The verdict is in. Most crappie fishermen use plastics to catch their crappie, and most often they are vertical jigging.
42% prefer plastics, 25% prefer live bait, 14% like horsehead/spinner style baits, 12% use hair/feather jigs and only 6% use crank baits (and using crank baits is almost exclusive to the sumertime).
Here are the details of over 700 responses on a poll held on the Crappie.com fishing forum.
| summer | fall | winter | spring | |||
| plastics | 70 | 76 | 64 | 82 | 292 | 42% |
| live bait | 40 | 47 | 42 | 48 | 177 | 25% |
| hair/feather jigs | 20 | 16 | 26 | 23 | 85 | 12% |
| horse head spinner | 18 | 21 | 13 | 23 | 75 | 11% |
| crank bait | 29 | 9 | 0 | 7 | 45 | 6% |
| beetle spin/spinner bait | 4 | 5 | 4 | 6 | 19 | 3% |
| spoon | 2 | 4 | 5 | 1 | 12 | 2% |
| summer | fall | winter | spring | |||
| vertical jig | 46 | 47 | 51 | 47 | 191 | 32% |
| spider rig | 20 | 42 | 32 | 32 | 126 | 21% |
| casting | 26 | 29 | 13 | 54 | 122 | 21% |
| long line | 33 | 31 | 15 | 23 | 102 | 17% |
| dock shooting | 15 | 16 | 6 | 14 | 51 | 9% |
