Originally Posted by
TCinVA
I've not seen anything that has made me change from Fiocchi's dummies. They are holding up very well for me.
I frequently get questions about the Match Saver product. As I understand the history of the device, it was conceived in the world of three gun where being competitive required carefully planning your shotgun loading lest you lose precious seconds. If you missed or a target didn't go down when it was supposed to, you had ready access to another shell for a quick load that could literally "save" your match.
Since a speedy reload was the raison d'etre for the Match Saver, folks naturally assume it's a good option for a quick reload on a defensive scattergun.
Personally, I'm not a fan. The typical location of the Match Saver actually interferes with non-Match Saver manipulations on semi-automatic shotguns. The typical mounting location is just forward of the ejection port. This places, in effect, a ramp right in front of the bolt handle on most semi-automatic shotguns. If you attempt to charge the weapon at speed the way one would operate the bolt on other weapons with a protruding bolt handle (think M1 Garand, AK, etc) you can actually end up hitting the "ramp" of the Match Saver and overshooting the bolt handle entirely. I've seen this happen repeatedly in class with even very skilled shooters. Further, the gap between the bolt handle on your typical semi-auto and the Match Saver is small, leaving little room for error or reduced dexterity due to cold, gloves, etc.
It can also interfere with the process of getting another shell into the ejection port when loading from something besides the Match Saver itself. Granted if someone has finely honed reloads it is not going to be much of a danger...but I encounter very few people who have taken the time to finely hone that manipulation. This seems to be especially true for lefties who are already working at a slight handicap to the rest of us.
It is also a dedicated manipulation that, at best, works one time. For a dedicated three gunner that isn't a problem because they are spending considerable amounts of time working on their manipulations. Anyone who is investing the time and effort necessary to reliably quad-load their shotgun is not going to find the match saver difficult. It has been my experience, however, that most people using the shotgun for defense...even those who are pretty serious about it...are not practicing loading manipulations with anything approaching the frequency it requires to reliably master them. Adding a dedicated manipulation with no commonality to those used for the side saddle that's on their gun doesn't strike me as conducive to ensuring they can get through what's on the gun should it become necessary in an extraordinary situation where what's in the gun hasn't solved the problem.
They can be fast. And it is probably the fastest single load of a shell into the chamber of an empty gun that is possible...but, that being said, going from a side saddle is not really much slower and the side saddle is a more useful and realistic way to carry extra shells on the gun, IMO. I don't think that the slightly faster reload really justifies the drawbacks I've seen from Match Savers in use.
I don't recommend them. I certainly don't forbid them, either...but when they do show up in class and I see people struggling with them I make it a point to highlight the difficulty it is causing. I try to avoid being dogmatic about gear because generally speaking when folks are in class running their equipment they get the opportunity to see how well equipment decisions work out. Maybe my material is strange, but generally speaking when a Match Saver shows up the owner doesn't find themselves fond of it by the end of class.
As for the velcro style holders in the same location, I tried those as well and found that getting the shell out of them reliably to be tough. The options I tried weren't built like the Vang Comp shell cards and as a result they tended to die prematurely when working with dryfire and never gave me a real advantage in speed or a reliable result over using the Vang Comp side saddle.
And there again, we're talking about a dedicated manipulation for one or two shells versus one manipulation that will work for all the shells in a side saddle. If you like to dryfire and you don't care how many manipulations you learn not a big deal. Most aren't doing that obsessive level of training, though, and for them there's not much upside. All the options I tried allowed the shells to move a lot under recoil, too...so that fast load you are hoping for never really panned out because they wouldn't stick in a consistent orientation.