Hey Lowlight, I know it is a touchy subject and I am NOT asking you to name names. But the "grey-area" and cheating things your talking about that 10% of competitors are doing. what ARE those things? What should we be looking for? What should we be watching for or really keep an eye open for. You mentioned if you see it, SAY something. What kind of stuff are ppl seeing and not saying stuff about?
I CAN say things because I don't give a shit, and I'm not worried about upsetting anyone. I don't know what Frank thinks the grey area is. I know what I think of PRS matches though.
First off, they are fun and useful for building skill...but people that tout themselves as "PRS Shooters" can be absolutely insufferable. The whole game (IT'S NOT A SPORT) attracts a lot of very credible people, but also a lot of elitist assholes that think PRS is the biggest, baddest, most practical and hardest shooting sport around. Because it's a points race, and we can look on the internet and see who all the top shooters are. And we can go to Precision Rifle Blog and see "What the Pros Use" and obviously conclude that what they use is the best. (Nevermind the fact that companies basically pay to be well represented) And guys derive a huge sense of accomplishment out of just participating in it. Usually most people are well behaved at a match but go to any online forum and you'll see what they think of themselves in private. They think that all of the gamesmanship like 8oz triggers, attachments galore, and 26lb rifles are pushing marksmanship forward. They want to treat PRS like it's an Olympic sport but don't want to run it like one.
Second, the "grey area" is mostly due to the rules being pretty open ended. Some people look at the "grey area" as being part of the game, and others look at it as undermining the competitive nature of the game. It's both. Rifle matches are social events. Nobody wants to go to a match and be told that you can't shoot with your friends. Guess what? Having friends is an advantage.
For example, if I squad up with friends who are great shooters in their own right, and great at playing the game, and we work together, we can come up with pretty close to the optimum solution on every stage. Perfect real world example: one of the matches I shot had a stage where you had to shoot off a table-top and a stool. The shooter could put the stool on the ground, keep it on the table, and have it in any orientation they wanted. Every squad before mine had decided on some variation of the stool being on the ground and turned on it's side. I decided to flip the stool upside down on top of the table and put a bag on it; it was basically the same as shooting off of the table. I asked the RO beforehand if this plan was alright, and he didn't see a problem with it because he was like "The stage only says you have to shoot 5 off the table and 5 off the stool, and you get to pick the orientation of the stool." Technically I could have put the bipod on the stool and it would have been within the rules. We had a good laugh about it but I easily cleaned the stage and everyone after me did a lot better than the people before. Nobody had thought of it. I cleared it with the RO beforehand, but I am sure there are people who would have shot the stage first and asked questions later, and then complained to the match director that it was within the rules. Another example would be a "sitting stage" that I shot. I cleaned it by using a sling and actually being good at it because I shot a metric fuck ton of NRA Highpower so that's my bread and butter. Another Highpower shooter cleaned it as well. And then a whole squad of shooters cleaned it because a guy had an extra long bipod, and they stuck their feet out in front of them and put the bipod on their feet, and put a bag under the back.
Another advantage of being on a team/super best friends squad is that you can game the shooting order at matches. Maybe I am doing well, but my buddy is doing better, so I can shoot first and give him my wind call, and he can shoot right after me at a marked advantage over someone going at it alone. The same goes for spotting impacts: if I can put a guy behind me with a spotting scope and he tells me all of my shots were slightly low, I can edit my data to perform better on the next stage.
And then if you are on a team, you can also bully the RO's into basically giving you extra points. I already talked about how you can break the stage design. You can also get extra hits by having your super-best-friend spot for you as well. Put your buddy next to the RO, and on shots that the RO doesn't have to call, you just have your buddy verify that it's a hit, and usually the RO will give you the benefit of the doubt. Or just have your buddy be the RO and shots that he normally has no call for might actually be impacts that barely clipped the edge.
Is it fair? It's not fair to the new guy who expected this to be an individual show of skill. However it is fair in the sense that he can work with his squad in the same sense other guys work together. Part of the fun of going to matches for a lot of shooters is basically hanging out with their friends, as well as sharing knowledge. If you make the rules more strict by splitting up squads, and limiting communication, you also make the matches less fun. And it makes it harder for new shooters to get up to speed if we cut off communication about how-to-shoot a stage due to fairness. Making it an Olympic type environment would also make it less fun.
And it's not that this is necessarily wide-spread. Like I don't think that Team X is having guys go up and spot impacts in bad faith. But a whole squad of guys wearing the same T-shirt, and trying to win a $4000-$5000 prize, and all of a sudden it can start to look very bad. It just takes a few cynical people exploiting loopholes to ruin it. And RO's and Match Directors are going to be reluctant to call it out because Team X sponsors the match and donates to the prize table as well. And the matches are mostly funded by repeat customers. Go to more than 1 match and you'll see a bunch of the same people. And at the end of the day it doesn't matter if Shooter X places top 50 because of a few less than ethical points here and there. Because his direct competition Shooter Y is doing the exact same thing. And Shooters X and Y are the guys paying these $250 match fees over and over.
It's probably not the people that finish at the top that are the cynics either; it's going to be shooters that are just below the top that really want to be there that will be doing the shady shit. Like the guy with the erasable pen was someone I never heard of before in my life. The guy that is shooting 185 Juggernauts in tactical class this year is probably someone you never heard of.