A dog hunt at Blue Sping is a draw hunt now? I used to just climb a tree and listen for the dogs.

School me on points. I have put in for hunts last 2yrs and have 2 points how does someone get 65 points?

I don’t get it either. I’ve put in for hunts since the beginning for both turkey and deer. I got chosen to deer hunt in 2021 and I think I had around 60 some odd points. I went in this time with a whopping 9 points. I’ve put my wife in every year as well. She got chosen to deer hunt last year but had to decline at last minute. She went in this time with 126 points and was drawn as an alternate on 3 hunts. It makes zero sense to me how a first time applicant gets drawn and someone who’s put in for 5+ years doesn’t. SMDH.

Also I don't really know how much the points actually matter because I had 65 and know people with 28 and even 9 who drew more hunt options than I did.

The SOA's use what would be more correctly classified as a "Bonus Point" system, I don't know why the state insists on calling them "preference points" when that's not the system they're using.

In a bonus point system, you can think of each point as another entry in the drawing, or name in the hat so to speak, this increases your odd of drawing each year but doesn't guarantee a draw even at the highest tier.

If it were a true preference point system, then no one with 65 points would be drawn until everyone with 126 points got a tag and so on. this makes it easier for planning purposes, but this is what has led to lots of the seemingly unattainable draw hunts out west. many take 10-20 years at minimum to draw and some are predicted that if you just started applying now, you would never accrue enough points to get ahead of the creep. Some western states with a preference point system now allocate something like 10-25% of the tags to a random draw, so that regular folks still have a small chance of drawing.

a bonus point system is better for a program where you have a very limited number of hunts, and a large number of applicants.

Also I don't really know how much the points actually matter because I had 65 and know people with 28 and even 9 who drew more hunt options than I did.

So the points go up exponentially by cubes and you always have the plus one point that you start with on year one.
Year 1 : 1 point
Year 2 : 1 point + 1³ = 2
Year 3 : 1 point + 2³ = 9
Year 4 : 1 point + 3³ = 28
Year 5 : 1 point + 4³ = 65
And so on...

But don't/aren't your points supposed to go to (0) zero once you are selected and participate in a hunt.

Yeah they get reset to 1 when you accept a Hunter spot

That's the way I thought it would work and why I was asking. I thought that you drew on multiple hunts last year? If so, how were you still carrying 65 points this year? It sounds like based on a lot of the comments in this thread of people missing their points, that the point system is not heavily audited by or maintained, by the Chuckie minions, for the correct application of points or failure to properly assign points each year.

I go on a few SOA hunts every year, yes. But I have not accepted a deer hunt that I have drawn in several years. I've got a good group of buddies and between them, my dad, and my wife I usually manage a hunt or two each season while saving my points to hopefully draw a really good one and pay one of them back as my guest.