Story by Ken Duke | Photos by Tanner & Travis Lyons
If you’re a tournament angler, you know the drill. Catching a limit is just the beginning if you’re going to be competitive. To have a realistic chance at winning, you need to catch a kicker just about every day, and that’s what typically separates the top 10 from those who finish below the check line.
A “kicker,” of course, is a bass that’s much heavier than the average fish in a particular tournament. Quite often it’s a fish that allows an angler to cull a much smaller bass, and — as a result — to move way up the leaderboard. In the NPFL and other high-level tournaments, catching a limit is ordinary, expected, nothing special. Most of the anglers in an NPFL tournament will limit all three days, and no angler has ever won an NPFL event without limiting each and every day.
How an angler targets kickers can be a big part of successful tournament strategy. Basically, there are just a couple of options.
First, you can go kicker hunting after you’ve secured your five-bass limit. Unless several of those fish are bigger than average, you’re often well served to target other areas, throw other baits, or do something else that increases your chances of appealing to a bigger bass or two … or even five.
Second, if conditions warrant, you can target your kicker first thing in the morning. This makes sense if it’s a sight fishing tournament and there will be a race to the spawning grounds or if you’ve discovered a solid big fish pattern that works before the sun gets high.
And, of course, there are all kinds of strategies that take something from both those game plans.
One of the best in the game at targeting kickers once told me that he goes into every event with a preconceived idea of the weight he needs each round to make a check. As soon as he reaches that weight, he stops what he’s doing and rolls the dice in search of a lunker. That might mean a long run or switching baits or something else, but the moment he hits his target weight, he goes into “kicker mode.”
Getting those kickers can be critical, and of the 23 events in NPFL history, it should be no surprise that eight of the winners caught a daily big fish on their way to the trophy. In two of those cases, the eventual winner caught the biggest bass of the entire tournament.
Did those kickers make a difference? Maybe not as often as you’d think … but the NPFL is young, and 23 tournaments is not a big sample size.
Realistically, those daily big bass probably made the difference between winning and losing about three times. That’s how often the ultimate margin of victory was less than 2 1/2 pounds. But kickers equal cash even if they don’t take an angler to victory. They need only bump the daily weight a pound or two to move an angler up 10 or more places in the standings, and that can mean thousands of dollars.
As evidence of this, just look to how often the angler with one of the daily lunkers finishes in the money. That number is an impressive 83% of the time!
So maybe kickers do more than take an angler from competitive to the winner’s circle. Maybe they’re also the path to a payday!
