The New ISSF Air Pistol Finals Format

[B Lafferty]

https://www.issf-sports.org/getfile.asp ... 1.1.22.pdf

IMO, it should be titled How to Kill A Sport. Boring, IMO. Not worth watching at all.....and I've tried.
I emailed the following message to the ISSF.


"New Air Pistol/Rifle Finals Format

The new format is terrible. I've watched it, hate it and will not be watching any future competitions using it. It makes me wonder what recreational drugs were being used when this new format was created.
Brian Lafferty
USA Shooting Member"

[Ade C]

I don't think it's ever been a particularly interesting spectator sport has it?

[Grippy]

It's quite baffling. There appears to be no purpose behind the changes.

With the previous format change I understood why it was done. Starting at zero makes it closer and repeatedly narrowing the field gives more of a progression to follow. But it still maintained the basics and was comprehensible. Anyone watching one round of shooting could intuitively understand what was going on. Even if they are not familiar with the sport.

The new format is complicated for the organizer, complicated and arbitrary for the shooters (semi finals etc.), it completely breaks the usual scoring (you could win scoring a couple of zeroes as long as you shoot high tens) and it's incomprehensible to viewers. It's even incomprehensible to viewers that are target shooters but don't compete in finals (which is the majority). By the time you understand what is going on the scoring changes, or a new segment starts.

Who was this designed for? If there was a recognizable trade off I could maybe understand it. But it's just strictly worse. It's the kind of thing teenage wannabe game designers come up with where they think "adding more rules, stages and modes" somehow makes it more interesting.

The worst part in my opinion is that the finals are just an outright different event than the qualification. In qualification you have to maximize every shot and you have the time to do so. Time management is a relevant skill in qualification. But in the new finals you can outright write off some shots. If the other three competitiors got a 10 then a 9 and a 3 count the same. You could win with the lowest combined score as long as you shoot a bunch of high tens and a bunch of bad shots. The time management aspect is completely removed. Admittedly the time part already applied to the previous finals formats.

A further silly thing is that the "qualification" is what the majority of shooters will perceive as the main part of the competition, right? And realistically other shooters are also the audience for watching finals. The only mainstream attention these events get is a couple minutes every four years at the olympics.

I really want to know who this was designed for.

[Grippy]

I don't think it's ever been a particularly interesting spectator sport has it?

Exactly. It's literally a sport about not moving. Even as an experienced shooter you can't externally observe another shooters execution. The only way to observe the sport is by seeing numbers pop up on a screen. It's as appealing reading a spreadsheet. And no amount of convoluted rules is going to fix that.

At this point I'm almost hoping shooting drops out of the Olympics because all these distorting rules changes come off as a desperate (but incompetent) attempts of staying relevant as an olympic viewer event. The rules should be made to benefit the competitors, not some imaginary audience that barely exists once every four years.

The in my opinion most interesting to watch variation of this type of shooting is the German Bundesliga. Which is centered around bog standard 40 shot "qualification" courses. But it is more interesting to watch due to how the team scoring works.

[Xman]

The pervious method of qualifications of the top eight followed by the decimal scoring finals was so pure and simple given the need for decimal scoring for the "lack" of a "X" worked.

Why mess with a system that worked, was not broken, was easily understandable from the get go?

The new method has flaws and that is a given as I marginally know them. It may even allow for "dumping" shots therefor gaming the system if I read the previous posters comments correctly. It may have become a "game" of strategy rather than the skill of shooting centers.

"I maybe totally wrong"
Above used without permission of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of invention.

[Grippy]

It may even allow for "dumping" shots therefor gaming the system if I read the previous posters comments correctly. It may have become a "game" of strategy rather than the skill of shooting centers.

Well, there is never a reason why you'd want to shoot a bad shot. The way it works is that all current competitors fire one shot and the highest score gets 4 points, the second 3 etc. However what that means is that if three of them shot a ten and the last one messes up and hits a 7 it's weirdly not that bad? In the old finals formats (or the qualification) that would have been a big issue. But in the new one that 7 might be worth as much or as little as a 10.0. Which is just weird. I don't think there is much room for strategizing. It's just weird that in qualification you really need to be consistent and then in the finals the event is somehow more tolerant to screwups?

[B Lafferty]

I don't think it's ever been a particularly interesting spectator sport has it?

Exactly. It's literally a sport about not moving. Even as an experienced shooter you can't externally observe another shooters execution. The only way to observe the sport is by seeing numbers pop up on a screen. It's as appealing reading a spreadsheet. And no amount of convoluted rules is going to fix that.

At this point I'm almost hoping shooting drops out of the Olympics because all these distorting rules changes come off as a desperate (but incompetent) attempts of staying relevant as an olympic viewer event. The rules should be made to benefit the competitors, not some imaginary audience that barely exists once every four years.

The in my opinion most interesting to watch variation of this type of shooting is the German Bundesliga. Which is centered around bog standard 40 shot "qualification" courses. But it is more interesting to watch due to how the team scoring works.

