How many masters/grandmasters in US?

[ArmdCtzn]

I got asked a question today that I really had no idea of the answer. How many USPSA masters are in the US? How many grandmasters? Mr. Googles can't find the answer. Anybody know? Have an educated guess?

thanks

[BritinUSA]

Annual Report

[ArmdCtzn]

Thanks! That is perfect.

[Ultimo-Hombre]

Thanks for sharing.

[pmt]

Do the totals in the report take into account a person could be a GM or M (or A/B/C/D) in more than one division?

[kneelingatlas]

Do the totals in the report take into account a person could be a GM or M (or A/B/C/D) in more than one division?

It doesn't appear that way. The way I read it there are 539 GM classifications and each GM could hold as many as 6, so there are likely much fewer GMs than 500.

[rowdyb]

I thought it was interesting L10 had more people classified in it that Open or SS....Most of those people must not shoot it, like me, that often.

So if you use total membership number of 23,747 and 568 people for Limited and 361 for production hold Master classifications that is 2.3% and 1.5% respectively. That's some rare air getting to Master in the most populous divisions.

Even if in say Production you figured 361 Masters out of 8,234 classified in Prod that is still only around 4%.....

Edited January 21, 2015 by rowdyb

[ZackJones]

There are lots of different ways to slice and dice the data. Each month when the classifier data is updated and posted on the USPSA web site I download it and import it into a database I've developed. It looks to me like their numbers are on the high side and don't take into account that a person could be GM in multiple divisions. In an attempt to eliminate duplication I selected the distinct first name for the shooter who had at least one classification record in calendar year 2014. I then checked my results against what's published in the report the it became clear that the counts do include shooters that are classified at the same level in multiple divisions.

GM

Division - Report - My count

Open - 165 - 166

Limited - 169 - 161

Limited 10 - 46 - 47

Production - 108 - 105

Single Stack - 24 - 28

Revolver - 27 - 25

So as you can see my numbers are pretty close to what is in the report. Now if we eliminate names for shooters classified in multiple divisions I came up with a count of 320 for GM and 1025 for M. Both of which are significantly less than what is in the report.

It should be noted that without knowing exactly how USPSA counted their numbers you should take mine with a grain of salt. I just happen to be a numbers nerd so when I saw this post I thought I'd do some checking. Our match got rained out today so since I'm stuck inside I thought I'd do some slicing and dicing of my own.

[teros135]

It depend on what question you're asking. Is it "how many GM's are there in USPDA?" or "how many GMs are there in each Division?" or how many people have achieved GM at least once?" (i.e., how many unique GMs are there?". Those are different questions and will yield different numbers.

USPSA isn't trying to "hide" anything. Their stats simply show how many of each classification are in each division.

Edited January 24, 2015 by teros135

[ChuckS]

While this is not the entire answer about GM redundancy in the stats, look here for duplicity in the top 20's:

http://www.uspsa.org/top20.php

(example: Sevigny has 5 GM classifications)

And master is even more obfuscated ( ) since any GM in any division will be no lower than M in any division in which they have earned an initial classification.

[teros135]

Forgot about that one.

So the total number of GMs per Division is be pretty much what the report said, about 1.3% of Production and 1.6% of Limited (the two most popular Divisions), although with duplications the total number of shooters who have at least 1 GM card is less than the 1.5% (of total classifications) in the annual report.

According to the Annual Report, the totals of GM + M are 5.6% in Prod and 7.1% of Lim, but we can't tell how many individual shooters hold that total of all those classifications, so it's probably a lot less individual people that hold GM or M than we might have thought.

Guess those are harder to get into than it seems (but then, they're the best and, unlike Lake Woebegone, we can't all be above average...)

(The report did say those numbers are percentages "of all currently-held classifications", which does allow for the multiple-classification holders, which is probably a bunch of us.)

Edited January 24, 2015 by teros135