Big Game by State

Editorial standard

Methodology

Every figure on this site comes from a document a state wildlife agency published. This page explains how those documents become tables, what we check before publishing, and the things we deliberately refuse to do.

Where the numbers come from

Each state publishes draw results, odds reports, or harvest statistics — usually as PDFs, occasionally as spreadsheets or query tools. We fetch those documents directly from the agency, keep a copy of the original file, and parse it into a structured table.

Every row we publish carries three pieces of provenance: the source document URL, the date the agency published it, and the date we retrieved it. These are not optional fields. If we can't attribute a number, we don't publish it.

What gets checked before a state goes live

Parsing a PDF is the easy part. The checks are the work:

  • Mechanical checks, run automatically. Success odds fall between 0 and 100. Permits issued never exceed the quota. Point levels sit inside the range the state actually uses. A report that yields fewer rows than the same report did last year is treated as a failure, not a warning — a silent partial parse is the one failure mode that would quietly corrupt everything downstream.
  • Semantic checks, run by a person. Does a column mean what we think it means? Utah's odds reports reflect first-choice selections only — a fact that changes how every Utah number should be read. Wyoming expresses some point tiers as 18 and others as <18, and collapsing that distinction would be wrong in a way a script wouldn't catch.
  • Continuity checks. Before any figure is charted across years, we confirm the hunt code refers to the same geography in each of those years. Where boundaries were redrawn, the series is broken rather than quietly joined.

Rule changes break comparisons, so we annotate them

A chart that runs across a change in the rules can be arithmetically correct and still tell a lie. When a state cuts a nonresident allocation, the points required to draw will spike for reasons that have nothing to do with how many people applied.

We keep a record of these changes — the state, the species, the year it took effect, what changed, and the source — and any chart crossing one shows it as a marked boundary. Where a quota moved, we prefer applicants-per-tag to raw point levels, because that comparison survives the change.

Deadlines are held to a higher standard than anything else here. Being wrong about a historical odds figure is embarrassing and correctable. Being wrong about an application deadline can cost someone a season. Deadline dates are verified against the agency's own page every cycle and never carried forward from last year. Where a state doesn't publish a firm date, we say that rather than estimating one.

What we refuse to publish

  • Predictions. No simulations, no "you'll need 13 points next year," no recommended units. We describe what happened and let you draw the conclusion.
  • Pool odds presented as point-level odds. Total applicants divided by total tags is a real number that answers a question nobody asked. Publishing it where a hunter expects point-level odds is the single most misleading thing a site in this category does.
  • Numbers for states that don't publish the underlying detail. Some states publish no bonus-point-level breakdown and no resident/nonresident split. For those, we publish deadlines and say plainly that accurate odds don't exist — including in the paid tools.
  • Filler. We don't pad data pages with generic prose to make them look substantial.

Corrections

If a number here is wrong, the source document is linked directly beside it — check us. We treat a published error the way a software team treats a shipped bug: corrected on the page, with a note saying what changed and when. Write tocorrections@biggamebystate.com.