Entry 107-2

How To Win Bass Tournaments With Denny Brauer

Don't Be An Excuse Maker

Editor's Note: To win bass tournaments, you have to prevent yourself from losing. You can have the best equipment, be fishing at the best places and have everything you can possibly need to win a tournament, but if your attitude isn't right, there's a good chance you'll lose. There have been some anglers who've won the Bassmaster Classic and never again have returned to that winning form. Bass fishing consists of more losing than winning. How do you recover from a bad day of fishing or from a bad tournament? How do you mentally prepare yourself, not only to fish the next tournament well, but to win the next tournament.

One of the most-consistent winners on the BASS circuit is Strike King Pro Denny Brauer of Camdenton, Missouri. Brauer not only has won all the major bass-fishing events, he came back from what could have been a career-ending back injury, and returned to his winning form and the top level of competition. Brauer's attitude is responsible for his wins just as much as his fishing skills. This week, we've asked Brauer to tell us how to overcome difficulties and get your fishing back on the winning track.

Brauer: Bass fishing is a sport of variables. You cannot sit in your motel room the night before you fish a tournament and plan out exactly what will happen the next day when you are on the water. A football coach can lay out a game plan for a football game, but he knows when the ball is kicked off at the beginning of the game, more than likely, he'll have to change, adapt and restructure his game plan according to weather conditions, what his opponents are doing to counter his game plan and the way each one of his athletes is performing that day. The coach knows excuses don't win football games, and you should know excuses don't catch fish or win bass tournaments.

To overcome a bad day of fishing, realize you'll make bad decisions and don't let those bad decisions affect your fishing. For instance, you may have found a spot on the lake where you know you can catch fish, but when you get to that spot, there's another fisherman catching the bass you would have caught if he weren't there. You can either get mad because he's fishing the hole you had planned to fish, or you can run to another area where you expect to catch fish and understand that's the breaks of the game. The more backup plans you have, the less frustrated you'll become when you fish.

Also, you'll lose some fish - usually big fish. They'll break your line, pull off the hooks, miss the bait and/or fall out of the boat. Things will happen that will cause you to lose fish you should have been able to keep. When that happens, don't throw your rod down in the boat, start cussing and/or stomp your equipment. Just realize that things like this will happen in a day of fishing, and you have to get over it quickly. Instead of thinking about the one that got away, start concentrating on the next fish you have to catch.

Often, the reason we don't catch fish when we fish is because we've made a bad decision about where to fish, what fishing technique to use or what lures to fish with, or we don't set the hook properly and the fish takes the bait, but we don't let the fish have the bait long enough to set the hook properly. We didn't play the fish well enough to get him to the boat, or we didn't get the boat in the right position, make the right cast to get the bass that bit our bait out of the cover. Luck does play a factor in whether or not we fish well or win or lose a tournament. However, most of the time, if we don't catch bass, or we don't finish well in the tournament, it's usually because we made poor decisions, or we haven't execute our fishing techniques very well. Although I believe you should try to learn something new every day you fish, I've had some days when I fished so poorly that I didn't learn anything. On those days blow it off, forget about it and prepare to fish the next day.
 

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