogeyMap does not sell rank, placement, or score adjustments, and no course, resort, or management company can buy its way onto a list. There is no advertiser input into any rating.

Are private clubs included in BogeyMap rankings?

National, state, and city ranking lists cover golf you can actually go play: public, municipal, resort, and semi-private courses. Private clubs are catalogued for context but are excluded from the playable ranking lists.