Time Plus and how fast is fast enough?

[Mr_White]

USPSA, where you can shoot fast enough to make up for poor hits. I have seen it done and have been beaten at major matches because of that fact. (Coming in second to someone that has a few misses and a hit on a non-threat is hard to understand, but it happens)

...

Time plus always leaves room for improvement and for someone to be on top.

You have a lot more and higher level competitive experience than I do. So far, I have found that I cannot slack off one bit on accuracy in USPSA. Sometimes I don't do well because of a dumb plan that causes a slow time, but usually my failures seem directly related to bad shooting. I'm not very far into the USPSA journey though.

With you for sure on the open-ended nature of time-plus. PAR times can be useful sometimes too, but usually I dislike having an artificial limit on speed in the form of fixed times.

So with regard to time-plus scoring, how severe do you personally like the 'plus' part to be? IDPA, KSTG, GSSF (different target though), other? More or less punitive?

[LangdonTactical]

So with regard to time-plus scoring, how severe do you personally like the 'plus' part to be? IDPA, KSTG, GSSF (different target though), other? More or less punitive?

That is a really good question and I am not sure I have a good answer? I have very little experience with the GSSF rules and scoring. But I have shot a bit of IDPA and a very little KSTG. I tend to like IDPA just a little more with the half second per point down, but I like KSTGs rules with misses and hits on non-threat targets. I am OK with the KSTG scoring up close, but as you add in distance it tends to force you to shoot slower than I think you really should. For example, I think KSTG is 1 second for each point down. So if you shot two C's on a target in 2 seconds at 20 yards, you would have been better off taking 4 seconds and shooting the two A's. If someone was shooting at you, I think the two C's in 2 seconds would be much better. As long as you follow up with a few more C's and A's and D's or whatever was required to get the job done (falling back on there is no such thing as shooting someone a little bit). Not saying that either one is right or wrong.

I don't know that there is a perfect answer here? Straight IPSC hit factor rewards speed a little too much in my book. I also know that the original IDPA scoring was .30 seconds per point down. But they decided that that was too heavy on speed and went to .50 seconds.

It also depends on the targets you may be using. I feel the IPSC target has a very large A zone on the body (too large), while the A zone in the head is very small. The KSTG target works quite well and is a good compromise. The PTC target is really nice as it give you all different size targets to shoot at as well as nice 3x5 head box and a nicely located 8" circle in the body (the IDPA targets body circle is a little low I think. If you using a target with smaller max scoring areas, you may need to adjust the time you lose for points down.

Again, I don't have the answer. I know that TLG and others struggled with this a great deal when working up the rules for KSTG.

Ernest

[Mr_White]

...I have very little experience with the GSSF rules and scoring...

...I am OK with the KSTG scoring up close, but as you add in distance it tends to force you to shoot slower than I think you really should. For example, I think KSTG is 1 second for each point down. So if you shot two C's on a target in 2 seconds at 20 yards, you would have been better off taking 4 seconds and shooting the two A's. If someone was shooting at you, I think the two C's in 2 seconds would be much better. As long as you follow up with a few more C's and A's and D's or whatever was required to get the job done (falling back on there is no such thing as shooting someone a little bit). Not saying that either one is right or wrong.

...Straight IPSC hit factor rewards speed a little too much in my book...

Although the shape of the target is different, GSSF scoring is essentially more than twice as punitive as IDPA for shots outside an 8" circle. Accuracy is far more important than speed in GSSF, by a ton.

That's a great example you give with KSTG - I am not picking on KSTG - it's a good illustration of the dynamic that I certainly feel. It might cost a lot of time to get a little accuracy and a little accuracy loss might be quite reasonable, as in your hypothetical. The time may or may not be available to lose depending on the situation - just like the accuracy loss may or may not be acceptable depending on the situation.

I can see your point about hit factor in IPSC/USPSA rewarding speed too much if we are talking about Major caliber scoring. Shooting Minor, especially in a division that allows Major scoring, removes that dynamic right quick for me though. Or so I think. I am new enough to USPSA that I am a bonehead sometimes with the game mechanics.

[GJM]

This is exactly where I was headed with this whole conversation.

Where time plus really shines is it rewards you from going as fast as you can while keeping in control of the outcome. Like both IDPA and KSTG scoring, speed is very important, but you cannot shoot fast enough to make up for poor hits either. Unlike USPSA, where you can shoot fast enough to make up for poor hits. I have seen it done and have been beaten at major matches because of that fact. (Coming in second to someone that has a few misses and a hit on a non-threat is hard to understand, but it happens)

That being said, one has to start somewhere and there has to be standards of performance that are considered acceptable.

