The Multi Target Match
A fair bit of feedback on the Multi-Target walkdown proposal. Most of it in favour of at least having the option. Even if your friendly match director does not take the opportunity of the potential flexibility this offers you can only lead a horse to water….
However flexibility does bring complexity and it was pointed out that a consistent scoring and countback mechanism was needed if this was to fly. Stats crews do have their own grumbles in this area. Believe me – algorithmic tangles will lead to disgruntlement in more places than the stats office.
So in order to offer the flexibility required a new score card is proposed which places slightly more emphasis on both shooter and Range Officer on the point and on the day.
Countback methodologies for many GR&P events when ties on bullet scores and X counts exist start with the furthest distance first mechanism. The theory is – shots from the furthest distances are counted with highest regard so ties can be effectively broken if recursed in this way.
In the case of a multi-target walkdown we are faced with the problem of breaking ties with 12 shots on each target. We no longer have the luxury of knowing when those shots were placed. The left hand target has 75% of its shots from the 25 and 20m lines so we have some leverage there.We can split ties on the left hand target perhaps. Recall, we are looking for operational flexibility, to be combined with statistical ease of computation. Hence the following proposal:
A new scorecard for the Multi-Target match which will record scores for either a Staged procedure or a Walkdown procedure. The countback process for whichever method will be as follows:
- Highest bullet score overall – followed by
- Highest number of Xs overall – followed by
- Highest number of 5s overall – followed by
- Highest number of 4s overall – followed by
- Highest number of 3s overall – followed by
- Highest number of 2s overall – followed by
- Highest bullet score on the Left hand target – followed by
- Highest number of Xs on the Left hand target
Using the new proposed scorecard stats crews will simply enter the left and right hand bullet counts into their difference engines. Competitors will have to do a little more work at the target depending on how the match was shot. At most – all shooters probably need to add up to 12, else ROs will.
We now end up with a consistent and feasible method of breaking ties however the match is shot based simply on a left and right hand target bullet count.
Comments – as usual – welcome.
Proposed Multi-Target Scorecard
