Sounds like you are trying to figure out what you want to do.
When you apply to diff states, you pay fees, some guys spend thousands $,$$$ to manage their hunting and diff places to go. They also have the entire fall off and hunt from Sept 1 thru Dec 31 every year.
Is that what you want to do? Can you afford it? Do you have the vacation time or can your business live without you for 4 months?
Do you want to hunt a specific animal? Say elk, bear, mule deer, antelope, moose, buffalo, sheep, billy goat, exotics in TX, Aoudad, sambar deer, whatever.
Some of those animals will take 30 years of tags to get the permit, if ever. Others you can hunt every 0-5 years. For those 30 year tags, it is cheaper, easier, and more likely if you travel somewhere to hunt them.
For the 0-5 year tags, those are high pressure hunts, you go, jump in the busy pool and try to outswim the other guys. Fun but not like the hunts you seen on You Tube.
Again, I ask - what do you want to hunt. And once you say X. I will ask you where you want to hunt. Then you say I want to hunt Y. OK - that's when you start applying for what you want to hunt where you want to hunt.
The points game is really crazy right now. Someone put some numbers up and they were inspiring. This is just roughly how the numbers fell:
20 points+ = 2,000
15 points = 3,000
10 points = 5,000
5 points = 15,000
2 points = 30,000
1 point = 70,000
The whole concept is that the shallow end of the pool is very wide and that the top end point hunts - bison, moose, sheep, mtn goat, elk in "trophy monster gorge", mule deer in "jumbo canyon", etc. are going to be beyond the reach of many hunters, even if they collect points for a lifetime. You need to do your calculations and make your best guess.
SO what is starting to happen - the hunters who realize that they have a snowball's chance in July regarding getting drawn for Superhunt #2 want to ruin it for everyone who is in line way ahead of them and change the preference point system to go random draw for everything. Say you spent 10 years at $200/yr ($2,000) and then the state changes it to 100% random draw cause the guys with no points who have been hunting every year feel entitled to have the same opportunity that you do for holding points for 10 years and not hunting cause the end prize was worth not hunting a lesser unit every year. You can search on here and find the discussions - they happen and lots of entitled guys are pushing for the random only draws. Or at least some crazy mathematics to even the odds out. My thought is if you aren't willing to sit it out and wait, you don't deserve the same opportunity as the guy who sat it out.
As with everything else - take this with a grain of salt. It's an opinion.
