Thursday Night Back to Normal(ish)

Thursday's Match Director brought us a few stages lifted from the IDPA World Match and, just to make it easier for all, he set up all four stages in one space. We didn't have to stop and reset after two squads did two stages, as is the norm.

Scoring was less than stellar. The biggest problem seems to be that I failed to slow down.

I did have one interesting PE. The stage had two targets visible from P1, two "surprise" targets obscured by visual barriers enroute to P2 and one behind the barrier at P2. Two on each except the last, which gets six. My plan was pretty simple and similar to almost everyone elses, 2 each, advance, 2 on the first surprise, shoot to slidelock on second surprise, reload behind the barrier, 6 on the last.

Where I went wrong must have been in the count. I shot at the 2nd surprise target and initiated my reload, only to notice that my magazine was empty, but that there was a round in the pistol; it wasn't at slide lock. I am pretty sure I retained my magazine, reloaded and took the last six shots. I got a PE for it and I was not at all surprised, so I had no reason to review the details.

During the day today, I was discussing the match with coworkers and when I described what happened, it occurred to me that if I retained the magazine, it would be a tactical reload and maybe should not have been a PE. I consulted to rules and verified that a magazine can be empty at tactical reload. What makes it a TR is that there is still a round in the pistol and you do have to retain the magazine, not drop it. I emailed the SO that I thought had run me on that stage and we ended up chatting on the phone about it. Turns out he wasn't who ran me, but he observed that the PE was for initiating the reload before I was behind cover, not the reload itself. I feel better now. :)

Overall, I placed 12 out of 16 shooters, but really I was 4 out 5 Markman ESPs.

I definitely need to shoot a lot more and get back in the groove!

Speaking of scoring, news from the banquet at the IDPA World Match is that they are going to change the penalty for points down. Currently, each point down is a half second. The change is expected to be to a full second. There has been much forum discussion about it. The intent seems to be to discourage shooting real fast for a bunch of 1's and thus encourage accuracy. I'm not convinced that is the best way to do that, but it will make the math of scoring easier :)