Many fishing fans know about my background as a professional poker player. It’s how I financed the start of my fishing career, but once I got to the Progressive Bassmaster Elite Series there wasn’t as much time to play seriously. Nevertheless, I still use the skills I developed as a poker player — the ones I believe made me successful — every time I compete in a bass tournament.
It doesn’t necessarily seem like that should be the case. After all, fishing is very much about feel. At its best, it’s intuitive and instinctive, so it feels funny bringing math into the equation, but when you break it down, everything we do is based on odds and percentages.
It isn’t exactly like poker, though. In poker, you can go back and check your work based on actual numerical odds. There are only 52 cards, which provides a finite number of possibilities and outcomes. It’s not necessarily results-based. Indeed, you can make the “right” decision and still lose or make the “wrong” decision and win big. Nevertheless, the numbers don’t lie. Over time, proper analysis of very specific odds is the only way to come out ahead.
In tournament fishing, on the other hand, we have imperfect information, huge numbers of variables and tiny sample sizes (only nine Elite events a year, all on different waterways, all on different dates). That’s why it’s so important to be process-oriented in this sport. If you allow yourself to get misled by a bad example, it can have harmful long-term effects on your fishing.
For example, earlier this year at the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway I suffered through the worst finish of my Elite Series career after digging myself a big hole on Day 1. I started in an area that was crowded with a lot of fellow competitors. By 9:30 a.m., I’d caught one little keeper and hadn’t seen anyone else land a single fish. I left and came back at 12:30 p.m.
My experience in prespawn tournaments is the bass tend to turn on after noon. But I later learned there was a major shad spawn that lasted from about 10 a.m. until 12 p.m. that fired up the bite. That’s an anomaly — one I really had no way of predicting — so after thinking about the tournament a lot, I’m still extremely happy with the decisions that I made. They didn’t work out, but my process was solid. I’m not sure I would have changed much at all.
Another example is Day 1 of the 2021 Elite event at the St. Johns River. We were delayed for over three hours, a major chunk of our eight-hour tournament day. I ended up making a run of over an hour to what I thought was a subpar area — just loaded with 2 1/2-pounders, the type of fish that normally won’t help you in Florida. If we’d had a full eight hours to fish I wouldn’t have gone there, but with a short day, the near certainty of catching 11 to 12 pounds made it the right choice. I ended up making a check at that event. It’s critical to constantly adjust based on evolving variables, just like reacting to another poker player’s actions.
Again, if you just base your post-tournament analysis on where you finished, you’re only getting a partial picture. It’s possible to make all the right decisions and end up doing poorly because you didn’t execute well. In that case, you may overcorrect and end up undermining your confidence in an otherwise sound process. This is one of the hardest parts of our game — learning to reflect on past tournaments accurately and honestly. It’s something I work on every day.
This sort of mathematical thinking trickles down to how I rig my boat and how I store my tackle. The biggest and most inflexible constraint we have as anglers is the length of our days. No matter what we do, once a moment passes, it’s gone forever. Accordingly, I try to ensure I use every moment effectively. That might mean putting my Power-Pole stomp switches in a particular position so they get down quickly, and I don’t get too close to the fish. It also means being able to access a particular lure when I need it without wasting a moment.
I recognize all our brains work slightly differently. There may not be a universally right or wrong way to prepare for a day of competition or to reflect on it afterward. What I’ve realized, though, is the best anglers add some form of tangible evidence into their game plans. It has to be more than just a feeling.