I know that when I was very training hard to win competitions years ago, I knew how long it would take me to do any given task. Draw to a difficult shot, easy shot, movement, reloads of almost any type. I knew what my push times would be and what my safe times would be for almost any given task. Training was often geared toward improving those specific times while maintaining a very high level of accuracy. I knew all this because I used a timer for most of my training sessions. Not all of it, like TLG says, there is a time a place for slow fire with no time limit. But that was the bulk of my training focus.

I also like using the par time drills, such as the ones on Pistol-Training.com. They are a great gage, and can be modified to suit each person’s skill level. Most of them also really focus on accuracy at speed, which is what we are all striving for.

But I think as some point you have to run drills and focus on what the timer says. As ones skill level goes up, the little improvements in time are much harder to come by. For example, going from a 2 second draw to a 1.50 second draw comes much easier than going from a 1.25 second draw to a 1.15 draw.

For me it comes down to this. I want to train to move and shoot as fast as I possibly can, seeing what I need to see for any given shot. All while not having to make decisions about grip, stance, sights, trigger. I need to be thinking about what/who needs to be shot, where they can be shot, where I should be moving to, who else is in the area in front of or behind the intended target.

I think this comes from pushing speed in practice. Speed with accuracy as a gage = time plus.

So therefore I think this is the way to get the level of skill up for an individual or an elite team. Elite teams are very competitive, but if most of them can max or come close to maxing their qualification course of fire I think it puts a cap on how far and how hard they train. Time plus always leaves room for improvement and for someone to be on top.

Ernest Langdon

I use absolute times not for win/lose, but to motivate me and also show me what is possible. Origami, for example, is my prime bench mark, although he is a bit of a sandbagger by often posting his scores late in the week. Basically, I adjust my target times off of him by adding .25 for a 1-2 shot drill.

(Here is how I come up with that hit factor. Origami shoots appendix versus my OWB, so that gives him .15. He is also a junk carry SME so that is another .15. He uses a cheating gun, the 34, so that is worth .025. Finally, he uses special, slightly shorter Champion shirts that he buys online from Target, which is worth another .025. On the other side, I am 20 years older than him, making me smarter, so I deduct .10, making the total adjustment .25. Make sense?)

[Mr_White]

I use absolute times not for win/lose, but to motivate me and also show me what is possible. Origami, for example, is my prime bench mark, although he is a bit of a sandbagger by often posting his scores late in the week. Basically, I adjust my target times off of him by adding .25 for a 1-2 shot drill.

(Here is how I come up with that hit factor. Origami shoots appendix versus my OWB, so that gives him .15. He is also a junk carry SME so that is another .15. He uses a cheating gun, the 34, so that is worth .025. Finally, he uses special, slightly shorter Champion shirts that he buys online from Target, which is worth another .025. On the other side, I am 20 years older than him, making me smarter, so I deduct .10, making the total adjustment .25. Make sense?)

Late in the week posting = range availability for live fire is what it is. I can dry fire when I want, but can't always shoot when I want.

G34 = cheating gun, lol. It's only cheating if you don't actually carry it...

Hey, I buy those shirts in the store!

First I thought you had crazy math but then I got out the calculator and see that it adds up as you presented it.

[LangdonTactical]

You have a lot more and higher level competitive experience than I do. So far, I have found that I cannot slack off one bit on accuracy in USPSA. ?

You can prove it on the range in practice. Shoot an el prez at a solid pace to get all A's, then turn around and shoot it again like WFO at a pace that will just get everything on paper. More than likely the WFO run will have a higher hit factor. The deal is, with practice and skill, the WFO run and the solid all A's run start to get close to the same speed. So for the Dave S. and Robert V. type guys, there is very little difference in times. That is why they are so, so great.

Ernest

[rob_s]

Where time plus really shines is it rewards you from going as fast as you can while keeping in control of the outcome. Like both IDPA and KSTG scoring, speed is very important, but you cannot shoot fast enough to make up for poor hits either. Unlike USPSA, where you can shoot fast enough to make up for poor hits.

I have beat a lot of people at both IDPA and USPSA strictly on time. I'm not shooting at the same level you are, but in many cases I can shoot faster, and shoot more rounds, than people that are focusing solely on accuracy. Sometimes I can beat them with the same number of rounds fired but just doing so in less time.

First place SSP sharpshooter, plus I beat the whole field of Experts in SSP.
http://tssaidpa.us/wordpress/wp-cont...012-12-221.pdf


First place SSP Marksman, plus I beat the whole field of Sharpshooters and half the Experts. Note that in this case I have nearly double the points down of the SSP Sharpshooter winner, but a lower overall score.
http://tssaidpa.us/wordpress/wp-cont...2012-11-24.pdf

[ToddG]

1) How do people learn/improve? Is it better to only try things you are absolutely capable of, moving a tiny increment at a time, or to go balls to the wall.

