Renno

I pull the trigger when I dry fire. On my rimfire guns I put a small chamber flag in and let the bolt rest against it. That way the trigger goes all the way to the back but does not drop the hammer. It also keeps the weight distribution the same. On centerfire guns I rack the slide every time and break the trigger pull on the last shot so my timer picks it up on max sensitivity. I kinda pretend to pull the trigger on the first 4 shots by pressing it up to the wall but not breaking it. I made weighted magazines by removing the followers from old bodies and filling it with metal BBs and hot glue to simulate loaded weight/balance in a safe manner for dry fire as well.

I usually set dry fire targets up kinda random. More horizontal than vertical because SCSA is mostly horizontal transitions. Then I do practice matches where I dry fire all 8 stages and just try to minimize makeup shots on the clock. The time isn't important but it simulates the pressure pretty well. A good match will have like 2 or three makeups on the clock, 6 clean stages. A meh match is like 4 clean stages, 4 makeups. Then live fire once a week or so to confirm my shot calling is correct. I set up 10" and 12" plates at about 25-30yd and practice transitioning between them and calling the hits.

If you are shooting as fast as you can process your fundamentals like finding the target, processing a good sight picture and calling the shot, you're already shooting as fast as you can perform with high reliability. You can push faster than that and exceed your consistent ability by sacrificing fundamentals like not quite calling the shot or not fully processing the information you're seeing. This will result in a wider performance window where your bad strings are much worse, and your good strings are much better. The problem is that practice is mostly about developing an understanding of what you are doing so that it can be repeated on command. Shooting faster than you can process in practice is like watching a movie on fast forward and trying to replicatr the script after. Yeah you may have got to the end faster but you didn't get all the information out of it. Now if you go to write out the script from memory, you're going to be missing a lot of the finer points that you needed to observe in order to recreate it. Shooting faster to test your limits is a good idea, but it should only be a smaller portion of your practice routine. If you're shooting faster than normal and missing but still processing everything, that's not a bad thing. If I'm going fast and hitting only 80% of my shots, thats okay as long as I'm calling my shots for what they truely are and seeing everything I need too. That way I can make corrective action and the practice is useful. What becomes bad is when you're going faster and failing to process everything. If I'm only hitting 80% of my shots and I didn't see a thing, then I'm just building bad habits. You don't have any information to work off of to build a repeatable model. You're just adding more imprints on your subconscious that dilute the good imprints. It's better to get faster at doing it perfectly than to sort through a mess of sloppy reps. It makes you a more reliable competitor in higher stress settings, builds confidence that you can simply rely on your foundational skills rather than risk to meet your goals, and preserves the self image by reducing the frequency of bombed matches. Sports psychologists believe that optimal training is 5 or 6 days a week. Having a break or two is important to preventing burnout and stopping bad habits before they cement themselves. This is because we remember the things we do right longer than we remember the things we did wrong. And usually we forget bad habits faster than our skill decays. I like to do 3 days on, one day off. And I make sure to put two days on prior to a match when I'm able too. It also helps to have multiple days put together. If I can only practice two days a week, it would be optimal to put them back to back so that my improvements can compound. If I have a good day on Monday, I should go again on Tuesday and try to cement in what I learned and use the confidence from my success on Monday to propel my practice on Tuesday. The benefit to practicing official stages is that you can know what you can get away with ahead of time. Like I know I can usually shoot plate 2 of roundabout without making a complete stop based on previous experience making that transition. Or little things like "man plate 3 on speed option is really hard for me, I need to take that swing a little more careful next time." You develop that benchmark within like 5 matches and that's where the benefits really end. When I run a good stage, it's not the result of memorizing the motions to shoot the plates. It's about repeating one simple process over and over: a transition. I put my eyes on the next target, I put the sight between my eye and the target, I call the shot, shoot, and repeat. If you try to memorize the motions to shoot a stage as one process, it's too complicated to be repeatable. Plus if it held any water, you would still fail at the first match where the staff mismeasured the plates. SCSA allows 2" of variance and level 1 doesn't require a laser leveled, it'll catch you fast.

