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So when is a "A" hit not worth it..


DocMedic

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After obliterating a post in my online journal a few moments ago, I got to thinking, I tend to "chase" down A's at the cost of.. well time. At Rocky Mountain 300 the total round count for paper if you didn't miss was 247rounds, in which I shot overall 237 A's and only 10 C's. No D's and no Misses. I'll use the 2 stages that were all paper in compression.

In stage one, the "hoser" stage, I shot 318pts(1 C, and the rest A's) at 42.27secs with a HF of 7.52, that netted me 7th out of 31 Production shooters overall on this stage taking 50.44% of stages points for the 134 shooters. The First place Production shooter, Rank'd "A". Shot it with 306pts at 26.68secs, HF of 11.46, taking 76.9% of the stage points. 3rd place Production who shot the lowest score above my score shot it with 289pts at 29.64secs, and ended up with 9.6 HF.

Stage 4, 62rnd count. Shot 60 A's and 2 C's, giving me 306pts, but I shot it in 73.9secs, taking 11th/31. First place production it basically at half the time with a 296score.

When I look at at besides the all steel stage, out of the 4 stages, 3 of them I had the highest pts, or was tied with others with highest pts, with the exception of stage one were someone scored a perfect 320(who ended up several spots lower then me.)

So yea any advice? specially from Production shooters?

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The high hit factor of a stage determines the bias of the stage. The way I see it, if a stages high hit factor is 5 or below I consider it points biased (take extra time to get the most points you can). If the high hit factor is 8 or above then I consider it speed biased (risk dropping points by shooting/moving faster). Between 5 - 8 is an even mixture of points and speed.

You can think of stages as fast or slow stages based on their HF's but really in the end your task will always be to shoot as many points as you can in the least amount of time. When I look at a stage I don't really care what the possible high hit factor is. I know that I can only shoot as fast as I can call my shots for any given target. If I shoot within my abilities where I am able to call my shots my hits will be as good as I can do regardless of how fast or slow I shot a stage. I set my pace of shooting on calling my shots and whatever the HF ends up being is what it is.

A good initial goal to set for any stage is to shoot at least 90% of the available stage points. Using this simple measurement of 90% points per stage will quickly tell you if you are shooting too conservatively or too aggressively. The national caliber shooters are able to consistently shoot 95% of the available points at their full "race" speed. They know that if they are shooting more than 95% of the available points they were not pushing hard enough (wasting time). If they shot less than 95% of the available points they were pushing too hard and getting sloppy (wasting points). Failing in either direction (too fast with less points, or, too slow with more points) by about 2% - 3% usually ends up being a wash in the resulting HF.

There really isn’t a golden rule other than shoot as fast as you can accumulate 95% of the stage points. Shooting 95% of the points without being turtle slow is hard through so it might be easier for you to set the goal of shooting 90% of the points. Your examples of stage points verses time show that you are sacrificing way too much time to gain an excessively high amount of points. In both of your examples you are accumulating more than 99% of the stage points. That is far above the 90% target for stage points accumulated and thus you are wasting time on collecting all of those excessive points.

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first thing i notice you need to be looking at the production only scores on the weld county practical shooters page of the uspsa.com website under local match results to get an accurate picture of the points because you are comparing all the hit factors of the match when only the division you are shooting in matters

second the hit factor was high almost 11.5 time was much more important than point even though the winner in production only dropped 7 C's

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During the parents class at the MGM/AMU Junior clinic Rob Leatham told us that at a long distance, even if he took all the time in the world, he might not be able to guarantee an A, but he could pretty quickly guarantee a C. The point being that at distance you don't have to take too much time to get an A and can accept a C.

At short distances, he said you pretty much *have* to get As, so don't rush those too much and accept Cs up close.

