how difficult would it be to actually spell out the divisions here alongside the acronyms? New shooters would appreciate not being required to have a rule book out and be looking up these to see where they fit. It’s not like electrons cost anything.
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Hi Ron,
Well, the sanctioning body stipulates how the divisions are listed.
If you are a match director you may go in and change the descriptions of any of the divisions. But if you are sending match results in for say, classifiers, I imagine it would get bounced back because your division listings won’t match corporate.
If you don’t want your new shooters having to go look in the rulebooks, you can always had the division names underneath the list of acronyms.
I’m just a guy trying to figure out what division I want to shoot in and seeing a bunch of acronyms is not making it easier. Especially when they are all rather similar. I expected that a practicscore webmaster might be able to adjust this.
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@Ron_Micjan if you aren’t sure which division is right. Pick any. Then ask the match staff when you arrive at the match. I’m sure they will be able to guide you.
The PractiScore does not run matches it provides a service to match directors and shooting sports to assist them with running matches.
As DJ said, these acronyms are what the IDPA sport is commonly using and this match registration form is just using the official naming.
If you aren’t sure what to pick, CDP, SSP, ESP, etc - having full names like Custom Defensive Pistol, Enhanced Service Pistol or Stock Service Pistol aren’t that helpful.
You need to check the rules for the sport and see what division your equipment comply with. See this page for more details and a link to the rulebook and equipment/division appendices IDPA Match Rules – International Defensive Pistol Association
thanks for the info, actually the spelled out names are quite helpful, they allow me to disregard several of the divisions and then take the time to look up the ones that are closest. My point to this entire post is to get the organizers to understand how opaque many of the acronyms are for new(er) shooters. I have shot one IDPA match 6 months ago and this week I had to go back and review a couple hours of rules etc to figure out what gun I want to bring and what division it fit into. The very first time I decided to shoot IDPA I was completely lost, now I’m only mostly lost. There are still things I don’t know for tomorrows match: How many magazines will I need? How many rounds are expected to shoot? How many rounds do I load in each magazine? Will there be reloads mandatory? What if I don’t have a holster? If I have a small concealed pistol like a P365, but it has an red dot, do I get bumped into Carry Optic division? I’m sure you all know the answers to these questions, but I can’t find the answers anywhere I look. I don’t even know if I am in the right place to ask these questions. But I started with support on the page I was signing up for the match on, (PS) just asking what all the acronyms mean and why the whole description wasn’t simply there. Thanks
You are making assumptions.
The PractiScore is not the organizer of the events. The match directors are. Also the match directors for many established shooting sports are operating under stipulations of the sport’s governing bodies.
The rules of the sports are published by the sport’s body and all competitors are expected to be somewhat familiar with them when participating in the events. Some clubs also offering some kind of orientation courses for those sports and you can always contact match directors for the event you are signing up to. The contact info is linked on the match signup page on PractiScore.
This is textbook expert blind-spot. I had no clue what these acronyms meant either when I made an account, so looked it up and this thread was the first result.
Practiscore is not the organizer: great - that’s fine. That doesn’t stop the web developer from just creating a dictionary that parses all the acronyms into something human-readable as another element on the webpage. No red tape necessary.
I’d imagine making the content more accessible is great way to make the sport grow.
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I’m here for this same reason, and my thoughts exactly.
There isn’t even a clear list of divisions in the actual USPSA rulebook - doing this the first time felt a bit like checking your shopping cart against a 122 page recipe with no ingredient list.
I will just put this here for the next person:
ISP - Iron Sight Pistol
ISR - Iron Sight Revolver
OSR - Optics Sight Revolver
PROD - Production Pistol
SS - Single Stack
CO - Carry Optics
OPN - Open Pistol
LTD - Limited Pistol
RFPI - Rim Fire Pistol Iron Sights
RFPO - Rim Fire Pistol Optics
RFRI - Rim Fire Rifle Iron Sights
RFRO - Rim Fire Rifle Optics
SGP - Shot Gun Production
PCCI - Pistol Caliber Carbine Iron Sights
PCCO - Pistol Caliber Carbine Optics
U - Unclassified
D - D Class (<40%)
C - C Class (40-59.9%)
B - B Class (60-74.9%)
A - A Class (75-84.9%)
M - Master (85-84.9%)
G - Grand Master (95-100%)
X - Expired
Preteen - age <13
Junior - age <18
Senior - age >55
Super - Senior age >65
Lady - gender on government ID listed as “Female”
Foreign - lack permanent resident status
Law Enforcement - current full-time LEO
Military current - active-duty military
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@Andrew_Terentyev you are complaining at the wrong place. It is not really PractiScore business to explain every aspect of the rules of every shooting sport. You need to bring your concerns to USPSA.
PS: even in your summary <40% of what? You still have to read and get yourself familiar with the rules of the sport you want to participate to.
OSR is not Optic Sight Rifle… It’s Optic Sight Revolver
ISR is Iron Sight Revolver
X isn’t used much anymore but usually is for competitors with expired USPSA memberships that don’t have an official class.
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My post was really agreeing with Fren’s statement that the acronyms would be a fairly trivial thing to build a dictionary around; and Practiscore could just add a tooltip so there’s zero impact to page/site layouts. The user profile settings seems to already expose a superset of all the possible values for the division field (e.g., you can choose both “PROD” and “Production” which mean the same thing).
This as an opportunity for Practiscore to improve the experience of paperwork used behind the scenes by sanctioning bodies, not a substitute for understanding the rules (by the way, the acronyms as far as I can tell are not all actually defined in USPSA, IPSC, or IDPA rule books).
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Being familiar with sport’s requirements, including requirements for individual sport’s divisions is pretty much requires to understand the rules.
But for PractiScore these division names don’t mean anything other than grouping competitors in the match results and sending these names as is to the sanctioning bodies (nothing to improve there).
There are over 70 different match templates in PractiScore used for a number of shooting sports. Customizing them all, so newcomers would be able to bypass reading the sport’s rule books is a huge task.
You are somewhat wrong on this part.
Eg. regarding IDPA:
For IPSC/USPSA no abbreviations are used (except for match results reports).
For SCSA (i.e. USPSA’s Steel Challenge) they have full names in the rule book, but their match template uses the abbreviated division names, so as their classification data, e.g. https://scsa.org/world-records
I think you may have gotten your request with sugar, but instead you used vinegar…
Thank you!!!