Texas Star, IPSC Videos from Oregon

The Dundee IPSC Classifier match in April had four classifier and two non-classifier stages. I wrote about one of the non-classifier stages earlier, illustrated with a video of SWMBO performing far above her C-Open classification would lead us to expect against a field of steel targets.
(April 27; "Steel Is My Friend")

The other non-classifier stage ("Belly Up To The Bar") featured mostly cardboard IPSC targets, but at the end of the run you were faced with a 9-shot array which could reasonably only be engaged from one position. That doesn't ordinarily present much of a challenge, but five of those nine shots were aimed at the 8" plates on a Texas Star target.

If you were shooting a limited-capacity class (eg: single-stack, Limited-10, Production) you came into the shooting position with no more than 11 rounds in your magazine.

It's a 25-round stage with a long walk down a target-rich alley, so even if you're shooting Open with a hi-cap magazine you have to ask yourself ... do I feel lucky? Can I shot the star with no misses (or few misses, depending on whether your magazine holds 25, 26 or 27 rounds) and risk losing time making a standing reload? Or do I try to find a place during the movement phase where I can reload without wasting as much time?

This turned out to be a very challenging stage if only because of the minimum round-count requirement to complete the course. The wide variety of cardboard targets on both sides of you while you walked down the alley invited you to treat it like a hoser-stage, but the change-ups from near to far targets and the proliferation of no-shoot penalty targets gave you plenty of room to screw up with a miss or a penalty ... or both ... if you yielded to the temptation to shoot on the move faster than your ability.

It was a 'hero-or-zero' stage, and while we didn't see anybody actually zero the stage, there were plenty of people who (see scores) were either too bold or too cautious on this stage.

You can watch videos of most of the people I was squaded with here, but this is really a celebration of "Bob the Nailer", who threw caution to the wind and ended up shooting the stage at an average time of just under two shots per second, mostly while moving, and racked up 118 of the available 125 points.

Go ahead, watch this movie, then go here to download (average filesize: 4mb) and view the rest of the crew try to play catch-up with Bob.