I think it's a mistake to look at this as all or nothing. There are times when making small incremental pushes will turn in the results you want. There are times when going "balls to the wall" will break you through a plateau you thought was unachievable. But most often, something in the middle is best. You don't want to rest on your laurels regarding speed but neither do you want to get too far into the habit of shooting so fast that you miss a lot.

My general standard for most of my practice is that I want to hit 90% of my high% shots and 100% of my low% shots. But there are times when I push the low% speed, knowing I'll get misses, because that's one aspect of improvement.

2) Why do we miss -- because we are going too fast or because we mess up some aspect of grip, trigger, sights unrelated to pure speed?

Again, it's not either/or. First, a lot of grip/trigger/sight problems occur because someone is going too fast. But people also make those mistakes even when they're not going fast because of some other factor. It could range anywhere from bad lighting to a mental error to distraction.

3) What is the trade off between speed and accuracy in defensive shooting?

General consensus among the people I trust the most when it comes to "combat accuracy" is that rounds that aren't doing serious damage might as well be doing no damage at all. Peripheral hits might make someone bleed out in 15 minutes rather than 60, but that doesn't do us much good during a 15s fight.

Shots that get fired without meaningful impact on the target waste both time and ammo.

4) Are par times more useful when you are responsible for a group of shooters versus improving your own skills?

PAR times for groups of shooters are beneficial because they establish a standard and they're much easier to administer.

PAR times for individuals are beneficial only when the PAR pushes you. If we set up an El Prez and told folks to do it in 20 seconds, most would have no problem getting all A's and it wouldn't have much training value. Set the PAR to 5 seconds and again it would have limited training value... though for an obviously different reason.

That's basically the sum total of this discussion: a PAR is about how fast you can do something with 100% hits, while Time Plus sets some arbitrary allowance for misses. Like I said above, I think both approaches have their place in individual training. Using the FAST as an example, I can't tell you how many people I know who say they've got a consistent 6-, 5-, or 4-something FAST "except I miss a head shot or two." That's not a 6-, 5-, or 4-second FAST. When SLG and I were shooting it once or twice every single day, we didn't score it as Time Plus. You either got your hits or you failed. For what I want to accomplish with my shooting, I think that's a much better standard. But when you turn it into an evaluation of lots of shooters, ignoring the difference between a 4.5s "fail" and a 15.5s "fail" doesn't make sense.

5) How do we define consistency? Are we talking about the ability to shoot a task cold, on demand, or being able to repeat something like shoot a 3x5 10 times in a row?

I think consistency is a pretty straightforward concept. To me, it covers both of those things: something I can do cold and something I can do repeatedly on demand.

Is there any tactical relevance to repeating the same task over and over.

I don't think I understand the question. No, you're not going to have to draw ten times in a fight. But if you can't draw properly 10 times in a row on the range, that doesn't speak well to your chances to pull it together in a fight, does it?

I find it highly interesting that the Rangemaster Core Handgun Skills Test uses Hit Factor (points/time) as its scoring method. It might be said that the designer of that test has more direct experience than most when it comes to producing civilian students who very successfully defend themselves from deadly criminal attack.

There are two disparate reasons why Hit Factor fell out of favor. Well, three actually:

1. It is complicated and requires a calculator; less of an issue these days since every cell phone is a calculator.
2. It rewards speed at non-shooting tasks (moving from point to point; setups; etc.) that may not have any relevance to what is supposed to be measured.
3. It's what IPSC uses, and anything IPSC must automatically be gamey & inappropriate for tacticalness.

Hit Factor (vs Time Plus) it what makes IPSC more of a race & athletic event than IDPA because in those games there is often a lot more going on than just draw & fire. Looking back at some USPSA match video I have, I'd say less than 25% of the time on many stages is spent actually drawing, aiming, & firing the gun. A lot is spent getting out of, over toward, and into shooting positions. We can debate whether those things have practical value but I don't think anyone would argue they're three times more important than shooting speed & accuracy.

Like GJM, I think my sweet spot isn't necessarily where I am getting 100% hits to the most desirable target zone. But this also goes back to using your brain and paying attention to the situation at hand. There are times that no less than 100% hits to a small target are acceptable due to foreground or background issues. That's by no means all the time though.

I certainly wouldn't claim to put a number on it, but I feel like I get Rogers' point about precision shots/guaranteeing hits. I usually feel like I have to slow down a lot to truly 'guarantee' the hit.

