Pistol Drill Standards: 20 Benchmark Drills in One Table
Pistol drill standards are scattered across forum posts, out-of-print books and the memories of instructors who learned them from someone else. This page collects twenty benchmark drills in one table: the distance, the round count, the number you have to beat, and — the part almost nobody publishes — who actually set that number.
That last column matters more than it looks. Some of these standards come from the person who invented the drill and are fixed. Others are range-floor convention that has hardened into fact through repetition. Knowing which is which changes how seriously you should take a failed run.
20 benchmark drills in one table
All distances in yards. “Clean” means every round in the scoring zone the drill specifies — a fast run with a miss does not count as a run at all.
| Drill | Dist. | Rounds | The standard | Set by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bill Drill | 7 | 6 | All six in the A-zone. 3.5–5.0 s carry-ready, 2.5–3.5 s competitive, under 2.0 s elite | Bill Wilson |
| FAST | 7 | 6 | From concealment, clean: under 10 s Intermediate, under 7 s Advanced, under 5 s Expert | Todd Louis Green |
| El Presidente | 10 | 12 | 10-second par, all hits down-zero. 7–10 s is competitive practice | Jeff Cooper |
| Failure to Stop (Mozambique) | 7 | 3 | Two body, one head, all in zone. 2.5–4.0 s carry-ready, under 1.5 s elite | Cooper, after Rousseau |
| Dot Torture | 3 | 50 | Clean 50/50 before you are allowed to move back to 5, then 7, then 10 yards | David Blinder |
| 10-10-10 (The Test) | 10 | 10 | Ten rounds, ten seconds, scored on a B-8. 90+ out of 100 is the pass mark | Ken Hackathorn |
| 5×5 Drill | 5 | 25 | All 25 inside a 5-inch circle, five strings of five, each under 5 seconds | Gila Hayes, via Claude Werner |
| Casino Drill | 7–25 | 21 | 21 rounds in 21 seconds, all A-zone; misses add 5 seconds each | Tom Givens |
| 2+2 on Two Targets | 7 | 4 | Two on each target, all four in the A-zone, 5-second par. Scored 20 points a rep | USPSA practice standard |
| 3-Second Head Shot Standards | 5 | 9 | 7 of 9 hits in the head box, every string at or under 3 seconds | Ken Hackathorn |
| Accelerator | 7–25 | 12 | 8-second par, IPSC scoring out of 60: 48 passes, 54 is good, 60 is clean | Ben Stoeger |
| The Humbler | 25 | 5 | Five rounds in 10 seconds at 25 yards, scored on a B-8 out of 50 | Range convention |
| Walk-Back Drill | 3–25 | 10 | No clock. Record the farthest distance at which every round stayed in the zone | Range convention |
| First Shot Drill | 7 | 1 | Draw to a single A-zone hit in 2.0 seconds | Defensive convention |
| 1-Reload-1 | 7 | 2 | One shot, slide-lock reload, one shot — both A-zone, under 4 seconds | Competition convention |
| Strong Hand Only | 7 | 5 | Five rounds, one hand, all A-zone, 5-second par | Range convention |
| Dot Torture Lite | 3 | 20 | Four dots, clean 20/20, same 2-inch geometry as the full version | DrillLane, after Blinder |
| Bianchi Plate Rack | 10 | dry | Six sight pictures in sequence: 2.3 s freestyle, 2.8 s strong hand, 3.5 s weak hand | Dry-fire convention |
| Two-and-Two Reload | 5 | dry | 1.8-second par for two presses, a reload and two more | Dry-fire convention |
| Draw to Sight Picture | 5 | dry | 0.7 seconds from the beep to a sighted, two-handed hold. No trigger press | Dry-fire convention |
Three of the twenty are dry-fire standards, deliberately. A benchmark set made only of live drills is one you will test four times a year, and four data points a year is not a training record.
Published standards versus range convention
Ten of the twenty rows trace to a named person who built the drill and stated the standard: Bill Wilson, Todd Green, Jeff Cooper, David Blinder, Ken Hackathorn, Gila Hayes, Tom Givens and Ben Stoeger. An eleventh, Dot Torture Lite, is our own cut-down of Blinder’s drill, and the table says so rather than borrowing his name for it. Those are fixed points. If you shoot a 4.9-second FAST clean, you are an Expert by Todd Green’s scale, and no instructor gets to move the line.
The rest are convention. Nobody published “5 rounds strong hand only in 5 seconds” — it is simply what a generation of ranges settled on as a reasonable ask. Convention is not worthless; it is consensus, and consensus is usually about right. But treat it as a target rather than a verdict, and do not let a convention-based failure convince you that you have a problem.
Where the tiers say “carry-ready” or “competitive” rather than naming a person, those are our brackets, derived from widely cited times for that drill. We say so on each drill page rather than dressing them up as something they are not.
