Like most winter evenings in and around St. Louis, last Thursday was an excellent night to be indoors, particularly indoors at a range enjoying our sport with 19 other awesome people. IDPA matches at The Range St. Louis West typically consist of 20-25 competitors running through three, sometimes four, traditional stages and one warm-up/drill stage.
While we typically prefer to do as much shooting as possible, with the current conditions being what they are, the right answer seems to be fewer stages with high round counts in favor of more stages with lower round counts.
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I shot, and won, the carry optics division. After all the shooting was done, I finished 1st overall and Most Accurate*, and I became absolutely convinced that the dot is a much more effective way of shooting both quickly and accurately in comparison to irons sights. Taking a look at the results supports this, because even with my minor error on stage 2 (top-notch recovery though), I was at least 6 seconds faster on the stage than shooters that would have made me suffer that had I been using irons.
In the end, I won because I’m a great IDPA shooter AND I leveraged a wicked advantage by shooting behind an optic against OTHER great IDPA shooters. I know there are several red dots that are great for competition use, but I am totally smitten with this Trijicon SRO.
Other great successes of the night:
Ryan finished a strong second, even with a tough time on Stage 2, won CCP.
Grant, back behind his 2011, Won ESP.
Brent knocked the dust of his range shoes with alarming speed (3rd in Raw Time).
Casey shot an exceptionally smooth match, proving that dry fire works.
Dustin was Most Accurate (Iron Sights).
John had a strong and confident last stage.
Most importantly, they say that in IDPA you are only really competing against yourself. No one embodied this more than Kirk and Mark, both of whom won their Divisions (CDP and REV respectively) by beating themselves.
*Most Accurate, in my opinion, should really be reserved for iron sighted handguns until we have multiple red dot handgun divisions then we can have two types of most accurate.