Engaging Masters golf fans with better projections

As golf’s most prestigious tournament, the Masters® can inspire players to rise to the occasion or to falter under pressure. Either way, it makes for some of the most compelling viewing in all of sports. This year, IBM and the Augusta National Golf Club partnered to give Masters fans more accurate probabilities of success on every player’s stroke.

Last year marked the first year that the Masters managed its entire AI lifecycle using the IBM® watsonx™ portfolio of products. What does that mean to the Augusta National Golf Club? It means having decades of data about every hole, shot and player managed on an open, scalable data lakehouse through IBM watsonx.data®. It means having an integrated development studio for AI models and applications, as well as traditional machine learning, through IBM watsonx.ai®. And it means robust monitoring and explainability through IBM watsonx.governance®.

The Masters partners with IBM in a continuous design thinking process to improve the world-class digital experience on the Tournament’s app and web site. “This year the process went more smoothly than ever, thanks to the unified AI development, deployment and governance of IBM watsonx,” says Corey Shelton, IBM Technology Program Director, Sports & Entertainment Partnerships.

The moment a shot comes to rest, players and fans consider how well it sets the player up for their next shot. Hole Insights provides data that instantly reveals the potential risks and rewards based on the exact x, y and z coordinates of each shot.

Of course, trends have emerged from analyzing years of data. That’s why this year fans can see a “zone sector” (highlighted in red, below)—these landing zones are rich with data and thus provide more accurate projections. “Instead of ‘right fairway,’ we can now analyze positions within ‘right fairway 100 to 150 yards from the hole,’ or ‘150 to 175 yards from the hole,’” says Shelton. “This approach provides improved granularity, so it’s a leap in terms of the output we’re generating.”

The statistics from these zones are interpreted by an IBM Granite® model combined with an open-source LLM, which generate natural-language output fine-tuned to the vernacular of golf and the Masters (for example, using terms such as “second cut” instead of “rough”).

This year, Hole Insights are not just informed by more granular raw data, but by expert opinion. “We’re also drawing on hours of interviews with an expert caddy who has served almost 30 years at the Augusta National Golf Club,” says Shelton. “We recorded him walking us through every hole, providing his personal insights and anecdotes.” The team then used a transcript of these recordings as a corpus for fine-tuning the output, to deliver more human and creative language around shot projections.

The example shown below reveals the improved, more engaging language in this year’s Hole Insights application.

This year’s innovations show that the Masters, though deeply rooted in tradition, is an exceptionally agile and forward-looking organization. In partnership with IBM, they advance their values through innovative technology. By analyzing ever more granular predictive data, they reveal with better clarity the talents of the world’s best golfers as they pursue greatness year after year.

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