Are Professional Cornhole Bags Worth It?

It's a question a lot of Cornhole players ask. Are professional Cornhole bags worth it?

If you decide to buy a set of competition Cornhole bags, you're going to pay a premium. So...are they worth it? It's not a simple yes or no question. There are a handful of things to consider if you're thinking about spending the extra money on a set of pro Cornhole bags.

Let's first talk about the benefits of getting a set of professional corn hole bags. The fabric is going to be top-notch. Period. Cheaper Cornhole bags sometimes don't have the best fabrics and they wear very quickly. You're not going to have that issue with a good set of pro Cornhole bags. In fact, some manufacturers have fabrics with different speed ratings, so you can find the one that works best for you.

Almost every set of pro Cornhole bags will have some sort of design on it. That's not the case for every Cornhole bag. So if you really want a cool design on your bags, you might have to buy pro bags to get a design you'll like.

Almost every set of professional Cornhole bags are resin-filled. The alternative is corn-filled bags, which simply aren't as good for a variety of reasons. This is one of the reasons pro Cornhole bags cost more than standard bags. The filling is of a higher quality and it just cost more.

Another thing you might not be aware of relates to filling the bags to the correct weight. Cornhole bags should all weigh right around 16 ounces, but there's a little wiggle room there. If you buy a set of standard duck cloth Cornhole bags, the odds are pretty high that those are machine-filled and the weights will vary a little bit from bag to bag. With pro Cornhole bags, generally speaking there's a lot more care taken when filling the bags. It's about consistency. Each bag will perform just like the others, because they were likely filled by hand, weighed and then adjusted to get extremely close to 16 ounces. This is another reason for the higher cost. There's more labor involved and it takes longer to make the pro bags.

Another thing to consider is companies that make and sell professional Cornhole bags, generally speaking stand behind their product. That's not always the case, there are some horror stories out there, but for the most part the major manufacturers understand they're offering a premium product and that comes with high expectations from the consumer. If a bag starts to split or breaks relatively soon after purchasing them, most of the time you'll be taken care of.

Another thing that serious players are keenly aware of is that some tournaments require bags from certain manufacturers. In these cases, your hand is kind of forced. If you want to play in a certain tournament, and the bags have to be a certain kind, obviously you're going to have to spend the money for those bags in order to take part.

One thing that you should be aware of, and this isn't meant to be a promotional ploy for buying our bags, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this. Without going into too much detail, and naming names so to speak, there are a lot of stories out there about people buying professional corn hole bags then waiting for a very long time to get them. Sometimes several months. This will not happen at Cornhole.org and that is a promise. If we don't have the bags to ship, then they won't be available for purchase on the site. It's as simple as that.

In conclusion, if you play in tournaments, even if they're just local tournaments, you should really make the jump to professional Cornhole bags. The care taken when making pro Cornhole bags is simply higher than when making standard corn hole bags. Flat out, they are better than their non-pro counterparts.

That said, if you're a backyard player, as described above but you play with the same set of people and it's pretty competitive, a pretty strong case could be made to step up to professional Cornhole bags.

At the end of the day, when you compare the price of Cornhole bags to say golf clubs or a tennis racquet you realize that relatively speaking, Cornhole is a pretty cheap activity to take part in. If you enjoy Cornhole enough to play a dozen times a year or so, give a set of professional Cornhole bags a shot. If you do, you'll likely never go back. And there's something to be said about that.