How Fast?

[Duane Thomas]

My suggestion would be to practice the draw at 10 yards. When you get comfortable and feel like your times are improving, go back to 25 yards and try and duplicate your draw stroke. Most shooters will subconsciously draw slower from this distance. Realistically, nothing should change except the time it takes you to get a good sight picture.

True. A good thing to practice is, at all distances, to get the gun out of the holster and on target, trigger prepped, ready to fire the shot, as fast as possible. What you'll find, at the longer ranges, is that if you still whip out the gun like you're trying to do a sub-second draw at close range, that will save you such immense amounts of time you can take what seems like forever to align the sights and break the shot, and still have, in the overall scheme of things, a very fast first shot time.

[Duane Thomas]

Personally I think this is one thing that is over emphasized with IDPA/USPSA shooters- there is so much room for better overall improvement in other areas- transitions, efficient movement, longer shooting with accuracy, etc. A really fast draw without the other things are... well... useless IMO.

It's all important. Once you start saying, "X is more important than Y," you pretty much cede superiority in Y to someone else. Of course, that's just MHO.