This is where the difference in philosophy comes in and why I, at least, look for 100% on low% shots most of the time. It's why I'm more concerned about getting the tough shot when I need it than edging a hundredth off the easy shot. (not to say you do the opposite, obviously!)

With no time limit?

Correct. For the purposes of who's coming to my class, I am much more concerned about marksmanship than speed. The class is mostly about building speed without giving up accuracy. But if there is no accuracy to begin with, time spent building speed is wasted.

I am OK with the KSTG scoring up close, but as you add in distance it tends to force you to shoot slower than I think you really should. For example, I think KSTG is 1 second for each point down. So if you shot two C's on a target in 2 seconds at 20 yards, you would have been better off taking 4 seconds and shooting the two A's. If someone was shooting at you, I think the two C's in 2 seconds would be much better. As long as you follow up with a few more C's and A's and D's or whatever was required to get the job done (falling back on there is no such thing as shooting someone a little bit).

Interesting take. As you alluded, SLG and I spent a ridiculous amount of time working out the scoring system even though it seems simple enough on paper now. I totally see where you're coming from and it's a valid point. I'm just not sure there's a practical way to have a scoring system that switches the degree of penalty as the target gets farther away.

The flipside is that practically speaking, I don't think two C's will physically incapacitate someone under normal circumstances. As such, getting two ineffective hits in half the time doesn't seem like a good tradeoff. Let's face it, that's one of the "tricks" to the IDPA Classifier: going at a pace at the 20yd line where you get reasonable hits in good time instead of slowing down for all good hits.

The flipside of that, however, is that KSTG has a pretty serious Failure To Neutralize penalty because two Charlies will not count as a neutralized target. So if someone really shot all C's on a target, even if he saved a couple of seconds in points he'd still give up 5 to the FTN. It would be interesting to go back and plug in 0.5s/point and a 10s FTN to past match scores, just to see what difference that would make.

The flipside of that, though, is it rewards the fast A-C over two A's. And that was something we specifically didn't want.

Like I said... making a decision about scoring was a lot harder than it looks from the outside.

I have beat a lot of people at both IDPA and USPSA strictly on time. I'm not shooting at the same level you are, but in many cases I can shoot faster, and shoot more rounds, than people that are focusing solely on accuracy. Sometimes I can beat them with the same number of rounds fired but just doing so in less time.

That's how scoring is supposed to work, isn't it? If you go fast enough compared to the other guy that you overcome the accuracy deficit (whatever it is for a given game), you beat him. I've beat guys who were slower but more accurate; I've beat guys who were faster but less accurate; and I've been beat by a whole bunch of guys who balanced the speed/accuracy equation better than I did for a given game.

[jetfire]

I use par times almost exclusively for training, I have certain performance benchmarks that I want to hit in the long run, and intermediate goals on how to get there.

So, for example right now I can get two rounds into a 3x5 card from 10 yards in about 2.5 seconds very consistently. I can throw a hoper run out there and do it in under 2.25 sometimes, but that's not consistent.

So a training progression using pars would go like this:

• End goal: 2 shots in a 3x5 card at 10 yards under 1.75 seconds
• Current Performance: 2.50 seconds
• intermediate goal: under 2.00 on command

For something like 2 shots on a 3x5 card, I also break it down into whatever its base components are - a draw and a follow up shot. If I've found that issue is the followup shot, I'll work on shooting quick shots from an aimed in position at the dot. If the problem is the draw, I'll work on single shot draws with a decreasing par time.

When I'm looking at standard drills like the 99 Drill, if I get to the point where I'm regularly scoring 95s or better, I'll shrink the par times to push for more speed. I like making pars smaller and forcing myself to manipulate the gun faster.

[rob_s]

That's how scoring is supposed to work, isn't it? If you go fast enough compared to the other guy that you overcome the accuracy deficit (whatever it is for a given game), you beat him. I've beat guys who were slower but more accurate; I've beat guys who were faster but less accurate; and I've been beat by a whole bunch of guys who balanced the speed/accuracy equation better than I did for a given game.

You're taking my post out of the context of the portion of the post I was responding to. A post was made implying that one could not make up for poor accuracy with speed in IDPA or that it was harder to do, which (A) I don't think is true, although I once did and (B) there are too many other variables to be able to compare the two.

what was posted was, to quote (again) the relevant portion to keep this in context

Like both IDPA and KSTG scoring, speed is very important, but you cannot shoot fast enough to make up for poor hits either. Unlike USPSA, where you can shoot fast enough to make up for poor hits.

Which is clearly not the case given the links I posted, and which you appear to also disagree with.