Frequently asked questions

PRM — Precision Rifle Matches — is an independent platform for precision rifle clubs. A club gets its own page, builds its own matches, runs its own seasons and leagues, and keeps its own data. A club sets its own classes, its own rules and its own entry fees.

It covers the whole match day, too — the match book, registration, squadding, check-in, weigh-in, the scoring pads, a live board and the paperwork afterwards.

Any signed-in shooter can start one. From the Clubs page you create the club with its name, its location and — if it has one — its waiver. You choose whether the club is public or private and how people join: open, by request, or by invitation only.

Followers follow from the club page — it is free and is not paid club dues — and staff are given their roles (owner, admin, match director) from the roster.

The page is live and its match links work from the moment the club exists. What waits is the platform's reach: a brand-new club stays out of the club directory, the world map, search and the public match list until a platform admin approves the listing. Sending proof the club exists — a website, a sanctioning-body listing, a lease, a letterhead — moves that along, and it can be sent when the club is created or later from its own settings.

Every club shows what it has to show for itself. Its page carries a standing — Verified or New — beside how long it has been around and how many matches it has actually run, counted from its finished matches. A club the platform has seen proof of reads as Verified.

Clubs can also be reported by shooters. Enough independent reports inside a short window take a club out of the club directory, the map and the public match list automatically while a platform admin looks at it. Nothing is suspended when that happens — the club's page, its matches and its links keep working, and it goes back the moment it is restored.

To enter a match, yes — an entry has to belong to someone. Browsing doesn't: club pages, upcoming matches, results and the live board are all public, and each one can be shared as a plain link.

A finished match gets its own results page — the podiums, then the full scored roster — at a link that opens without an account, with a Share results button that copies it for a group chat.

Publishing a match carries a small one-time publish fee, charged by card when the match goes live. Entry fees are the club's own and go to the club, not to PRM — no cut is taken from them.

A match moves through five states: draft while the book is being written, registration while entries are open, squadding once the desk is working, live once scoring is running, and finalized once results are posted.

Around those sit the desks — check-in, squadding, weigh-in and payment — plus the scoring pads on the stages and the live board everyone can watch.

One of four things, and the Publish step names which.

The match needs at least one stage a shooter can actually be scored on, and at least one division to award a podium for.

A match cannot go on the calendar until a shooter can find the club and reach somebody about it, so the club needs a street address that places on the map, a contact email and a contact phone. Filling them in clears it on the same save — there is no approval step — and the block links straight to the club's settings.

The last is the platform's publish fee, charged by card the first time a match leaves draft. Once it is paid, that match publishes free forever.

Managing a match — the book, the roster, publishing, the desks — is limited to the club's owner, its admins and the match's directors. Range officers get the scoring pad and nothing else, scoped to the stage or squad they were put on, and they can call a ceasefire.

Shooters see the shape of the day: the stages, the round counts, their squad and the board.

Yes. A match can be set as blind, and then the courses of fire are never published — not even on match day. Shooters and visitors see the shape of the day, while club staff and the officers assigned to a stage or squad read the full detail on their own tools.

Squads are built in the squadding desk or, if the match allows it, chosen by the shooters themselves. A squad can be given a start stage, a capacity and one or more officers, and the desk can rotate the firing order so the line keeps moving.

Squadding and per-stage officers are two separate ways to staff a match, and a match uses one or the other.

Most matches take volunteers. While the door is open the match page carries an I'll RO card — tap it and your name goes on the list, and you can take it back off at any time.

Being on that list does not open the scoring tools. The match director places you on a stage or a squad from the RO sign-ups desk and grants you the score pad, and if the slot is already full the match can hold you on an RO waitlist until a place opens.

The two assignments work differently: an officer on a stage scores every squad that shoots there, and one on a squad scores that squad on every stage it walks. Either way the pad is scoped — you only ever see what you were assigned.

Say it on the spot first. The range officer attaches a protest note to that stage's score, and the match director sees exactly what happened and on which target — far easier to sort out while the squad is still standing there.

When it needs a ruling rather than a correction, the shooter lodges a formal protest from their own entry on the match page: what it is about, and what happened. The window is the arbitration period — while the director's clock is running a protest can be lodged, and once it closes it cannot. A match that never opens one takes protests until it is finalized.

Some matches charge a fee to lodge one, set by the director and shown on the form before it is sent. It is returned if the protest is upheld and the club keeps it if it is denied. The director rules either way with a reason the shooter reads, and the whole record stays on the shooter's own entry.