Interest is relative to the viewer. For the non-shooting viewer the system needs to be readily understandable. The new system clearly is not. I have always found the old finals system zeroed with eliminations after the first twelve shots both easy to understand and at times quite exciting.

This is undoubtedly an attempt to make the sport more "exciting" to watch. The new format fails miserably at that, IMO. Of course, I also love to watch Olympic Curling* and I do enjoy watching slow chess. I draw the line at watching paint dry......

Looking at the ISSF channel on YouTube, it's not clear how viewership of the new format is going. In six months we should have some idea if viewership with the new format had dropped off or not.

* Assuming that I'm alive and mobile in four years, I will do my best to make it to Italy to watch Curling and cheer on Stefania Constantini.

[nmondal]

These are interesting changes.
They are progressing in the direction of 25 Rapid Fire Pistol.
I think they should just make anything above 9.5 a 1.0 hit and rest a miss.
In fact better, at finals only 10s should be counted.

I am certain there are not enough formally minded people in the ISSF.
One can actually prove this elaborate contraption and the above ideas are in fact 1-1.

[Grippy]

This is undoubtedly an attempt to make the sport more "exciting" to watch. The new format fails miserably at that, IMO. Of course, I also love to watch Olympic Curling* and I do enjoy watching slow chess. I draw the line at watching paint dry......

I spent a lot of time thinking about what makes sports interesting to watch in this context. And mostly concluded that shooting is just not a viewer sport. Intrinsically.

Curling and chess are clearly more interesting to watch. They are the kinds of sports where you as a viewer can observe the situation evolve, try to guess what the next move is and backseat strategize. In shooting that doesn't happen. The state of the game is always just a one dimensional number and the next move is always "try to hit a 10".

Things like downhill skiing also "just record a number and rank it" but there you can observe the execution. You can see someone take a wonky line and wonder how much time that will cost on the next split. Even golfing has a moment of suspense. You see the ball bounce and roll and wonder where it will end up. Not so with shooting. The movements and mistakes at decent level competition are imperceptible from the outside. Even if you were to stand right next to the shooter you couldn't tell. And if they score a bad shot you won't know why. All you see is a person standing still followed by an instant numerical result.

Maybe if coverage could at least contextualize how hard it is. That is the case for sports like gymnastics. The scoring is not particularly transparent for a casual viewer. But when you see it you intuitively understand that these are incredibly impressive skills being demonstrated. Target shooting coverage totally fails to do so. They never even attempt to show camera angles where you can see the targets in context and see how small they are. They always just show shooters from the front in goofy poses while magic numbers pop up on screen. Only people who dedicated time to this know how good a 10.8 or how bad a 8.5 is. To everyone else it's just meaningless numbers.

It can be interesting if you are invested in a competitor. But "it has a ranking that changes and you may want someone to win" is something every sport has. Even watching paint dry is fun if you do it with friends. That doesn't make the paint drying interesting...

By my ranting posts you can tell I'm really invested in this. Because I think target shooting is an amazing sport. For participants. How many other sports are there where you can compete at high level almost independently of age, gender or having some unique physical characteristics.

But for some reason the ISSF seems hellbent on leaning into the one thing shooting sucks at. Which is being a viewer sport. To the detriment of the participants.

[B Lafferty]

This is undoubtedly an attempt to make the sport more "exciting" to watch. The new format fails miserably at that, IMO. Of course, I also love to watch Olympic Curling* and I do enjoy watching slow chess. I draw the line at watching paint dry......

I spent a lot of time thinking about what makes sports interesting to watch in this context. And mostly concluded that shooting is just not a viewer sport. Intrinsically.

Curling and chess are clearly more interesting to watch. They are the kinds of sports where you as a viewer can observe the situation evolve, try to guess what the next move is and backseat strategize. In shooting that doesn't happen. The state of the game is always just a one dimensional number and the next move is always "try to hit a 10".

Things like downhill skiing also "just record a number and rank it" but there you can observe the execution. You can see someone take a wonky line and wonder how much time that will cost on the next split. Even golfing has a moment of suspense. You see the ball bounce and roll and wonder where it will end up. Not so with shooting. The movements and mistakes at decent level competition are imperceptible from the outside. Even if you were to stand right next to the shooter you couldn't tell. And if they score a bad shot you won't know why. All you see is a person standing still followed by an instant numerical result.

Maybe if coverage could at least contextualize how hard it is. That is the case for sports like gymnastics. The scoring is not particularly transparent for a casual viewer. But when you see it you intuitively understand that these are incredibly impressive skills being demonstrated. Target shooting coverage totally fails to do so. They never even attempt to show camera angles where you can see the targets in context and see how small they are. They always just show shooters from the front in goofy poses while magic numbers pop up on screen. Only people who dedicated time to this know how good a 10.8 or how bad a 8.5 is. To everyone else it's just meaningless numbers.

