ScoreTracker Live is the most exciting digital addition to the sport of bass fishing that I’ve seen in years. Finely tuned for years through rigorous MLF Bass Pro Tour competition, ScoreTracker Live is hardly new. What is new about it, though, is that this technology is now available to us all. Using ScoreTracker Live through the Bubba app, event organizers can build and host tournaments, participants can enter catches and win prizes, and fans can follow along with the leaderboard in real time.
How does ScoreTracker Live work?
When hosting a tournament through ScoreTracker Live, the options are seemingly endless. You can run a tournament where every fish counts, like on the Bass Pro Tour, or you can score the five best bass, like the Tackle Warehouse Pro Circuit. There are also big fish tournament and team tournament templates, as well as custom formatting that can be used to basically build any tournament scenario imaginable. You can even create a length-based tournament if you prefer, meaning Bubba scales aren’t even required in all cases to use the ScoreTracker Live feature.
If you would like to participate in a tournament, you can search for events, enter events, and log catches all through the Bubba app. If a Bubba scale is required, both the Pro Series Smart Fish Scale and the Smart Fish Scale Lite are compatible. For the friends, family, and other fans that would like to follow along, there’s a shareable ScoreTracker Live leaderboard where they can keep up with all the action.
I was recently tasked with putting ScoreTracker Live through its paces, and there was only one realistic way to do this—I needed to build a tournament and participate in it. So I created a 1v1 tournament between my dad and I. Bubba sent out a couple of their Pro Series Smart Fish Scales for us to use for the competition, I created the tournament using the ScoreTracker Live platform, and we set out on the water to give it a go.
Building a tournament
For our event, I created a custom head-to-head tournament consisting of four one-hour periods. For scoring, the biggest fish of each period would win the period. Whoever won the most periods won the day, and in the event of a tie where we each won two periods, the biggest bass overall would serve as the tiebreaker.
We decided to fish from the same boat, each having two hours from the front and two hours from the back, rotating every hour. We flipped a coin for the option to choose which periods we wanted to be on the front of the boat. Dad won the toss and elected to fish from the front during period one and period three. And I sent a live leaderboard link to my wife so that she could test the experience from the fan’s perspective.
Using ScoreTracker Live on the water
Linking my scale with my app and dad’s scale with his was extremely easy. The app uses bluetooth to connect the two, and the scale stays connected to the app as long as you let it run in the background and don’t close the app out, which I accidentally did a couple of times. If you do this, simply open the app again and click “resume” on the tournament, reconnect to your scale, and you’re good to go.
Logging the catches was super simple as well. As you go through the normal motions of weighing a bass on the Bubba scale, the app works in the background to simultaneously enter the catch into the tournament and reflects the results in the leaderboard, all with the simple push of one button.
Test tournament results
Though we really wanted to hang some heavy fish on the scales, the bass were not willing to cooperate, and we found ourselves in a grueling match of miniatures. I took the first round, catching the only bass of the period, which weighed a mere 10 ounces. Dad bested my 12-ounce entry in round two with a 14-ouncer, and we made it all the way through the third period scoreless. So, entering the fourth and final hour, dad and I were locked in a tie, winning one round apiece, and dad’s 14-ouncer held down the lead for “big fish” of the day.
As brutal as the fishing was, using ScoreTracker Live made things exciting, and it was pretty fun to see texts coming through from my wife like, “Uh-oh, dad in the lead”, as the leaderboard’s automatic notifications came through on her end. Don’t worry, though—while dad was in the lead for a good portion of the day, I rebounded in the end.
With control of the front of the boat for the final round, I locked a swim jig in my hand and made up my mind I was going to force-feed a decent one. Boating another small bass weighing 1 pound 1 ounce halfway through the final round, I took the overall big fish lead and the lead for the period. And then, with twenty minutes remaining, the final finishing nail sealed the proverbial coffin—a 2-pound 15-ounce kicker (by the day’s standards) smoked the swim jig.
My takeaway
ScoreTracker Live made what would have been an otherwise miserable day of fishing a suspenseful game of strategy that had each period flying by. Bass weighing less than a pound—that would have typically been discarded without so much as a second look—were coveted catches and suspenseful fights. Knowing my wife was sitting at work, eagerly awaiting an update, added a surprising element of urgency to the day. Simply put, fishing under the same pressure cooker as the pros is exhilarating, and thanks to ScoreTracker Live and the Bubba app, it’s now an experience we can all enjoy.