Seven. Precision Rifle is the one point per steel hit; Hunter 2-1-0 and PRM Hunter 3-1-0 are the two ladder styles; Blackjack Challenge (KYL) is the rack; Cascade Scoring is the relay that pays by distance and clock; Extreme Long Range is the distance-times-shot-order ladder, cold bore included; and Time-Plus scores the clock — a stage is a run's time plus the seconds a team gives away.

Any of them can be run centerfire or rimfire, and the style belongs to the whole match — it locks once a single card is on the books.

A Hunter match ranks shooters inside classes rather than one open field. Each class carries its own rule — a weight window, a power-factor floor, whether the OEM-suppressor credit comes off the weighed weight — and a class can be set to group and rank on the day without earning season points.

Team Hunter pairs two shooters on a single run time, entered once and stamped on both cards. A weight handicap ladder can be applied from the match's own settings.

The 3-1-0 style goes further: the rifle itself is part of the score, levelled against a reference rifle by a five-part equity read off the scale — the weight band, the recoil term, a production-rifle bonus, a factory-ammunition bonus and any suppressor credit — summed and held inside a cap. Weigh and chronograph every rifle before the first shot; the scale is what scores, not the claim on the entry card.

Blackjack Challenge (KYL) is shot as a rack of targets, each rung worth its own points. In advance mode a hit pays the rung and moves the ladder on, and a miss burns a round while the shooter stays on that target — the string ends when the rounds run out, and whatever was already earned still pays. In bank mode the shooter keeps going until they choose to bank what they have, but a miss zeroes that rack.

A cleared rack can pay a bonus, extra hits on the smallest target can pay more, and an optional per-string timer is used for the tiebreak.

ELR is the style where the distance itself is the score. Every target carries a distance, and a hit pays that distance times a multiplier set by the round it went down on — five times the distance on the first shot, down to one on the last. A first-round hit at 1,800 yards is worth 9,000; a fifth-round hit on the same target is worth 1,800.

The match sets its own shot ladder, and each target's string is the opening rungs of it. A course can also open on a cold bore target — a single shot on a cold barrel, paid at the target's own multiplier rather than the ladder — and a distance can carry its own clock, a stop-after rule, or a minimum hit count a shooter has to reach to move on to the next one.

A match scores one of two ways. Common ELR pays the target's own distance; King of 2 Miles squares the distance and divides by 3,000 first, so 1,500 yards opens at a base of 750 and a first-round hit there pays 3,750. The match director picks the mode, and every other rule reads the same on both.

A hit is worked out from the distance squared over 3,000, times the multiplier its shot order carries — so a first-round hit at 1,500 yards pays 750 × 5, or 3,750.

The board ranks on the furthest distance reached in an unbroken run of hits first, with the match score behind it, and the score itself can be placed in the tie-breaker chain.

Three house rules can be switched on. A soft weight limit, where a rifle over the ceiling costs its shooter points off the match score — 10,000 a pound over by default. Extra shots for advancement, which pay nothing. And disregard after failure, where a shooter marked out short of a distance keeps only what they held when the match ended.

Everything else is shared with Common ELR: the ladder, the string, the cold bore, the stop-after, the minimum hits, the clock and the tie-breaker order.

A division and the rifle. Every ELR division carries two ceilings — the ready-to-fire weight a rifle has to be under, bipod included, and the caliber it may not go over. Out of the box those are Light at 26 lb and .338, Heavy at 50 lb and .50, and Tac-Hunter at 16 lb and .30, and a club can set its own list. You pick one when you enter, and the entry card shows what each one allows.

With the division you declare your rifle's weight and caliber. That is a claim, not a measurement: the card reads it against the ceiling of the division you picked and warns you if it is over, and it never refuses the entry. The official weigh-in at the desk replaces your figures with the measured ones.

A rifle that comes out over its ceiling at the scale goes to the match director, who settles it one of two ways — kept in the division you entered, with a note, or moved into a division the rifle fits. Either way your own entry says which way it went.

If the match takes teams, entering also asks who the entry is: your own, or a team. A team is one entry and one card carrying its own roster, the shooter first and then a spotter or a wind coach, and the points it earns are the team's. A match can be individuals only, teams only, or mixed, and on a mixed field the director decides whether the two boards are ranked together or apart.

Time-Plus is scored on the clock rather than on hits. A stage is one run on the officer's shot timer, and its score is that raw time plus the seconds the team gave away — 30 for each target it failed to neutralize, 60 for each it never engaged and 10 for each procedural or no-shoot by default, all set by the match and overridable per stage — less any delay credit the officer records. The total is the stage's adjusted time, floored at zero, and the lowest total wins.

