The results from the Limited nats are just as interesting as the Production ones, especially when taken in context with the other 2 nationals matches that just happened.
- 1st place in LTD is JJ Racaza. JJ won the Open championship earlier in the week (and was the only handgun shooter to "win" versus the winning PCC shooter, although they weren't competing by rule). He took 3rd in the Production game. Going 1, 3, 1 in the three biggest USPSA division nationals is insane. Those are very different games in many ways, and being able to toggle back and forth between them effectively is incredible.
- 2nd place was Nils Jonasson. He also shot the 2 earlier matches, though he chose Single Stack for the factory gun match (instead of production), and he won single stack. He "only" finished 9th in the Open match. So he went 9, 1, 2 in the course of a week. Also bonkers.
- 3rd place was Ben Stoeger in his first time shooting nationals in anything other than Production. He mentioned in the class that I took from him a couple of months ago that going "top 3" in both Production and Limited would be pretty cool; I guess he can now confirm or deny whether it is, in fact, pretty cool.
- Just eyeballing it, the correlation between overall time and place of finish among the top 16 was more linear/direct for this match than for Production. Racaza was the fastest by almost 10 seconds (at 275), which is gigantic. Nils was the 2nd fastest at 284, and the only other shooter to get under 290.
- Stoeger was 5th fastest at 295. The 2 guys in the top 16 who were faster overall were Shane Coley (last year's LTD champ) at 4th/291 and Blake Miguez at 8th/290. Both of those guys are very fast by even top 16 standards.
- Miguez racked up a fair number of M's and threw in a couple of NS's, so that's what happened there.
- Figuring out Coley is a little harder. Looks like he had one pretty rough stage (#15, which also played a big role in knocking Nils back from Racaza) at 43%, and a couple more in the low 70's.
- Stoeger did his "cruising the stage" thing through most of the match and never dipped below 74.
- After that, any out-of-time-order finishes are pretty easy to figure out by just looking at the M's column.
- Racaza took 10 stage wins, Nils took 4. Coley took 2, Ben took 1. It's the CW that stage wins don't matter that much, but when you rack up more than twice as many as your closest competitor, that's probably a good sign you're gonna come out happy.
- Most of the other stage wins were by guys who were very high in the overall standings. The closest thing to an outlier would be Randy Arrowood's (19th overall in the match) win on a 6-shot stage (smaller stages are known to be more sensitive to someone "hooking up" and getting a finish a little above their place in the match). Randy's really a Single Stack guy... and just a tremendously cool and nice dude. He's the GA section president and is a middle-aged guy with kids and a regular job and all that... pretty cool to see a guy in that kind of situation steal a stage win at nationals in a "foreign" division for him. He posts some hilarious content on youtube, too.
- A few takeaways:
- Charlie's don't matter in major scoring. No readily apparent relationship between number of C's (as compared to A's) and order of finish.
- The "cruise" strategy is a good one, because usually other people who are more aggressive will make a few big mistakes that derail them... but not always.
- Really good shooters are really good shooters, even when they change gear and divisions. The really elite guys are able to switch effectively between target-focused, major-scoring, SAO, high-cap shooting and iron-sighted, minor-scoring, DA/SA, low-cap shooting with shocking proficiency... and they can do it literally overnight.
- It's CW that only 2011's make sense for LTD, but 3rd was a Tanfo and 4th was probably a Glock with a big frame weight added to it.
