Course Profiles / Plantation Course at Kapalua
Course Profile · No validated fit signal

Plantation Course at Kapalua:
what wins here.

The Sentry, Sentry Tournament of Champions · 7 editions, 2019–2025 · 1,212 rounds analyzed

Weights — not validated
OTT 25%
APP 25%
ARG 25%
PUTT 25%
Every category weighted equally. This course has not accumulated enough history for its weights to be tested, so we do not score course fit here.

How it plays

Not what the scorecard says — what this course does to the same players, measured against everywhere else they play. Built from 1,212 rounds across 7 editions, and ranked against every course in the archive.

MeasureVersus elsewhereWhich meansAcross the archive
Driving distance +7.6 yds longer off the tee here 11th longest of 89
Fairways hit +7.7 pp easier to find 10th easiest to find of 89
Greens in regulation +11.0 pp easier to hit 2nd easiest to hit of 88
Scrambling −1.3 pp harder to save par middle of the pack

Scoring. These players average 3.67 shots fewer per round here than they do elsewhere.

Plays most like. TPC Summerlin, Detroit, TPC Deere Run — the closest courses in the archive on those four measures together.

A record of what happened, not a forecast. Estimates are shrunk toward the tour mean by how much evidence each course has, and every baseline leaves the course itself out, so a venue cannot define the average it is measured against. Split-half reliability 0.888. Weather is not controlled for.

What it has taken

The numbers the week has actually demanded, edition by edition, counted from the scores rather than from anyone’s summary of them. The cut line is the worst halfway score that still saw a Saturday.

-27
typical winning score
Range -35 to -14 across 7 editions.
-21
to reach the top ten
The tenth-place score, median of 7 editions.
YearFieldCutTop 10Won with
2025 59 no cut -23 -35
2024 59 no cut -24 -29
2023 38 no cut -21 -27
2022 38 no cut -23 -34
2021 42 no cut -19 -25
2020 34 no cut -8 -14
2019 33 no cut -13 -23

The week, round by round

Scoring average for each round of the tournament, drawn against this course’s own four-round average. Round 2 has played 0.94 of a shot easier than round 1, the widest gap in the week.

hardereasier
ROUND 1
-3.09 avg
ROUND 2
-4.03 avg
ROUND 3
-3.59 avg
ROUND 4
-4.01 avg
Longer to the right is easier scoring than a typical round here; longer to the left is harder. Built from 1,208 rounds — every player who completed an edition at this course, counted in all 4 of his rounds. Only finishers are in it, because Thursday is played by the whole field and Sunday by the half of it that survived the cut: compare those as they fall and every course on tour looks like it eases off for the weekend. Weather is not controlled for, so a single storm-hit afternoon is in these numbers along with everything else.

Who has played above themselves here

Strokes gained per round at this course against the same player’s own average everywhere else. Being a good player is not enough to appear on this list — the comparison is with himself, so what is left is the part that belongs to the course.

PlayerRounds hereHereElsewhereGap
Collin Morikawa 24 +1.97 +1.19 +0.39
Sungjae Im 20 +1.61 +0.84 +0.35
Tom Hoge 12 +0.93 +0.17 +0.25
Kevin Kisner 12 +0.42 -0.25 +0.22
Marc Leishman 12 +0.82 +0.27 +0.18
Justin Thomas 24 +1.52 +1.20 +0.16
The gap is pulled toward zero by how few rounds sit behind it, so a player seen four times here does not outrank one seen twenty. Read it as a record, not a projection: players who keep coming back to a course are partly the ones it has already suited, and that selection is inside these numbers.

What the data says

We do not publish a course-fit read for Plantation Course at Kapalua. Venue weights are kept only where they predicted results on seasons the model had never seen, and this course has not yet accumulated enough history to clear that bar — 7 editions in the archive.

That is deliberate. It would be easy to generate confident-looking numbers from 1,212 rounds of scoring data; they would just not mean anything. Until the signal is testable, every category is weighted equally here and course fit is not scored. The winners below are still worth reading as history — they are simply not a forecast.

How the winners won

Strokes gained per round for every champion here since 2019. The highlighted figure is that winner's best category for the week. A dash means the category split is not published for that event — only the total is.

YearWinnerTo ParOTTAPPARGPUTTTotal
2025Hideki Matsuyama-35+0.51+2.29+0.34+1.36+4.49
2024Chris Kirk-29+0.18+0.60+0.92+0.90+2.61
2023Jon Rahm-27+1.12-0.72+0.76+1.51+2.68
2022Cameron Smith-34+1.00+0.68+0.42+1.62+3.72
2021Harris English-25+0.64+0.25-0.04+1.71+2.57
2020Justin Thomas-14+0.63+1.43+0.45+0.22+2.73
Method. Weights come from regressing top-20 finishes on players' strokes gained in each category, using only rounds played before each event, and comparing each course against the tour-wide baseline — so a weight measures what this course rewards more than golf generally does, not simply which skills help. Weights are kept only where they predicted results out of sample; where they did not, we say so. We tested our previous method, found it did not predict, and published that too: how the model works.

The field, ranked before they play.

Every tournament week we score the field on course fit and player quality. Lab Notes lands every Tuesday with what the numbers say, free.

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