A match is scored either shooter by shooter on individual clocks, or as teams on one clock: one time, one set of penalties and one adjusted time for the whole team. Teams are built from entries already on the roster, and every member has to be checked in before the team's card opens.

It runs one open division, with no classes — civilian, military and law-enforcement teams compete together, and the board ranks every team purely on performance. There is no rifle card, no weigh-in and no weight handicap.

A stage can carry its own par time, and the match decides what going over it is worth: the calculated time stands, a fixed penalty is added, or the stage is a DNF. A stage with no par time is never judged against one.

No. A season runs one of the six points styles, so a Time-Plus match is not linked to a series. Its own board is the record — ranked on the lowest total adjusted time, with the fewer penalty seconds settling a level total and the earlier confirmed last stage settling that.

Everything else works as it does on any style: the roster, the check-in desks, confirmed cards locked against everything but the match director's override, the audit trail, and the printed packet.

On a Blackjack Challenge or Cascade match, yes — if the director turns the entries switch on. One shooter may then hold more than one entry, one per category: the course is shot again and scored on its own card, and every entry takes a seat and owes the entry fee like any other. A shooter can never hold two entries in the same category.

The entry form only offers the categories a shooter is not already in, so a withdrawn or disqualified entry frees its category back up. A second entry is filed by category, so a match awarding no categories takes one entry a shooter however the switch is set.

However the club already collects: cash at the range, or a Venmo handle the club lists on the match. A club that connects its own Stripe account can also take card payments online, and card payments can be switched off per match or per club.

Whichever the method, the desk records the entry as paid, pending or comped, and a match can require payment before check-in.

One caution before you send anything: a club's own handles stay hidden until the club is verified or has run its first match. Until then the match page offers cash at the range or card on the club's connected account, and says why.

A match can offer pricing tiers under the standard fee — youth entries, paid club members. A tier that needs confirming only holds its price once a staffer has vouched for the entry at the desk; until then the entry owes the standard fee.

A club can also sell extras on top of the fee — a lunch, a match shirt in the size you pick, extra ammo. Each one has its own price and a cap on how many one shooter may take, and a shooter picks how many when they enter, so the desk knows what to order and what to hand over.

Entry fees go to the club. Card payments settle into the club's own Stripe account, not PRM's, and a club that only takes cash or a transfer app never has to connect anything.

On the scoring pad at the stage — by the officer running it, or by the shooter if the match allows self-scoring. Targets are marked one by one, and every entry, change, confirmation and reset is written to an audit trail with who made it and when.

A Time-Plus card is different: it is a clock and a set of counters rather than targets, and it lives on the Time-Plus Scoring pad. The officer types the time off their own shot timer, taps a counter for each failure to neutralize, failure to engage and procedural, and confirms the adjusted time — which is what the board reads.

Yes. The board is a public, read-only feed of the standings, refreshed as cards come in. It carries scores, places and stage breakdowns — never entry fees, addresses or staff notes.

Yes. Every finalized match has its own results page — the division podiums first, then the full scored roster — at a link that opens without an account. The Share results button on it copies the address, and the link carries its own preview, so it reads as that match rather than the platform's front page.

Results only appear there once the match director has finalized the match. Before that the page says they aren't posted yet.

A card that can't be sent is held on the device, the pad says so, and it can be sent again the moment the signal comes back. Nothing is lost, and the desk can see which cards are still outstanding.

No — PRM is software, not a governing body. It doesn't run a tour, award national points or police a rulebook. It's the tool a club uses to run its own matches and its own league, with its own classes and its own rules.

No. A league or a season on PRM belongs to the clubs that run it — the clubs set the rules, host the matches and own the standings. PRM keeps no championship, tour or series of its own.

A season is a points table. A club keeps its own, a league runs a championship across several clubs, and a club can be in both at once. Best-N decides how many of a shooter's matches count — the rest are dropped — a finale can score at a multiplier, and a qualifier can be required before anyone reaches it. The table recomputes every time a linked match is finalized.

When a season ends, archive it: the table is written exactly as it finished and stops moving, so a later score change cannot rewrite it. Starting the next season from it carries the rules over — style, divisions, categories, best-N, multiplier — with no matches and a blank table.

No. It doesn't drive range hardware or shot timers. It's the match book, the registration and desk work, the scoring pads and the board — the paperwork and the numbers, not the steel.