It can be interesting if you are invested in a competitor. But "it has a ranking that changes and you may want someone to win" is something every sport has. Even watching paint dry is fun if you do it with friends. That doesn't make the paint drying interesting...

By my ranting posts you can tell I'm really invested in this. Because I think target shooting is an amazing sport. For participants. How many other sports are there where you can compete at high level almost independently of age, gender or having some unique physical characteristics.

But for some reason the ISSF seems hellbent on leaning into the one thing shooting sucks at. Which is being a viewer sport. To the detriment of the participants.

The interesting aspect of paint drying grows dramatically after consuming one's second margarita.....chess can be made interesting for spectators with good commentary--Jan Gustafsson comes to mind.

It would make more sense to me if they applied the team competition model to the individual event. First competitor to reach 16 points wins.

[Mike M.]

I agree that commentary would be a Very Good Thing. Especially if you went to a finals format where each shooter fired one shot in sequence (to allow for commentary). But the simple truth is that the precision events are not terribly spectator-friendly.

What I find intriguing are the experiments being done with a falling-plate Rapid Fire event. Way back in the Ancient Days (the 1950s), Rapid was hit/miss scoring, so there's precedent. But to make any change to RF work, one criteria MUST be to shrink the target array and make it both more portable and cheaper. Something the average competitor can fold up and pack into the car. Targets the size of the black on a B-17 (precision target), not the big meatball.

[Grippy]

But what would you expect the commentator to commentate on? "Yep, he shot an eight, that's kinda bad. But we don't know why that happened nor can we guess what he is going to do to fix it. Lets just hope the next number is higher." riveting.

I claim commentary doesn't work for the same reason why it's boring to watch. There is nothing to observe and thus commentate on. In chess a commentator can point out lines, draw attention to threats that are less obvious etc.

[Azmodan]

i saw a last year or the year before that a competition where each finalist had a scatt mounted on the rifle (it was an air rifle final), and they displayed the scatt trace real time for all competitors.

something like that would allow the spectators to see the progress, movement and mistakes made by the shooters and make it more viewer friendly

[ojh]

Showing traces would be cool but it would also be a perfect excuse to get rid of the politically questionable projectile-launching and go entirely optic. Which I'm afraid is ahead anyway, after firearms and lead are banned.

[emre-nur]

Showing traces would be cool but it would also be a perfect excuse to get rid of the politically questionable projectile-launching and go entirely optic. Which I'm afraid is ahead anyway, after firearms and lead are banned.

It seems plausible that there will be advocates of the idea going all "optic".

[B Lafferty]

But what would you expect the commentator to commentate on? "Yep, he shot an eight, that's kinda bad. But we don't know why that happened nor can we guess what he is going to do to fix it. Lets just hope the next number is higher." riveting.

I claim commentary doesn't work for the same reason why it's boring to watch. There is nothing to observe and thus commentate on. In chess a commentator can point out lines, draw attention to threats that are less obvious etc.

THE ISSF channel has had a number of decent commentators who have worked with shooters in the discipline being covered. Arunivich (sp?) was particularly good. The commentators last year for the World Cup in Delhi were also good. Good commentators don't just focus on the shots being made. They add interesting "color" commentary if they are capable. That can make almost anything interesting.

[prowling]

IMHO a change for the worse, absolutely. I hadn’t really thought much about it before, but I agree with Grippy on the overall negative effect that being an Olympic sport has had on most of our precision shooting disciplines. Big-bore matches long gone. Running game, ditto. Free pistol ( that still stings to write) most recently dropped. The trickle down effect is them being dropped at International level competition, then National level, then they disappear altogether. All in the name of “spectator interest.”

There was NOTHING wrong or broken with the finals system as it was.

Bah. Humbug.

[Ade C]

I think we should see a return to this
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/646 ... mpic-event

[Grippy]

Free pistol ( that still stings to write) most recently dropped. The trickle down effect is them being dropped at International level competition, then National level, then they disappear altogether. All in the name of “spectator interest.”

That one is extra weird to me. In the ancient times I was in my country's junior national team and free pistol was a very relevant event for us. Last year only a single U21 athlete even competed in our national championships. The event being olympic should have no bearing whatsoever on the broader audience. It being olympic should matter to probably less than 100 people on the planet that have a chance of qualifying... and only once every four years. Is that really what motivated us random amateurs to compete? It just doesn't make sense.

It being dropped from Olympics has honestly made it more attractive to me personally. Exactly because it got rid of the finals. It's not like you need to resolve many ties in free pistol anyway. Especially not in national and lower level competition.

[prowling]

It being dropped from Olympics has honestly made it more attractive to me personally. Exactly because it got rid of the finals. It's not like you need to resolve many ties in free pistol anyway. Especially not in national and lower level competition.

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about trying to hold a little old-school match, if I could get a few people interested. I have a few free pistols, and anyone with an iron sight bullseye gun could join in as well. 10-shots on a paper target. Change it. Repeat 5 more times. Count center 10s as Xs. It has a simple, pure appeal to me.