Prior to my first tournament I prefished pretty heavily and found this stretch of weeds that held a bunch of fish.

Come tourney time we race to the spot only to find 2 other guys on each end.

We would run back to the spot throughout the day only to see other guys fishing it too.

 

So we had to go to a plan B which we didn't have but were forced to make up on the fly since we could not get to where we wanted to fish. So we kind of ran all over and ended up catching a couple good fish off a few different spots.

 

When we got to the weigh-in everybody was talking about how everybody and their brother hammered that weedbed on the inside bend of the creek channel. Because of this the fish got spread out over 5 or 6 teams and we ended up placing higher than any of those guys.

 

Looking back I can't believe that I was such a newb that I didn't even consider other people finding the same spot I did.

I also got spun out for about the next hour because I put all my confidence on a spot and not on my abilities/instincts and knowledge. I learned so much more from that first tournament because Plan A didn't work out, than i could have if we got to the spot and started jacking them.

Knowing when to Hold them and when to fold them is the difference between a check and going home out of the money. It's usually not always a different lure, it's almost always a different location as the bass activity changes. When the bite shuts off trying several different lures in the spot hoping they will strike another lure usually is a waste of time. Time management is very important with tournament bass fishing because it's limited.

Tom