How many people are playing golf in the world right now?

Clarifications

* I'm going to assume that this means traditional 'golf'.  I am therefore assuming that this means we are looking at someone playing 9 or 18 holes of golf.  What this does not mean:

** Mini golf

** Folks on a driving range

** Folks at Top Golf

** Other practice/skills building outside of a 9 or 18 hole course.  This might include high school players working on skills for example.

* I'm going to assume that 'right now' means plus / minus the current time, anywhere in the world.
 

“Facts”

* 7B people in the world

** 300M US, 700M European, 4B 'Asian' populations
 

Equation

# of people playing golf = people in the world who play golf * frequency they play golf/year / months / portion of day for game length
 

Assumptions

* For 9 holes, about 3 hours

* For 18 holes, about 6 hours

* World population distribution is as follows (Using the USA as the model for distribution for the rest of the world.  May not be correct but for simplicity sake in calculations):

** 0-5 years = 5%

** <18 years = 20%

** 19-64 years = 65% 

** 65+ years = 15%

* 1 in 100 people is an 'average' golf player. They make a point to get out and try to play golf on a semi-regular basis.  I am going to say that North America and Europe are generally the most popular continents for golfers.

** This applies for the continents - Europe, Australia, North America,

* 1 in 1,000 is an average golf player on these continents

** South America, Asia

* 0 golfers 

** This applies - Antarctica, Africa

** This may not be correct in Africa, but I've estimated a bit higher in other regions to account for some of the golfing population that would be in that region.

* Average golf player gets to play 8 rounds of golf/year.  

** This is for a region that has temperate climates - where there are seasons or where there is summer year-round.  Where a climate is cold year-round, this amount of rounds would vary accordingly.

Break Down

In order to calculate people in the world who play golf, we'll need to look at the population of those who can play and the climate of their continents for the availability to play golf.

7B total world population. Let's work to widdle this number down a bit.

65% of the US population is 19->64.  

Let's also add in another 10% from the 65+ population, for those who are capable (and have the time) to golf.

Let's also add 5% (for simplicity) of the <18 years crowd.

That gives us a total possible population of those that could golf of 80% in the world.

Leaves us with 6B (rounded up)

1 in 100 are golfers on select continents outlined above.

Those calculations.

* North America - 3M

* South America - 800k

* Europe - 7M

* Africa - 0

* Asia - 4M

* Australia - 250k

* Antartica - 0

Total possible world population that could be playing golf

15M

If we look at the average total times those golfers would be playing per year (8), that is a total possibility of:

120M - games of golf that could be played per year

10M - games of golf that could be played per month (120M / 12)

300K - games of golf that could be player per day (10M / ~30 days)

Of those games of golf that could be played per day around the world, we could only have active games for a portion of the day.  The lower limiter is my assumed 3 hours / 9 holes of golf.  

That is 1/8th of a given day for a 3-hour window.

300k games / 8 = ~40k

Edge Cases?

There are many edge cases to keep in mind.

Not knowing, offhand, all of the time zones easily to know if 'right now' is a playable time for all golfers on a golf course, anywhere in the world.

The climate also plays a role, and not knowing the current climate within a region.

The overlapping nature of games and the varying number of golfers for a game also throws this number into question.
 

Sanity Check

40k games of golf seems a bit low on initial sanity check as an answer.

But - Even if we were to 2x, or 3x some of the numbers, the variances aren't going to be wildly different.

Let's say that 360M games of golf were played per year.

Our end resulting number of games played per day would also be 3x more - at 120k.

So - if that number is fundamentally wrong, major changes would need to be made to the calculation and assumptions.

Clarifying questions -

1) Are we alking about professional players across the world or are including all kinds of golf players?

2) Are we talking of right know like 5:00 pm?

3) We are not including any version of online golf?

4) Are we talking about games being played in the golf grounds or any small arrangement like that in office or backyard will also count?

Assumption-

Golf is a rich man's game and is played mostly by males of the older age group.

Methodology -

1) I will be doing the calculations for the present time moment.

2) I will follow a top-down approach by considering the world population. 

3) I will then go for considerable age groups, social strata and gender based calculations.

World's population - 7.6 billion

Considering that half of the world's popoulation will be witnessing nightime, it will he helpful to assume that only 4 billion population will have daylight situation.

Amongst the eligible population, we will assume uniform distribution of population amongst age groups & gender. 

So, total population who plays golf would be approximately .044 billion or 44 million.

We will further round off this figure on the lower end because it is still a very niche game and is even not played in several countries. Hence, let's reduce the figure to 20 million putting in a factor of 1/2.

So, we have 20 million players.

There will be 3 categorisations of players based on frequency of playing -

1) Avid players (20% of the poplation) - Twice a month (Probability of playing today - .06)

2) Casual players (60% of population)- Once a year (Probability of playing today - .0027)

3) Moderate players (20% of popuation) - Once every 3 months (Probability of playing today - .011)

Also, today is a Sunday. So, no need to discount the probabilities further.

1) Avid players  (20*.2 = .4 million) - .4*.06 = .024 million

2) Casual players  (20*.6 = 12 million) - 12*.0027 = .0324 million

3) Moderate players (20*.2 = .4 million) - .4*.011 = .0044 million

Adding the above 3, the answer is approximately .06 million which is 60,000 people.