Another good way to tell is by width of the brow tine gouges:

I would say the height of the rub is more important.

Mathewsboy you should know big bucks and little bucks both rub on little and big trees.

this could've been made by a 6" spread spikehorn right!

I guess it could have.. But I just dont see it happening.. I'd have to go with the odds that it was made by a large buck.. Now if it was the only rub in the area like that, then yeah, maybe it was a little one.. But if you find 4 or 5 like that in a small area, I dont think its a Small buck.. My opinion..

I was always under the impression that you cant tell the size of the buck by the diameter of the tree but rather you look at the height of the rubs and see if you can see the distance between the browtines.

I don't put much effort in to figureing out what size buck made them, but I do know that seeing a BIG rub on a big tree gets me more excited than a little rub.

Agreed 100%

Ok, here's some more food for thought...

I've always been under the impression that deer make rubs for TWO different reasons, depending on the time of year.

1. During early season, they are simply making rubs to clean their antlers when the velvet starts coming off. Obviously, a mature buck can't fit a six inch tree in the small space between the different points, so this leads me to believe that young deer AND mature deer will mostly rub small saplings.

2. Later in the season, during the rut, deer make rubs to mark their territory, so it is likely that the more mature deer will rub larger trees than younger deer, and they will make them in the heaviest travel areas so that the majority of the herd will see them. Also the more dominant bucks will make "rub lines" to help mark the territory.

As I said, I don't know if this is completely accurate, but that's the way I've been taught since I started hunting.

Everything I have ever seen and read has said that the size of a rub or scrape is not dependent upon the size of the buck. I just got done reading an article in D&DH that saidmosthuntersare often taughtthat big rubs equal big deer but this is a huge misconception. The only really good scouting indicator that indicates at least a big bodied mature deer is large hoof prints and big crap pellets.