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I used to get frustrated by this, I started out in IDPA and when I started out in USPSA I would shoot stages and maybe get a C or two with the rest A usually with a nice shot group center mass. Only to get beat by guys with holes sprayed all over the targets but only a couple seconds faster. This game is about speed. As long as you are not getting Mikes or noshoots its all about speed. Production has acuracy slightly more in the formula becasue of the minor scoring but lets look at a typical 10 target 20 rd COF shooting major.

Guy A shoots 20 A's in ten seconds, guy B shoots 1A, 1C on every target in 9 seconds only 1 second makes up for all those dropped points. Shooting minor you'd have to do it in 8 seconds but as you can see just a few extra seconds can make up for a hole lotta C's.

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first thing i notice you need to be looking at the production only scores on the weld county practical shooters page of the uspsa.com website under local match results to get an accurate picture of the points because you are comparing all the hit factors of the match when only the division you are shooting in matters

second the hit factor was high almost 11.5 time was much more important than point even though the winner in production only dropped 7 C's

Thank you, I wasn't able to find it last night. Also the first place shooting production dropped more then 7 C's (I out scored him points wise on each stage), but he still whooped me lol.

Edited by DocMedic
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The last thing on my improvement list is shooting faster. All the things I can improve on that give more benefit in time are things like drawing, acquiring the dot/sight more efficient movement, better positioning, foot work, reloads, visualizing, getting up and down, stage break down etc, eliminating the pauses, the stuff 80% of most stages are made of.

If you meant shooting on the move instead of static to get A's then by all means get on the move, its points per second so any time not spent shooting is wasted time.

If your are just waiting for the sights to come back down maybe you need to get rid of the soft flat load and get somthing a little snappy so they come back faster.

I'm sorry I don't get it I shoot every stage as fast as I can and stay in control of the gun, shooting faster than you can control the gun is a crash and burn. Enos when you see what you need to see you break the shot, so I can't go with when you don't see it shoot?

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The high hit factor of a stage determines the bias of the stage. The way I see it, if a stages high hit factor is 5 or below I consider it points biased (take extra time to get the most points you can). If the high hit factor is 8 or above then I consider it speed biased (risk dropping points by shooting/moving faster). Between 5 - 8 is an even mixture of points and speed.

You can think of stages as fast or slow stages based on their HF's but really in the end your task will always be to shoot as many points as you can in the least amount of time. When I look at a stage I don't really care what the possible high hit factor is. I know that I can only shoot as fast as I can call my shots for any given target. If I shoot within my abilities where I am able to call my shots my hits will be as good as I can do regardless of how fast or slow I shot a stage. I set my pace of shooting on calling my shots and whatever the HF ends up being is what it is.

A good initial goal to set for any stage is to shoot at least 90% of the available stage points. Using this simple measurement of 90% points per stage will quickly tell you if you are shooting too conservatively or too aggressively. The national caliber shooters are able to consistently shoot 95% of the available points at their full "race" speed. They know that if they are shooting more than 95% of the available points they were not pushing hard enough (wasting time). If they shot less than 95% of the available points they were pushing too hard and getting sloppy (wasting points). Failing in either direction (too fast with less points, or, too slow with more points) by about 2% - 3% usually ends up being a wash in the resulting HF.

There really isn’t a golden rule other than shoot as fast as you can accumulate 95% of the stage points. Shooting 95% of the points without being turtle slow is hard through so it might be easier for you to set the goal of shooting 90% of the points. Your examples of stage points verses time show that you are sacrificing way too much time to gain an excessively high amount of points. In both of your examples you are accumulating more than 99% of the stage points. That is far above the 90% target for stage points accumulated and thus you are wasting time on collecting all of those excessive points.

Thats actually a sound strat. I want to try doing this at are next local USPSA match, but how do you factor in if a stage has a High hit factor vs. a Low hit factor. Also even locally I'm usually above 97% of points shot for most stages too, I'll try to dial back and "accept" only shooting 90% of the points and see if my time has improved.

