Wyoming draw odds

Species

Wyoming is a preference point queue with a random escape hatch: within each hunt area and licence type, 75 per cent of the licences go in strict point order and 25 per cent go to a random draw open to everyone, whatever their point total. Nonresidents accumulate points for elk, deer, antelope, moose and sheep; residents only for moose and full-price bighorn sheep.

Your points only count for your first choice

Almost everything a first-time Wyoming applicant gets wrong comes from one sentence in Game and Fish's own rules:

an individual's accumulated preference points are only considered in the initial drawing for the applicant's first choice in the preference point drawing.Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Preference Points

Your points do one job. They advance you in the queue for the single hunt area you named first, and they do nothing at all for your second choice, your third, or any draw after the initial one. Every figure on this site's Wyoming pages is therefore a first-choice figure.

Three quarters in point order, one quarter to everybody

In the draw, 75 percent of available licenses in each hunt area and license type will be allocated to the preference-point drawing. In Wyoming, preference points rank applicant pools. The remaining 25 percent of available licenses will be allocated in a random drawing, regardless of preference points.Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Preference Points

Seventy-five per cent is a genuine queue. The other twenty-five per cent ignores your points completely, and the department is explicit about why it exists: it is “intended to provide everyone who applies a chance to draw a license, regardless of their preference-point total.”

That is the reason a zero-point applicant in Wyoming is not wasting their money. In a pure queue, a newcomer to a hard area has no chance at all. In Wyoming they have a quarter of one, every year. It is why the random-draw columns on every hunt-area page here are not a footnote.

Wyoming also runs two licence types — Regular and Special — and draws them separately, so nothing on this site merges them. What we cannot tell you is how the licences are divided between the two: the department publishes that split nowhere we could find, and the figure widely quoted for it does not match what our own database shows. So this page does not print one. Compare a Special number only with another Special number.

Whether you accumulate points at all depends on where you live

The department's own two section headings settle it without ambiguity:

Full Price Elk, Deer, and Antelope Preference Points (Nonresidents Only)
Moose and Full Price Bighorn Sheep Preference Points (Residents and Nonresidents)Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Preference Points

So a Wyoming resident accumulates preference points for moose and full-price bighorn sheep only. There is no resident elk point, no resident deer point, no resident antelope point. A resident reading a competitor's “Wyoming elk points” page is reading about somebody else's draw.

The two ways to lose everything, and they are not the same rule

Wyoming's point-loss rules differ between the two species groups, and most summaries flatten them into one. They should not be.

• Elk, deer and antelope (nonresident). You lose all accumulated points if you draw your first choice licence in the initial limited quota drawing, or if you fail to purchase a preference point during the application period for two consecutive years.
• Moose and full-price bighorn sheep. You lose all accumulated points if you draw a licence — any licence, not just your first choice — or if you fail to be awarded a point within two consecutive years, which you can satisfy either by entering the drawing or by buying a point.

Two differences that matter. On elk, deer and antelope only a first-choice draw resets you. And the two-year clock there is about purchasing a point rather than entering a draw; on moose and sheep, entering counts. No person may apply for or be awarded more than one preference point per species in the same calendar year, so there is no way to build faster.

The department's own advice, which is better than most of what you will pay for

To maintain your preference points, do not apply for an easy-to-draw area as your first choice. If you do and are successful, then all of your accumulated points will be deleted and the odds of drawing a license in a hard-to-draw area will be diminished for several years until you build up preference points again.

If you want to hunt more often without using your preference points, continue to apply for your preferred (hard-to-draw) hunt area as a first choice and apply for easy-to-draw hunt areas as your second choice.

it is nearly certain you will draw a license in a hunt area with 100% odds listed for the second choice drawing.

Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Preference Points

Read those together and the strategy is complete. Your first choice is where you spend your points, so spend them on something worth a decade. Your second choice is where you get a hunt this year, because points do nothing there anyway and a 100 per cent second-choice area is close to a sure thing. The trap is the reverse: put an easy area first, draw it, and you have just paid several years of accumulated position for a tag you could have had as a second choice for nothing.

The second-choice columns on every Wyoming hunt-area page here exist so you can act on the second half of that quote.

Two ways to hunt without touching your points

No preference points exist for reduced-price cow/calf or reduced-price doe/fawn licenses. Applicants for reduced-price licenses retain their preference points if successful in the reduced-price license drawing, and they accumulate preference points if they are unsuccessful.Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Preference Points

A reduced-price cow/calf or doe/fawn draw is a way to hunt in a year you would otherwise sit out. Win and you keep your points; lose and you gain one. And for residents on moose and sheep the point is automatic — a resident who is unsuccessful in those draws is awarded one without asking. Nonresidents have to opt in on the application, so a nonresident who forgets the box gets nothing for the year.

One administrative detail with real money attached: points attach to your sportsperson ID, are species-specific, are not tied to a hunt area, and are neither refundable nor transferable. They are also deleted if you end up with more than one customer record — through a mismatch in your name, date of birth or the digits of your social security number. That is a harsh consequence for a clerical error and it is worth checking your account rather than discovering it in a draw result.

The number we had wrong, and fixed

Wyoming is a state where a points-to-draw figure is real: the queue exists, it is three quarters of the licences, and the lowest point level at which everybody drew is a meaningful observation about a past draw. So we publish it — worded exactly that way, as an observation rather than a forecast. We also got it wrong twice, and both corrections moved the most-read number on these pages.

First, the landowner draw. Our point-creep figure had been computed across all of a hunt area's rows, including the landowner draw, which most readers cannot enter. Excluding it moved 580 of 2,838 published figures, every one of them upward. For a fifth of the most-read number on this site, we had been understating what it takes to draw.

Second, levels nobody applied at. On 714 of 3,648 published values — 19.6 per cent — the level we were calling “the lowest that drew at 100%” was a level where nobody had applied. Everyone there drew, vacuously, because there was no-one. On 408 of those pools there was no non-empty 100 per cent level at all, so the figure described nobody; one area published a 12 for a year whose lowest level anyone actually held and drew was 14. We now require somebody to have applied at the level. That shifted 306 values upward — a median of one point, a maximum of eleven — and turned 408 into a dash, with the page saying why.

One note for anyone comparing our figures with the department's raw reports: Wyoming'sQuota column is a running remainder rather than a hunt total, and itsIssued column prints applicant counts on oversubscribed rows. Neither behaves the way its header suggests, so every figure here is derived from the exact integers instead. See how these numbers are produced and checked.

Deadlines

Application windows, modify and withdraw cut-offs, tentative result dates and the preference point period differ by species, by residency, and — for nonresidents — not at all between the Special and Regular draws, which is the part most often got wrong.

Wyoming application deadlines, with the source for every date →