The bass fishing tourney circuits are just starting to fire up here in Indiana, even if spring hasn't. Cabin fever tends to take hold and guys are just chomping at the bit to get out on the water and start fishing. Most circuits have a year end classic or regional to try and qualify for, yet that is a long ways off and out of many peoples mind at the moment. However, if you want to qualify for a year-end Classic, you need to be doing your homework right now. With a simple game plan applied to your tourneys all year long, you can increase your odds tremendously of being one of those anglers fishing for "all the marbles" come October.
What is the secret? It starts with reviewing the historical qualification data from the previous 3 years for a given circuit. The large majority of the anglers fishing these circuits are the same from year to year. Additionally, the scheduled waters tend to be the same also. As such, the points cut-off to qualify for the Classic tends to be very consistent from year to year. So find the standings online for whatever circuit you're fishing and figure out the average number of accumulated points needed to qualify for their Classic for a given year. For example, if the past 3 years had points cuts of 205, 211 and 214, then the average points cut would be 210.
Now divide this average qualifying number by the number of individual tourneys that make up the circuit. In this example, if the circuit held 5 qualifying tournaments then the average points needed per tournament would be 42. If this circuit awarded 100 points for the winner, 99 for second, and so forth in each qualifying tourney, this means you would need to finish each tournament in 59th place or higher in order to receive those 42 points and qualify for their Classic.
Now, go back through the archived results and try and see what type weight it took for each tourney in a given month to place 59th (still from our example. Use whatever actual place your numbers determined for the circuit you're fishing). If possible, use only results from the same lake that matches where a particular tourney is going to be. Sometimes this is easy and sometimes not. Again, if a May tourney was going to be held on Patoka Res., try first to find all May tourney results from Patoka in previous years for this particular circuit. If you can't garner that specific information, then use any Patoka tourney data from that circuit regardless of month. What you want to find is the average weight it took to finish in 59th place in all these tourneys.
Do this for all the tourneys on the circuit. Some places this might be a decent weight, while on other tougher bodies of water you might find that 59 people didn't even come to the scales in the first place. In those instances, you just use the weight of the last place person and take note of that fact. This in a nutshell is the system.
Now you have the system in a nut shell. But you ask, "So What?" In Part II, I'll go into detail on why this process is so important to the overall plan and what you do with this information.
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