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first thing i notice you need to be looking at the production only scores on the weld county practical shooters page of the uspsa.com website under local match results to get an accurate picture of the points because you are comparing all the hit factors of the match when only the division you are shooting in matters

second the hit factor was high almost 11.5 time was much more important than point even though the winner in production only dropped 7 C's

Thank you, I wasn't able to find it last night. Also the first place shooting production dropped more then 7 C's (I out scored him points wise on each stage), but he still whooped me lol.

1 Matt H. 133 A Production 306 0 26.68 11.4693 320.0000 100.00%

306 out of 320 is only 7c's down

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I started in bullseye, when I swiyched over to uspsa I was in the same place you are.

Iwas using the same type of focus on all my shots, I believe Brian calls type 4

Remember you only need to see what gets you a.s and some close C.s

anything else is over kill. Find out what you can get away with. 5yd tgts maybe just a index,

These are things to find out in practice

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I started in bullseye, when I swiyched over to uspsa I was in the same place you are.

Iwas using the same type of focus on all my shots, I believe Brian calls type 4

Remember you only need to see what gets you a.s and some close C.s

anything else is over kill. Find out what you can get away with. 5yd tgts maybe just a index,

These are things to find out in practice

+1 By reading your initial post your focused on pts. You need points but your goal is to pull the trigger as soon as you have an acceptable sight picture. I would guess your taking extra time to make sure you gave a perfect or close to perfect sight picture. What you need to see to shoot an A varies. If the target is close you may not need to see anymore than the top of your gun pointing at the target to get that A.

Don't be afraid of pushing it in practice. To the point your pulling the trigger and getting D's or Mikes especially in the beginning. You might feel out of control but that is ok as long as your safe. Your trying to shoot A's but as with anything else with shooting if you aren't shooting A's the more you practice pushing it the better your will get. You can always dial it back some in a match. After some practice you will be able to acquire a sight picture faster and squeeze of a shot off sooner.

Pay attention to whats going on with the gun and be very careful to make sure you just don't start shooting brown.

Flyin

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DocMedic> How do you know what the High Hitfactor is for a stage? That is easy. When you are dry firing the stage before you shoot it (in the walk through) time yourself from start to finish. Then take the total points of the stage and devide it by your dry fire time. The challenge with doing this is to keep yourself honest when going through it dry. You will see people run through a stage dry at a speed that is WAY faster than anyone can physically shoot it. So you need to put a time buffer in there to make it more real world realistic. For myself, when I first started I would time my run in dry fire then add 2 - 3 seconds to it. That usually ends up close to the real time I would shoot it in. Lately I can slow myself down during the dry fire portion to come up with a time that better matches what will happen in live fire.

But you can also put stages in buckets based on how they are physically setup. If a stage is physically small with lots of up close blasting, then the Hit Factor is going to be high. If the stage is large with a lot of running around, with a lot of long or tight shots that are difficult the Hit factor is going to be low.

But like I said in my first post. It all comes back to being able to shoot as fast as you can accumulate at least 90% of the stage points. If you are able to keep your points accumulation around the 90$ - 95% mark then you know that you are running it about as fast as you can.

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Curtis, at your level (C class) worrying about stage points etc. isn't going to help. Your mission should be to figure out how to shoot the stage as fast as possible, the biggest places you'll lose time are in your draw, reloads and movement, those things are easier to speed up than your actual shooting. Your shooting speed is what it is, as long as you are shooting as fast as you can see the sights and get your hits then you are shooting fast enough. Concentrate on being as fast as possible out of the holster, on your reloads and when moving around the stage and that'll speed you up more than worrying about the speed of your shooting. Once you improve those things then lets work on speeding up your shooting.

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<<Doc>> The main difference that I witnessed between those shooters with the highest HF and those with lower HF in Stage 1 had to do more with foot placement than anything else. With the exception of three shooters, everyone started on the left side of the array of barrels and worked their way towards the right-hand side of the COF. Most everyone (including you) went all the way into the barrels and then had to step back and around the barrels to get to the next position. Many Production, L-10 and SS shooters were completely planted in one spot while reloading and most everyone (because of their proximity to the barrels) were dropping their guns way too low for their reloads. Once they had reloaded many showed hesitation on where it was that they were supposed to be moving too next. I could easily tell that were searching not only for their next position but also for their next target; this is what ate away most people's times.

