How to Draw Pegs Fairly on a Driven Shoot

Peg allocation is one of those small logistical jobs that can make or break a shoot day. Get it right and nobody thinks twice about it. Get it wrong — or even just look like you got it wrong — and it's all anyone talks about at lunch.

Why fair peg allocation matters

Every peg on a drive offers a different picture. Some sit under the main flightline and see birds all morning; others, at the end of the line or facing into the sun, see very little. Over a full day of several drives, an uneven rotation means some Guns get a great day's sport and others go home wondering why they bothered. A shoot's reputation is built or lost on whether Guns feel the day was run fairly.

The traditional methods, and where they fall short

Most shoots use one of a few approaches:

• Pegs drawn from a hat or numbered cards before the first drive, then rotated by a fixed number each time.

• A fixed rotation system, where everyone moves up a set number of pegs after each drive.

• No draw at all — some shoots, particularly small syndicates, simply keep the same pegs all season.

The hat-and-cards method is fair in principle but slow to run with a full line of Guns, and it's easy to lose track of who's had which peg across a season. A fixed rotation is quick, but only works if the rotation number is chosen well — get it wrong and the same few pegs keep pairing up with each other, or one Gun ends up back on the peg they started on more often than pure chance would predict.

What good practice looks like

A few habits separate a well-run peg system from one that causes grumbling:

• Genuinely randomise the draw for the first drive, rather than reusing last week's order.

• Keep a record across the season, not just the day, so nobody is quietly stuck on the flanks every time.

• Be transparent about the method. Guns rarely mind a system they understand, even an imperfect one — what they mind is not knowing how it works.

• Account for known hazards — sun position, known thin spots — without letting that turn into favouritism.

For gamekeepers and shoot captains running the same day-to-day logistics week after week, doing this properly by hand — hat, cards, a notebook — is a real time cost on a morning that's already busy. That's exactly the job Peg Draw was built for: a genuinely randomised draw, run in seconds, with a season's history kept automatically so nobody has to remember who stood where three weeks ago. It works fully offline, since most shoot days happen well outside signal.