About Us
Hunt Planning Simplified
Our goal is simple. In the last seven years, there have been over a million hunters who wasted their choices on Colorado big game draw applications. We know. This crap is confusing. What started out as a better way for a couple of nerdy Colorado hunter transplants to research what, where, and when to hunt, is now a tool you can use to figure out how to structure your application for optimal results.
Colorado gives you four application choices folks. You can hunt every year if you want without blowing your preference points on hunt codes that don't need them, or putting premier hunt codes into choices two through four, where you basically have zero chance of drawing those tags. Well, not basically. You have no chance :) All this without having to hunt over-the-counter in the sea of orange.
It's all in the data. And we have seen so many hunters blow opportunities, and their time, because western preference point and license draw systems are overly complicated. The tools you'll find on this site aim to simplify all that. Oh yeah, and it's free to use.
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Our Story
We are just a couple of engineers who love to hunt and moved to Colorado circa 2017. I moved from Virginia, where all hunting licenses were over-the-counter with unlimited access to hunt any public land in the state, or private with permission, and roughly five months to hunt. A single license allowed me to harvest up to three antlerless deer, three antlered deer, three turkeys, a bear, waterfowl up to daily bag limits, and a partridge in a pear tree. It was $100. It was super frustrating moving out here to Colorado and having to compete with a bunch of other hunters (The Pumpkin Patch) and being confined to areas sometimes as small as a few dozen square miles for only a week. It was so overwhelming that I decided to do what I was professionally trained to do: Look At The Data.
I was pleased to find CPW publishes thousands of pages of data for all the big game species. The hard part is parsing through all of it (or in my case extracting and sorting it) and using it to your advantage to figure out the best places to lace up your boots and go to work. A couple of thousand lines of code later and I had the bones of a tool I could use to determine my draw odds for every choice on my application every year.
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Enter my esteemed friend from Texas, who I met at our then mutual employer, who suggested we take those bones and turn it into something real that anyone can use. Hence the birth of Western Big Game, LLC and the website you are currently visiting. I have been successful drawing deer and elk tags every year, while simultaneously saving preference points for a more premier unit, and only hunting OTC when I had the time (or energy). Full disclosure, this is not our profession. But, I bet you'll find a lot of utility on here with us that a lot of other companies will charge you for. We do it a little different because it makes sense to us to do it that way, but we'd love suggestions on how to make things better.