Another very common "mistake" amongst shooters was changing the way they shot each array. I saw a fair amount of shooters that would begin by shooting the lower right-hand side target and continue to shoot counterclockwise on one array and then start on a different target and shoot the array clockwise. Those with the highest HF shot every single array starting with a bottom target and moving counterclockwise while "flowing" (moving) to the next array.

The secret to Stage 1 (as Matt H. so elegantly demonstrated) was to shoot fast while never stop moving. The A-zone of all 32 targets was completely exposed and shooters where engaging these targets at no more than three yards. I don't say this often but, this is one of those stages where you are better off point-shooting.

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first thing i notice you need to be looking at the production only scores on the weld county practical shooters page of the uspsa.com website under local match results to get an accurate picture of the points because you are comparing all the hit factors of the match when only the division you are shooting in matters

second the hit factor was high almost 11.5 time was much more important than point even though the winner in production only dropped 7 C's

Thank you, I wasn't able to find it last night. Also the first place shooting production dropped more then 7 C's (I out scored him points wise on each stage), but he still whooped me lol.

1 Matt H. 133 A Production 306 0 26.68 11.4693 320.0000 100.00%

306 out of 320 is only 7c's down

Oops, sorry I thought you meant overall, Not for just stage one which now makes sense.

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Curtis, at your level (C class) worrying about stage points etc. isn't going to help. Your mission should be to figure out how to shoot the stage as fast as possible, the biggest places you'll lose time are in your draw, reloads and movement, those things are easier to speed up than your actual shooting. Your shooting speed is what it is, as long as you are shooting as fast as you can see the sights and get your hits then you are shooting fast enough. Concentrate on being as fast as possible out of the holster, on your reloads and when moving around the stage and that'll speed you up more than worrying about the speed of your shooting. Once you improve those things then lets work on speeding up your shooting.

Curtis, this is what you need to read and listen to. Big Panda is right, but you are not at a stage in your shooting where this will benefit you very much. Learn what Charlie is talking about along the way, but you really need to focus on reducing the amount of time it takes to do EVERYTHING that doesn't involve shooting an hole in the A zone. Dry fire practice reloads and draws till they are automatic and clean. Live fire practice your movements till you learn where to shave time and/or can eliminate overall time by shooting and moving accurately. Lastly, you are at a stage in your shooting where spending some cash and taking a class with Avery would shorten your learning curve.

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Lol, Its like getting beat down by a bunch of Nerf baseball bats in here, everyones getting a swing :D Thanks everyone for the wonderful advice, Theres definitely no question that I need to work on every mechanic of my game. And I got alot of great input (and not so great) from the video's of me during RM300. Its very humbling to be able to watch and gringe at parts of it, knowing that I could had done that better there and here :). I won't post them just yet (Not sure if my ego can take the abuse.. Plus for some odd reason they went to a Gig+ on the memory stick :blink: )).

Edited by DocMedic
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After obliterating a post in my online journal a few moments ago, I got to thinking, I tend to "chase" down A's at the cost of.. well time. At Rocky Mountain 300 the total round count for paper if you didn't miss was 247rounds, in which I shot overall 237 A's and only 10 C's. No D's and no Misses. I'll use the 2 stages that were all paper in compression.

In stage one, the "hoser" stage, I shot 318pts(1 C, and the rest A's) at 42.27secs with a HF of 7.52, that netted me 7th out of 31 Production shooters overall on this stage taking 50.44% of stages points for the 134 shooters. The First place Production shooter, Rank'd "A". Shot it with 306pts at 26.68secs, HF of 11.46, taking 76.9% of the stage points. 3rd place Production who shot the lowest score above my score shot it with 289pts at 29.64secs, and ended up with 9.6 HF.