I wrote this a few years ago when I was around 110%GM in my divisions. This covers the strategies I used and I built off of for the last few years, having never practiced live fire on any stages outside of matches. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yf3uV8sK0d5EXKoqDHWNpb-bEESYwYE9aJQCeOi2XKw/edit?usp=drivesdk When I began shooting match times that were 100% or higher, I was focusing on shooting clean rather than making speed the priority. I think a trap many shooters fall into is trying to prioritize a time rather than naturally working up to that point. I wasn't trying to shoot for a certain speed, but rather I was shooting it in a very repeatable manner and speed came from practicing that process. While you practice, you are subconsciously developing a formula/process to execute that allows you to make one transition at a time. You're not trying to memorize a stage pattern. This is especially important if you don't have access to practice real stages outside of a match. Jesse Misco, Brad Jeffers and I also cover some information to flesh out the process in their podcast found here: https://on.soundcloud.com/3zXw3W6gkh6HRPLk9

The only payout is in the overall now Most of JM's WSSC division times were composed of mostly stage records when he shot them. @JM_ which division was the most saturated? It's possible to make high risk runs for records but that's not what's happening now. The fact that no one has put all world records together in a match is not evidence that the standing records are unrealistic at match pace, but rather that it's really hard to perform perfectly for that long as humans with brains that think too much

I would guess that only 5% or less of stage records are zero/hero runs. The kind of competitor who can shoot that time isn't going to jepordize their match standing by risking stages like that. Obviously burn downs happen but I wouldn't call that zero/hero if you already have 4 solid strings in the bank. More like capitalizing on your consistent runs which were likely slower than your top end speed anyway Of my two records, one was a bad first string where I shot the remaining four safe. The other record had a makeup on the clock just shooting normally

The longer sight radius is really critical for SCSA with irons. On the 6" Mamba, if your front sight is in the rear slot, it will hit the plate within about a 4" group worst case case alignment. This means your bullet will land a maximum of 2" from where your fiber is on the target. Therefore, you don't need to verify perfect alignment for every shot. As long as you see the front fiber in the rear sight slot, it's an acceptable sight picture. A 4.5" barrel like the ruger mkiv is not acceptable because the sight radius is too long and the groups open up too much for this strategy to be effective. A 4.5" requires you to verify the front sight is actually centered in the rear sight slot which takes significantly more time and provides less consistent results than a 6". To make this kind of shooting even easier, longer fiber will make the front sight red dot bright even in the shade. I melted one end and taped the other. You can also slowly mold fiber rod in boiling water if you're careful. I think a thumbrest and magwell also make a big difference in RFPI to ensure a consistent grip and maintain alignment. Once you get the gun aligned for the first shot, you don't want the gun to lose alignment in your hands while you transition the gun. The thumbrest helps you grip against the reciever horizontally, and downward on the frame. The magwell pushes your hand up into the trigger guard and beavertail more which also prevents twist. I'm using Texas Pride CNC checkered grips/magwell, you can message them on Facebook to get them, but I also think that Steve Foster's Tempest grips are a great option. I prefer the Texas Pride CNCs though because they have more aggressive texturing.

The class system is designed to be dynamic with shooters times and change with them. It works as a way for competitors to compare their times against similarly skilled opponents in a match. The sport is always getting faster and everyone is always getting better, so the PST has to keep adapting to spread everyone into the classes they belong. As Zack Jones noted, PSTs have never been adjusted based on a division's overall population. It's not a population distribution based on the %. It's important to understand that a division with less or more than 5% population of GMs does not indicate that the division PST is high or low. What happens when the PSTs do not change fast enough to keep up with the speed of a division? Well you end up with shooters stacking up in the higher ranks and they need to be spread apart more to keep the classification system working in matches as I described it above. This is what we see now in the low ready divisions where 95% GMs are going against up to 150% GMs. Thats not right when every other division window is about 10-20%. To fix this, PSTs need to be lowered to more accurately place shooters in the M and GM classes. In this case, adding another class is not a viable solution. This inflation problem is exclusive to low ready divisions and adding another class would mess up all the centerfire divisions that have already stabilized over years. Low ready divisions have not stabilized yet because they are still getting faster. Therefore, this is a PST problem for low ready divisions, not a lack of classes. Shooters often set a specific class as their goal, not understanding that the goalpost is designed to change since it's a relative skill rating. I understand how that is frustrating but that's not a valid reason to stop maintaining the balance of classifications. Addressing the non-linear nature of the PSTs as you go down classifications: that's how it's intended to operate. The lower skill class you're in, the easier it is to make up time since you have a greater capacity to improve. It's much easier for a 50% C class shooter to make 16 seconds than it is for a 100% GM to make 8. A C class shooter has much more information out there to learn and push that time out. A GM can't just take a class or read a guide and shave that kind of time off where a C class shooter can. While the margin is quantitively wider for C class to B class, the changes are proportional in difficulty.

