John Hearn’s Mississippi Casino Drill

I recently attended John Hearn’s Who Wins, Who Loses, & Why: Understanding Human Performance When Death is on the Line and Cognitive Pistol with Tactical Anatomy classes – great classes; everyone should attend. Karl Rehn of KR Training hosted the classes.

John introduced the Mississippi Casino Drill variation of the Classic Casino Drill that Tom Givens of Range Master originally developed. The classic casino drill is fired from five yards, uses the original casino target (see picture at the right), with a total of twenty-one rounds. The shooter loads seven rounds in their pistol and has two spare magazines with seven rounds each. On the signal, shooters engage target numbers 1-6 with the same number of rounds as the target number: e.g. one hit on the #1 target, two hits on the #2 target, and so on; reloading as necessary until all twenty-one rounds are fired. The shooter’s score is their raw time plus one second per missed shot or shot fired on the wrong target.

John’s Mississippi Casino Drill variation is fired from five yards, uses the original casino target or variations thereof, with a total of fifteen rounds. The shooter loads five rounds in their pistol and has two spare magazines with five rounds each. On the signal, shooters engage target numbers 1-6 with the same number of rounds as the target number: e.g. one hit on the #1 target, two hits on the #2 target, and so on; however, the shooter DOES NOT engage target #6. Like the classic casino drill, the shooter reloads as necessary until all fifteen rounds are fired. The shooter’s score is their raw time plus one second per missed shot or shot fired on the wrong target. John’s Mississippi version uses six fewer rounds so shooters can log more repetitions for the same round expenditure.

Rangemaster uses the Classic Casino Drill in many/most of their classes so naturally people practice the drill. That’s not the point of the drill however, Tom designed the drill to stress the shooter’s ability to perform the primary task of recognizing and hitting the target while simultaneously performing the secondary tasks of reloading the pistol and remembering what target to engage (and with how many rounds) after a reload.

So how do we maintain the drill’s purpose and preclude shooter’s from memorizing the engagement sequence? In class, John turned some of the targets upside down which did provide some variation.

I recently used the Mississippi version in one of my classes and tried some other variations which worked to keep my students motivated and precluded them from memorizing the sequence. For starters, I found that there are at least three version of the casino target available with the number/shape targets different in each version. That being the case, by turning some upside down you would have six variations. If additionally, you rotate some ninety degrees left and right, you have nine variations.

If you are an instructor and you have a mixed group of intermediate and advanced shooters in your class (it happens a lot), you can use white masking tape to reduce the outline of some targets or you could draw a line across some targets (diagonal or horizontal) and challenge the advanced students to make ½ of the hits in each half of the target. You can add a dummy round in one magazine. You can tell the students to shoot in sequence from one to five, five to one, or start with a number (e.g. three) and then shoot in ascending or descending sequences. There are probably other variations.

John mentioned a method for training alone using modified dice. Take one die and add labels for up and down--one on each face while leaving the other as is.  Roll the dice and shoot as indicated.  For example, if you roll an "up" on one die and a "four" on the other, start with target #4, then engage target #5, then target #1, and so on. 

John’s Mississippi Casino is a useful drill that accomplishes the goal of stressing the shooter’s ability to perform the primary task of recognizing and hitting the target while simultaneously performing the secondary tasks mentioned above. If we add the variations and modifications we can maintain the challenge for everyone.