Nine Years Later, Beaver Lake Is Back on the National Fishing Map

After nine years off the national circuit, Beaver Lake is back where it belongs. From 1998 to 2017, this Rogers reservoir was a near-annual stop for professional bass fishing, drawing some of the sport’s top names to compete on one of the Ozarks’ most dynamic bodies of water. Then the tours moved on, and Beaver Lake quietly kept fishing. This week, the rest of the country gets to see what it’s been missing.

THE DEETS

📅 Thursday, April 30 – Sunday, May 3, 2026
🕑 Daily Competition Schedule: 6:15 AM – 3:45 PM | MLFNOW! Livestream | 7:30 AM – 4:00 PM
📍 Beaver Lake, Rogers, AR
🔗 Full event details

Nine Years Is a Long Time to Wait

Beaver Lake was no stranger to high-profile tournament fields before the tours stopped coming. The FLW Tour visited nearly every year through that stretch, and the anglers who fished it regularly came to know its quirks well. Then, for almost a decade, nothing. No national tours. No top-tier fields. Just a fishery getting better season by season while the rest of the country looked elsewhere. The weight totals tell the story: where 12 to 15 pounds used to win FLW Tour events here, team events on Beaver now routinely see 18 to 20 pounds to take the top spot.

Every Fish on the Leaderboard

This is the first national event on Beaver to use the Bass Pro Tour’s every-fish-counts format, where anglers score points on each fish they catch rather than weighing in a five-fish limit at the end of the day. That format sets up for high catch totals across the board.

Largemouth, smallmouth, and spotted bass are all expected to show up on SCORETRACKER. With the event landing in early May, the spawn will be winding down but not finished. That transition period tends to produce high numbers of active fish across the lake. Forward-facing sonar is available to anglers during one designated period each day, and postspawn bass pushing offshore could make that window a productive one.

Familiar Water, Fresh Stakes

Two former Beaver Lake tournament winners are in the field: David Dudley and Bryan Thrift. Wesley Strader leads all active MLF competitors with 20 career events on the lake, followed by Dudley at 19 and Mark Rose at 18. Water level is always the wildcard on an Ozark highland reservoir, and Beaver can rise and fall fast. It climbed about 12 feet from practice to the final day of the last FLW Tour event here. The lake is near normal pool heading in, with rain in the forecast before the event starts.

You don’t have to be a die-hard fishing fan to appreciate watching world-class anglers compete on a lake right in your backyard. Pull up the livestream, pick a favorite angler, and see how Beaver Lake holds up in its return to the national stage.

Catch all four days of competition on the MLFNOW! livestream from 7:30 AM to 4:00 PM CT at MajorLeagueFishing.com, the MLF and MyOutdoorTV apps, or the Major League Fishing channel on Rumble.