And to clarify what I mean by class inflation: I'm referring to the problem Lawboy mentioned of 95% GMs having to go against 130%+ GMs in their class. Carry Optics does not have this problem, with top 3 GMs only being around 110, everyone else is right at about 100 or below

But thats okay because C and B class shooters have the largest capacity for improvement and shave time off faster than GMs. They have the highest rate of improvement since there is so much available to learn to increase score. There isn't much more to squeeze out of GM by taking a class or reading a guide. 3.77 is significantly easier to drop at B class than 2.26 is at GM even though its quantitively proportional

@lawboy this inflation is a problem that is only present in the low ready divisions. That means its a PST problem not a shortage of classes. If PSTs are reduced then you can reclassify to Master where you won't have to compete against the top level shooters. There's no need for EGM since there is already a class for the elite, it's the Grand version of Master. I think adding additional classes would damage the balance of other divisions which are not experiencing the same problems with class inflation that the low ready divisions are. Changing the class system affects every single division, but we can fix the problems that are exclusive to specific divisions by changing their PSTs instead.

@GKB the PSTs are used to spread out classifications, they are top level times but not necessarily the best times possible. Per the bylaws they have to be set based on the results of WSSC each year. This is not based solely on the top performers but rather the results of the whole division (from my understanding). I think some divisions should de reworked with slower PSTs but that's just me. I think the wide range of GM players in low ready divisions is evidence that the PSTs were too slow to balance that class out. Its not so much about the population of GMs in each division thats the issue, but rather the range of scores in that class was too wide. We have 95% fresh GMs complaining they had to compete against 150% GMs. Lowering the PSTs solved this problem and placed everyone in classes they are more appropriate to be competing in

It can be seen as a revitalization of classification based competition. Lowering peak times means more competitors in C-M if individuals choose to reclassify. Competitors will migrate to their fitting class and increase that population at each match. This will lead to more recognition for these classes in terms of awards at majors and WSSC slots at Area matches for them. This is particularly good for GMs who were just over the 95% mark prior to the PST change because they no longer have to compete against the top end GMs at 120%+ in their class results. That was the biggest complaint I've heard about the class system in recent years. The cost it comes with is that ranking up now takes more work, but everyone will fit more accurately into their classification since the margins are widened. I think these benefits create a fairer environment for competitors of all skill levels

I can provide some insight. Lance and I pushed the division average down by about 6-8 seconds per match this last year. We knew it hadn't really been pushed like the RFPO or RFRO/RFRI so we worked together sharing ideas to go from shooting 70s in 2023, down to 64s by 2024. A few weeks ago Lance shot a 61. We made a few gear changes and altered our shooting process/strategy around them. We started using flared magwells to push our grip higher and stabilize the swing more. This allowed us to keep our sights aligned consistently enough to just swing without verifying alignment each shot. We used longer fibers and anti-glare coatings on our sights to increase contrast and glow brighter to process sight picture faster. We ended up shooting it like a red dot and our times followed the trend.

Hey Hoops, I wrote this SCSA guide a while back that I think may help you out https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yf3uV8sK0d5EXKoqDHWNpb-bEESYwYE9aJQCeOi2XKw/edit?usp=drivesdk What blackss06 says about balancing speed/aggression is absolutely right and that's the best strategy for SCSA. I think the most important difference between pistol and rifle is that rifle has a third point of contact (the stock), which keeps it in line with your body. When mastering rimfire pistol, it's huge if you can keep the pistol aligned in your hands for both irons and optics, proportional to your body. Imagine you are looking at yourself shooting from a top down view and think of your body like a capitol letter T. Your shoulders are the top of the T, and the stem is the direction of the barrel. See the image in the link below. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G1IBLCm_zuHEkOUhQY47incrV-0nwYVJ/view?usp=drivesdk When you rotate your body to swing toward your next target, you should keep the T formation so that the barrel of the pistol is always facing perpendicular with your shoulders. This makes the gun feel more predictable in a swing if you can keep this aligned, and feel similar to a rifle with practice