Some of the best luck you can have in deer hunting is meeting some really smart deer hunters and learning from them. Many years ago, I knew a hunter who talked about seeing a lot of big bucks. But he was able to back that up in a sense because he would normally kill one or two extremely fine bucks each season, along with a number of doe deer. I kept quizzing him about his success and he just chalked it up to "luck."

For quite a while, he had me convinced that luck was the biggest difference between him consistently taking big bucks and me taking "not-quite-trophy-size" bucks.

But after we became better friends, we planned a trip together. I went on a scouting trip with him during the early summer in preparation for a deer hunt together that fall. That's when I learned the truth. For him, it was not luck; it was physical and mental work that he applied to the sport that led to his success.

He worked his tail off for two days planning his strategy months before the hunt. He introduced me to the concept that planning the October and November deer hunts begins in June and July. By learning the woods, he could project where the deer should be later in the season based on available food supplies, and he would pick prime areas to hunt during the rut and late-season.

This was in addition to the time spent researching and pre-planning a hunt in a specific area to take a big buck. He also introduced me to the concept of going to the big bucks instead of hoping they would come to him in his back yard. We traveled two hours to get to the right place where big bucks were known to live. While this was just the surface of his big-buck hunting efforts, it taught me that luck had nothing to do with his success.

If you rely on luck to see and harvest trophy bucks, then odds are good you're not consistently killing trophy deer. For most of us it takes planning and hard work to consistently put big-racked bucks in the cross hairs, or get them within bow range, in South Carolina.

The "work" of this kind of hunting is complex. Work includes, but is not limited to, getting out before the season and scouting, planting food plots, learning the land and the hideouts where the big bucks prefer to stay. While all of these steps are essential to success, these require spending time and some physical effort in the woods and fields. For some hunters, the really hard part is the mental planning process. But it is no less essential to the final outcome.

You've got to put yourself in the right neck of the woods if you want to consistently see big-racked bucks.

To that end, we've compiled antler-scoring data from the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR) 2009 scoring sessions to help the planning "where-to hunt" part of the process.