We tried out a new format at the camp. I thank the 18 gunslingers that tested this format and Rodeo Romeo for letting us use the best facility in CFDA.
We shot Arizona Five with Rotation. I wanted to see if there was a enough time savings to justify using this format. What I found was that it took 1.1 minutes per shooter per round. We had 18 shooters and shot 6 rounds in 2 hours. To answer the questions I had posed in an earlier blog, the score sheets worked well, the shooters learned the format easily, there was no benefit on data entry stress, the sort was about average, and we could not get CFDA program to draw the rounds in advance.
My conclusion is that while the format would be good for practice, for an organized shoot the time benefit does not justify the extra work of preparing and using special scoring paper and training scorekeepers.
Gunfighter Rating: Whenever I can get my hands on score sheets I calculate the gunfighter rating of the shooters. This is helpful is in determining how good the sort is by a format. The gunfighter rating of a shooter is not affected by wins and losses. The top three shooters at the test shoot had a gunfighter rating of 1.17, 1.15 and 1.11. The top rated gunfighter finish 7th, the 2nd rated gun fighter finished 2nd and the third rated gunfighter won the event. The fastest gun there had a gunfighter rating of .89 and finished middle of the pack as you would expect. Whenever there is an anomaly such as the top rated gunfighter finishing 7th, I look for an explanation in the score sheets which I will detail below.
Being Prickly: The gunfighter rating is very useful in explaining why certain shooters finished where they did. It can benefit individual shooters in their quest to get better.
The top rated shooter had one bad match and then got caught by the luck of the draw. In his first match his gunfighter rating was .77 and then he shot 1.26 for the next five matches finishing with a 1.17 rating. In an Arizona Bracket shoot, you can survive one or two losses because of there is no elimination factor in this format but not three losses. After the first round he had two unlucky draws. He did not draw better shooters just drew shooters who got lucky shooting against him. Three losses moved him to Bracket B which he won finishing 7th.
The winner had a main match rating of 1.11, but when he got into the shoot offs his rating improved to 1.25. He shot both quicker and more accurate in the shoot offs. He won the event because he was the toughest shooter there. Since he has won two in a row, I think he has now learned that it does not matter how quick you are but how tough you are.
The gunfighter rating of the fastest gun there is informative. This gunfighter is trying to develop "a go to shot." When the gunfighter was slow shooting, the first two matches, the gunfighter rating was .57. In the next four matches, the gunfighter rating was .95 (including fastest shot of the event, a .353) for a main match rating of .89. I have been asking for some time "why." I remember observing with the Desert Master three years ago asking the same question.
For completeness, the 2nd rated gunslinger finished as you would expect 2nd.
Just because the test did not justify a new format does not mean it was not a success. You test not only to find what will work but what will not work.
Shooting in the Valley of the Sun. We shoot about 20 events using the Arizona Bracket shoot each year including two major jackpot shoots. It is popular and does a good sort. In some ways I think it does much better sort than the title match formats because 33% of the main match field has a chance to win whereas in a titled match only 5 to 10 % of the field has a chance to win. It is not unusual for the winner to come from well down into the field. You can overcome a poor match or an unlucky draw in an Arizona Bracket shoot.
"Boys, quick don't matter much if you don't hit that which you are trying to be quick about!" Virgil Cole
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