Is green pumpkin really the best first color?
Green pumpkin is the right first buy. Whether color matters much beyond that is genuinely contested: Tyler Berger spent years refusing to play the color game, and Matthew Stefan changed his mind over one day on the water.
The disagreement is the useful part
Two anglers who have both caught a great deal of fish do not agree about how much color matters, and the gap between them is more instructive than either position alone.
Tyler Berger’s position, held for years: color matters far less than being in the right area. Put the bait where bass are living and color becomes a small variable. Put it where they are not and no color saves the cast. He describes himself as having refused to play the color game.
What changed his mind. Matthew Stefan fished a bluffy bank at Douglas Lake around the spawn, catching better-quality fish on a green pumpkin jig while his co-angler out-bit him roughly two to one on a watermelon red-flake trick worm. Because the fish were sitting in specific crevices, the test was unusually clean. Stefan switched to a green pumpkin black flake worm and went about thirty yards without a bite while the co-angler caught four. He switched to watermelon black flake and got one bite to the co-angler’s three. He switched to watermelon red and got the next ten bites in a row.
That is a flake-color difference on the same bait, on the same bank, on the same day, deciding almost every bite.
Where they agree, which matters more for you
Stefan, who has the strongest evidence that color can decide a day, still reverts to green pumpkin and black and blue as a traveling tournament angler. His reasoning: those colors may not be the best anywhere, and they never fail badly enough to matter.
Berger’s synthesis after changing his mind is a sequence rather than a reversal: go out with confidence baits, find the fish and the pattern first, then fine-tune color.
So both anglers end up telling a beginner the same thing, from opposite directions. Buy green pumpkin. Color is the last variable you adjust, not the first.
What actually decides it
Both of them describe the condition that separates a color problem from every other problem: a second person catching them better than you, on the same water, at the same time. Stefan discovered it with a co-angler in his boat. Berger describes the same experience with a friend cycling through colors to prove it.
Alone, you cannot tell the difference between the wrong color and the wrong spot. You will conclude the fish are not biting when in fact they are not biting yours.
The other case is a home lake you fish enough to run the comparison yourself over weeks.
Both anglers also name the same failure mode: stubbornness. Each describes watching someone out-fish them with a small color change and refusing to switch for hours.
The artifact: first four colors, in buying order
Buy in this order and stop when the budget runs out. Each covers a situation the one above handles poorly.
| Order | Color | Buy it when | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Green pumpkin | First purchase, always | Clear to lightly stained water, rock, grass edges, bluegill and crawfish forage |
| 2 | Black and blue | Second purchase | Muddy water, tannic water, heavy overcast, night |
| 3 | Watermelon red flake | Third purchase | Clear water and pressured ponds. This is the color that decided Stefan’s day |
| 4 | White | Fourth purchase | Shad-forage lakes and open water, spring shad spawn |
Two colors cover most of a first season. The third and fourth exist so you have something to change to when a spot stops producing.
Before you swap color, change one of these
- Where you cast. Move down the bank thirty yards.
- How long you let the bait sit. Add a five count on the fall.
- The size of the bait. Drop from five inches to four.
Those resolve most dead stretches. When a fishing partner is out-catching you three to one on the same stretch with the same retrieve, color has become the variable, and that is the moment Stefan’s experience says to change it.
What we do not know
Neither position rests on published research. Stefan’s account is one angler reporting one day, which is the strongest kind of evidence available here and is still an anecdote. Berger’s default was a working assumption rather than a study. Nobody has published a controlled trial telling you how much color is worth to a bank angler on a given lake, and we run no tests. Treat the buying order as a way to spend a small budget well, not as a ranking anyone has measured.
Sources
- Practitioner testimonyBass Fishing HQ (Tyler Berger), "PRO Angler Just Convinced Me To Change LURE COLORS," February 7, 2026. Berger's stated default is that color matters far less than being in the right area, and that he had historically refused to play the color game.
- Practitioner testimonyMatthew Stefan, in the same episode. On a bluffy bank at Douglas Lake around the spawn his co-angler out-caught him roughly two to one. Stefan cycled through green pumpkin black flake, going about 30 yards without a bite while the co-angler caught four, then watermelon black flake for one bite to the co-angler's three, then watermelon red, and got the next ten bites in a row.
- Practitioner testimonyMatthew Stefan, same source, on his own practice as a traveling tournament angler: he still reverts to green pumpkin and black and blue, which in his words may not be the best color anywhere but never fail badly enough to matter.
- Our inferenceThe buying order and the conditions under which we say to test color are ours. Neither angler published a buying sequence, and we have run no color test.