26-03 “Mike Who?”, My First A-Class Run! …And One Charlie Away From Losing My Mind 😂

[Brandon Breeze]

Well, this is a bittersweet one!​

I just shot my first-ever A-Class performance on a classifier, posting 82.6145% on 26-03 “Mike Who?”.

Naturally, I should be celebrating, right?

Of course not. I'm a competition shooter. We don't do that. We find the one thing we did wrong and obsess over it for the next three days (or weeks).

Here's how it went:

• Time: 6.16 seconds
• Hit Factor: 7.7922
• Hits: 9 Alpha, 1 Charlie
• Classifier percentage: 82.6145%
• Match classifier ranking: 2nd out of 76 shooters!

Not too shabby, if I do say so myself being 6 months into competitive shooting. Open Minor. Would be M in LO, CO, L, & P. No wonder everyone tells me to get out of OM, lol.

If that Charlie was an Alpha... the run would have worked out to approximately 86.06%. In other words, potentially an M-Class classifier performance.

I was literally two points away. Apparently, my shooting skills are improving faster than my decision-making.

The good news? This is my first A-Class classifier run, and I'm pretty excited about that.

Since “Mike Who?” is one of the new 2026 classifiers, I figured I'd share the run while people are still getting familiar with it.

Who's shot 26-03 “Mike Who?” already? How did you do?

 

[Joker67]

Congrats! Hard work paid off!

 

[Brandon Breeze]

Congrats! Hard work paid off!

Much appreciated, still a long way to go, but recognizing the wins along the way is incredibly important. Without celebrating the small wins, it could get discouraging relatively quickly.

Had a solid match overall for my current performance/skill level, just need to get more consistency across all stages. I think I was fairly consistent across this match, but I held back a bit since the classifier was the final stage of the day and it was going to be a bit on the warmer side by the time we got there (middle aged guy problems ).

 

[Gawernator]

What do all the terms mean

 

[Brandon Breeze]

What do all the terms mean

Hopefully I get what you're looking for:

Here's the Classification Breakdown GM are essentially the top ranked shooters in the world for USPSA. When you shoot USPSA classifiers you're essentially being compared to the best shooters in the world roughly speaking since there are other factors that are well above my pay grade.:



Here are the current Top 10 Open Shooters according to USPSA. Of these folks I've watched more footage of Christian Sailer and that dude is absolutely bananas:




Here is the example of my score in Open (left) compared to what it would equate to in Limited Optics/LO (right). Same time, same hits.

Hit Factor (numbers below) are your points score divided by your time. 9 Alpha, 1 Charlie. Alpha = 5 Points, Charlie = 3 points.
9 x 5 = 45
3 x 1 = 3
45+3 = 48 Points
In this case 48/6.16 seconds = 7.7922 Hit Factor. Take the Hit Factor and compare it to the Hit Factors required for each Classification below:

If that one Charlie were an Alpha that would be 50/6.16 = 8.1169 Hit Factor, which would have been an M even in Open.


Division abbreviations:
OM, I was using it as Open Minor, but I guess it could also mean Open Major.
LO = Limited Optics
CO = Carry Optics
L = Limited
P = Production

TLDR, my apologies. Let me know if I missed anything!