FM Scoring

So now that you have started shooting 3 gun or any scored shooting event, how the heck does scoring work and how do I make sense of Practiscore when looking at Florida Multigun scores?

Florida Multigun scores are kept in Practiscore.com which handles all the back end math for us so we don’t have to do it by hand.  But the back end math is important when you want to try to figure out how you placed and how to get better and climb up the leaderboard.

Florida Multigun is scored using what is called Time Plus scoring.  There are quite a few variations of scoring but simply this method of scoring is the total time for each stage + penalties.  Every stage is scored individually and all the “scores or points” are added up for the entire day and the shooter with the most points at the end of the day wins. Simple….

Ok so let’s start from the beginning.  Stage 1, where you completed the stage in 30 seconds with penalties.  The best shooter on the day (A) finished in 22.5 seconds and the slowest shooter (C) finished in 45 seconds.  You get your points based on the percentage of the fastest time on that stage. So in this example you would get 75 points (22.5/30 = 75%), shooter A would get 100 (22.5/22.5 = 100%) and shooter C would get 50 (22.5/45 = 50%) stage points.  We calculate those percentages on every stage and then add them up to determine the winner. 

This is important as each stage is scored separately and winners of the stage can change depending on how you sort.  This is probably one of the most confusing points that new shooters have as they can see the scores “change”. The default “sort” by Practiscore is by overall which lumps all the shooters together.  As you start sorting by stages you can then select “overall” or by division.  If the overall winner is in your division then when you sort by division your percentage won’t change. If that is not the case then it would re-calculate based on the fastest shooter in your division (and that could be you!). 

So, now that we have scores from each stage we add up all the “points” to figure out the winner. We have winners from each division and we have an overall winner.  99% of the time the overall scoring will show the best shooters in each division and through the match but remember how each Stage is scored individually based on the top shooter (Overall or by Division).  Sorting score by Overall and Divisions can lead to some weird scoring and I’ve seen shooters place above someone in the Overall but when calculated by Division they end up in 2nd place.

I was able to find an example of this from our August ‘23 match: Adam and Daniel were in a nice battle in Open division. In the overall Adam was ahead at 66.61 and Daniel was 66.46. When we calculate based on Open division Daniel jumped to 76.91 and Adam was 76.50 giving the 2nd place to Daniel in Open division. So based on how those scores came out on those stages where the winners were different between Overall and Open division can change the percentages and move shooters up and down.

I’m not a big fan of the overall sorting and some matches don’t even publish them that way but we like to compete across all divisions so we keep it.  But if you are shooting a lower division, esp. Tac Ops just know that if you compare yourself against Carry Ops and Open shooters you are giving up a few trinkets that could help them lower their time and it’s not apples to apples.  

At Florida Multigun, we value each stage at 100 points (some matches might not).  Mostly our stages are balanced but that can create problems in scoring when it comes to penalties as a 5 second penalty is more valuable on a 20 second stage than a 80 second stage (almost double in that scenario).  That is getting into the weeds but I can assure you that someone out there at the match is doing that math.  

Short fast stages are more boom bust as there can be big swings in points based on a much smaller amount of time.  This is why sometimes you will see anomalies in scoring as there can be someone who finished higher than you with more “Overall time”.  It sucks but if you went through the data you’d find a stage or two that they might have bombed but they likely crushed a shorter stage and stole a bunch of points.

Scoring isn’t complicated and if you want to keep climbing the leader board it’s important to learn how scoring works. 

Shine