The Classified Matches

And their breakpoints

We classify into divisions the most popular GR&P events. Various opinions exist about how many divisions there should be and where these divisional breakpoints should lie. However we currently have what is defined.

The current philosophy is to build a hierarchical pyramid of shooters with top X class shooters forming the pinnacle and up and coming A, B (and C and D) class shooters climbing this virtual monolith.

The overall intention is to create an environment in which everyone has a chance to achieve their personal goals and compete against others of a similar ability or experience. It also produces a general comparative measure against which to gauge individual progress and improvement by promotion through the classes.

As the years have progressed scores have generally got better. Everybody who shoots a classified match has their score entered into the national database. The raw data this creates allows the breakpoints to be defined. Over the last few years this has been based on scores data going back the best part of 20 years. Some people think this skews the data slightly as we will have scores in the data-set from people who no longer shoot any more.

One method of overcoming this is to use a sliding window to only analyse scores data from the recent past in order to come to a more realistic conclusion on where fair divisions should be placed. Doing this for the last five years – looking back at scores for the last five seasons only – has slightly changed the class breakpoints as shown below.

Timed & Precision 1 (T&P1)

Timed and Precision 2 (T&P2)

Multi-Target (M-T)

Phoenix A

The 1500

Advancing Target