We’re back with episode two of Tournament Intel, our series with Angler's Channel, breaking down a tournament win straight from the source — no script, no hindsight, just the angler walking through what actually happened.
This time it’s Banks Shaw, who’s walking away from Oklahoma with two wins in a month on two lakes he barely knew.
“Walking away from Oklahoma, being here a month with two wins, it’s pretty special to me,” Shaw said. He’d never fished Eufaula before this year. At Grand Lake, he’d only ever fished a muddy area near the ramp — nothing like the offshore schools that won him
His approach to both: stay open and let the lake tell him what to do. “I just try to keep as much of an open mind as I possibly can, because you never know what to expect when you first show up to a fishery,” he said. A fish off a brush pile, another off a dock — small clues that build into a pattern over the practice week. And when the fish move during the tournament itself, like they did at Grand Lake, Shaw trusts the same process to find them again.
There’s a gut-feeling element to it too. “You’ll just be running down the lake and you’ll go past a spot and then all of a sudden you’re like, hang on, I need to turn around and go back to it,” he said. “Those are the decisions that sometimes make the difference.”
Shaw breaks it all down below — how he studies a new lake, why a shad bait is always his first move, and what he looks for the second he idles up to any unfamiliar point.