Stage 4, 62rnd count. Shot 60 A's and 2 C's, giving me 306pts, but I shot it in 73.9secs, taking 11th/31. First place production it basically at half the time with a 296score.

When I look at at besides the all steel stage, out of the 4 stages, 3 of them I had the highest pts, or was tied with others with highest pts, with the exception of stage one were someone scored a perfect 320(who ended up several spots lower then me.)

So yea any advice? specially from Production shooters?

I'm a Production shooter. :) I might even know a thing or two about this math stuff.

First thing, forget what everybody else did. You need to focus on your shooting.

You basically shot a 7.5hf on the first stage. That is 7.5 points per second. Or, said another way, 0.13 seconds per point. So, for this stage for you to trade an Alpha for a Charlie, you would need to save over a quarter of a second (at Minor, there are 2pts difference between an Alpha and a Charlie, 0.1333 x 2 = 0.2666 seconds)

On your other stage, you shot about a 4hf. 4 points per second, or (taking the inverse) 0.25 second per point. So, dropping 2 pts for a Charlie means you need to save a full half second to make it worth it.

We can say little more without knowledge of how you spend your time. It is likely that you need to find places other than the shooting to make more efficient use of time.

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You can think of stages as fast or slow stages based on their HF's but really in the end your task will always be to shoot as many points as you can in the least amount of time. When I look at a stage I don't really care what the possible high hit factor is. I know that I can only shoot as fast as I can call my shots for any given target. If I shoot within my abilities where I am able to call my shots my hits will be as good as I can do regardless of how fast or slow I shot a stage. I set my pace of shooting on calling my shots and whatever the HF ends up being is what it is.

Good stuff.

Hit Factor, Smit Factor. Your approach to getting your score (HF) should not have anything to do with what your score ends up being.

During the parents class at the MGM/AMU Junior clinic Rob Leatham told us that at a long distance, even if he took all the time in the world, he might not be able to guarantee an A, but he could pretty quickly guarantee a C. The point being that at distance you don't have to take too much time to get an A and can accept a C.

At short distances, he said you pretty much *have* to get As, so don't rush those too much and accept Cs up close.

More good stuff from the TGO. I remember him telling me almost exactly that when quizzing him on his point shooting strategies at various distances for Production Class or IDPA.

be

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  • 3 weeks later...

Don't dismiss Kyle's math lesson; it's really important because it actually SHOWS you that you cannot make up the time by shooting faster.

Shooting a charlie (in this example) is only worth it if it SAVES YOU .26 of a second.

Think about trying to save .26 of a second on splits. Unless you're shooting crazy slow, cutting .26 off your splits will not only be difficult, but maybe impossible.

Many times when you start "trying" to shoot "faster" you not only get more Cs......but more Ds........and then, almost always, misses on these close targets.

FY42385

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A C hit is dropping 40% of the points available, so you have to shoot that much faster faster to break even on hit factor.

On the close targets, you can't do it, so you have to shoot A's. On the long targets where A's aren't guaranteed a quicker split that get a C "might" be better than much longer splits if you may not get an A anyway.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Just shoot the targets when you see them. Hit the paper and be happy, get your times down to the winners time or better. Don't even consider the points, just hit the targets. Do this for several matches until you know what it is like to move through the stage and hit everything with a good time. Once you have this down, now don't think of it anymore. Go get your points and learn to do that at your new pace.

I believe that you can only do one thing concsiously at a time. I don't believe one thing will automatically happen without conscious effort first to ingrain that "one thing" into the subconscious. Once various aspects of the game are ingrained into the subconscious they happen automatically.

Drop down to 90% of the pts and I'm not even sure you'll get a new speed. It will be the speed you shoot forever until you decide on a different one.

This "go slow, get your hits, the speed will come" is CRAP to me. Until I made the effort to haul ass and hit the targets I didn't improve much. My .02cents.

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