One name in the table causes more confusion than the rest, so it is worth separating here. There are two different 5x5s. The one in this table is the compact standards test shot at 5 yards on a 5-inch circle, five strings of five rounds with a 5-second par, scored by counting hits. Bill Wilson’s 5×5 Handgun Skill Test is a different animal: 10 yards, an IDPA silhouette, four strings totalling 25 shots, scored on cumulative time with half a second added for every point down, and classified from Grand Master at 15 seconds or less to Novice at 50. If someone quotes you a 5×5 time, ask which one before you compare it to yours.
Four drills that cover the whole skill set
Twenty benchmarks is a reference, not a program. If you want a quarterly test that fits in one range trip and leaves nothing important untested, take these four:
| Drill | Rounds | What it isolates |
|---|---|---|
| Dot Torture | 50 | Pure fundamentals, including one-handed. No clock to hide behind |
| Bill Drill | 6 | Recoil control and grip at speed. Nothing but the clock |
| FAST | 6 | Draw, precision cold, reload — the three things that break under pressure |
| The Humbler | 5 | Whether your accuracy survives past conversational distance |
Sixty-seven rounds, four numbers, and between them they will find whatever you have been avoiding. Shoot them cold, in that order, before any warm-up. A benchmark taken after fifty rounds of tuning up measures your best day, and your best day is not the one you are training for.
Recording a score so it still means something in March
A time without its conditions is not a benchmark. These are the four fields that decide whether a score from today can be compared to one from six months ago:
A score you cannot use
- “Bill Drill: 2.9”
- Best of eight attempts
- Hits “mostly in the A”
- Different gun each time
A score you can
- Drill, distance and target named
- Cold first run, marked as such
- Hits counted by zone, clean or not
- Gun, holster and concealment recorded
Concealment is the one people leave out, and it is worth 0.3 to 0.5 seconds on anything that starts from the holster — enough to move you a whole bracket in this table. The details are in pistol draw time benchmarks.
For the scored drills rather than the timed ones, hit factor — points divided by time — lets you compare a 12-round drill to a 6-round one, which raw times can never do. That is the whole argument in hit factor explained.
One more thing that quietly invalidates scores
Half of these drills are scored against a printed target, and a printed target is only a standard if it printed at the right size. An A4 file sent to US Letter paper with fit-to-page enabled lands at 94.1% — every scoring zone 6% small, every score quietly harder than the one you are comparing yourself to.
Every DrillLane target carries a 1-inch calibration mark in the footer for exactly this reason. Measure it once per printer. The full explanation is in how to print shooting targets to exact scale.
Build a session from any of these twenty with the plan configurator — it gives you the round count before you buy ammunition — and log the runs in the DrillLane app, where the standard for each drill is already attached to the score.
Sources
- Every row links to its drill page, where the full course of fire, the scoring rules and the attribution are set out at length.
- F.A.S.T. tiers and penalties come from Todd Louis Green’s write-up on pistol-training.com: over 10 s Novice, under 10 Intermediate, under 7 Advanced, under 5 Expert, with a clean sub-5 run twice in a row earning the coin.
- Dot Torture is credited to David Blinder and was popularized through pistol-training.com, which carries the same attribution.
- Bill Wilson’s 5×5 Handgun Skill Test — the 10-yard one — is published by Wilson Combat as a one-page PDF carrying the course of fire, the time penalties and his classification brackets.
- Where the “Set by” column reads convention, no individual published the standard — it is settled range practice, and we label it that way rather than inventing an authority for it.
- Distances, round counts and par times in the table are the values stored on our own drill pages, which is what the configurator and the app use.
FAQ
What is a good pistol drill standard to start with?
Three cover most of the ground: a Bill Drill under 5 seconds with all six in the A-zone, a clean 50 out of 50 on Dot Torture at 3 yards, and 90 out of 100 on the 10-10-10. Pass all three and you have a defensible baseline in speed, precision and accuracy under a clock.
How often should I shoot benchmark drills?
Quarterly for a full set, and always cold, before any warm-up. A benchmark shot after fifty rounds of tuning up measures your best day rather than your normal one. Keep one drill on a monthly cycle so the trend has enough points to read.
Which pistol drills have officially published standards?
The FAST (Todd Green), El Presidente's 10-second par (Jeff Cooper), the 10-10-10 and the 3-Second Head Shot Standards (Ken Hackathorn), the Casino Drill (Tom Givens), the Accelerator (Ben Stoeger), Dot Torture (David Blinder), the Bill Drill (Bill Wilson) and the 5x5 as taught by Gila Hayes and Claude Werner. The rest of the table is range convention, and we label it as such.
What is the hardest standard on the list?
Two compete. A clean Dot Torture at 10 yards demands a cone tighter than the black of a B-8 at 25 yards, held for fifty rounds including one-handed strings. Todd Green's coin required a clean sub-5-second FAST twice in a row, and very few shooters ever earned one.
Can I compare my time on one drill to another?
Not directly. Times only compare within the same course of fire. For the drills scored on points, hit factor — points divided by time — normalizes the length away and lets a 12-round drill be compared with a 6-round one.
Turn this into a session
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