Shotgun Choke & Shot Size Selector

Choke effective ranges

Chokes trade pattern width for reach; shot size trades pellet count for per-pellet energy. Two rules the table encodes: nontoxic shot is federally required for waterfowl, and steel patterns tighter than lead — open your choke one step when switching. The advice every seasoned shooter gives: pattern-test your actual gun, choke and load on paper before trusting any chart, including this one.

Two tables that should agree, and one row that refuses

This page ships a choke table mapping constriction to an effective range, and a recommendation table mapping quarry to a choke and a typical distance. Those are two statements about the same thing, so they can be checked against each other:

Complete coverage is the exception, not the rule: only 2 rows sit entirely inside their band and 5 spill outside it. That is the ordinary business of a choke working past its ideal window, and it says the range column is a description rather than a limit.

One row is not a near miss. Turkey is recommended at 20–40 yards with a choke whose band starts at 40 — zero overlap. The tightest choke in the table, for the shortest-to-middling distances on the page, when every other row reads "further shot, tighter choke".

And it is right to

Constriction is not really about distance. It is about how wide the pattern is where it arrives, and the range column is shorthand for "the distance at which this constriction gives a useful spread on a flying bird". A turkey is not a flying bird — you are aiming at a head and neck on a stationary animal, so you want the densest pattern you can make, not the widest useful one. The page's own note says it: the one shotgun game where you aim like a rifle. The inversion is a signal that the range column means something narrower than it looks, and the one row that is not bird shooting breaks it.

Shot size runs backwards, and the count runs as the cube

The numbers get smaller as the pellets get bigger, which everyone learns once and still has to think about. What is less obvious is how fast the count moves, because a sphere's volume goes as the cube of its diameter:

BB is 2.25× the diameter of #9 and one eleventh of the pellet count — and 2.25³ is 11.4, so that is the cube exactly rather than approximately. Which is the real reason skeet loads are #9 and pass-shooting loads are BB. The trade is not small pellets against big ones; it is eleven chances at a close target against one pellet with energy left at 45 yards. The choke moves the pattern's width, the shot size moves how many holes are in it.

Those counts assume solid lead at 11.34 g/cc. Published tables run a few percent higher — #8 is usually quoted near 410 against the 400 computed here — because shot is alloyed with antimony and comes out slightly lighter per pellet. Close enough for the ratio, which is the part that matters.

One consistency check that does pass cleanly: 2 rows are flagged nontoxic, both waterfowl, and they are exactly the rows that name steel. No non-waterfowl row recommends steel and no waterfowl row forgets to.