Tony “GM26” Wong — Interview Notes

These are original quick notes I've put together when talking to Tony "GM26" Wong about his unique approach to training.

Text marked with double colons ::like this:: is comments from myself. Everything else is coming from Tony, unless it's a different specified quote.

I've covered them in this video as well:

Hate-Fueled Dry-Fire

Glock 26 is stupid – Practical Shooting After Dark Podcast

Wasted “Dot Dwell Time”

Pre-Interview Research on Forums

Sight recovery to the same target after 2nd shot is wasted time Yes, look at my Area 4 placement as an example. In particular, I wanted to try something very specific on stage 10 to gauge where I was losing time against Hwansik and Austin. I literally shot at the targets only once to see if "dot dwell time before leaving a target" was responsible for the difference. After I confirmed that, I implemented my changes for stage 11, and I think I would have gotten one of the best CO HF for that stage. Stage 11 would’ve been 96%, 2nd place CO and fastest time (Tony registered as Open), lost only by points.`

• Removing hesitation and getting closer to making overall stage time to equal sum of its components / chunks – Tony calls these things “fundamentals”.

Interview Notes

• “Am I waiting for the dot to settle?” Time loss theory.
• Tested theory on stage 10 area 4 2020 by shooting each target only once and on purpose zeroing the stage
• applied changes and almost won stage 11
• Tony uses time analysis for stage, knowing its timetable of ‘fundamentals’/components (chunks) – draw, reload, split, etc.
• Actual time on the stage (live) must be lower than the sum of chunks (due to blending) ::IMHO it should be equal with proper analysis, but you get the idea, remove hesitation::
• if it’s higher – there’s hesitation – ::solution “hesitation control” and power of mantras to be covered later ::

High Ambitions + Ego Control

So if I’m happy placing 96th at an Area match, it doesn’t matter how I place during locals

• coaches, don’t protect student’s ego

Cone of Accuracy

• area where the shot can connect
• every match less mikes (KPIs: penalties & followups)
• keep sending it until cone gets smaller than the target
• then make it smaller than Delta — Charlie — Alpha
• increase distance once in the Alpha consistency
• increasing speed shouldn’t be an option, since you’re already at max speed

Synthetic (classifiers) vs Real (Field Courses) Performance

• Tony stopped shooting doubles in practice
• Eric Grauffel and Maria Guschina don’t practice static drills (MG actually starts with them, but then goes onto short and then onto bigger stages)

Dry-Fire with a Banana

• Tony was out of the country and didn’t have a gun and dry-fired with a banana for 8 months
• you can’t squish it
• Ron Avery’s pliable grip theory
• ::IMHO, this is just not 100% grip and strength modulation::

Secret Par-Time for Draws

• when teaching a student – set a par time for draw, but don’t tell them the time
• idea is to remove self-induced limits from the equation

  Remove people from what they think they know

Growth Mindset – “Believe in Yourself” meaning

• most people chase “reasonable” or next-step improvement
• most coaches try to set safe expectations
• safe advice = safe shooting pace = stagnation
• consistently decent hits = BAD = not reaching
• you can’t learn if you don’t make mistakes
• ::”Stay hungry, stay foolish” Steve Jobs quote and this mindset is core principle of Deep Practice IMHO::
• “I’m not going to allow someone else’s limitations become my own” – Tony
• Must believe in a state that isn’t current
  • up to delusional levels – like imagining winning world in open division with Glock 26 with Irons
  • coaches, make student believe as soon as possible
  • ::Khabib (MMA Fighter): “I knew I was the Champ before I was the champ” – another example ::
  • ::Power of Imagination/Visualization & Almost complete delusion. Improvement through practice. Practice as a Balancing Feedback Loop – coming soon blog post and will be covered extensively in my upcoming book.::

Breaking through Plateaus

• secret par-time for draws
• How your groups looked at first in doubles? When did you improve the most? M-class who plateau usually shoot countless alphas. ::Especially in Carry Optics.::
• People think they need to maintain their level
• “I don’t want my groups to look like alphas only” – Tony
• Consistently decent hits = plateau
• Make people believe as soon as possible

Pre-Aiming through Walls

• worry about prepositioning, not pre-aiming
• reverse the walkthrough, don’t do the kongo-line
• ::IMHO, the idea is to build your mental representation of the stage and define its critical parts with increased precision. Reversing kongo, or figuring out positions then connecting them together, is just different ways to do that. Kongo is only useful when you have everything already figured out, like before the match. That’s what all GMs do. Then they do Kongo just to program an already existing plan into the subconscious. Noobs just follow that blindly and have bad plan programmed or re-programmed and a lot of noise in their mental representation of the stage. ::

Ben Stoeger’s class – Doubles

• When Stoeger first saw Tony at his class put his G26 on, he thought it was a joke and asked him to put his “real gun” on. When Tony said it’s his real gun – Ben looked at him like Tony was retarded.
• When everybody was doing doubles drill on the line – Stoeger would come to a shooter, observe them and give some advice / corrections
• Stoeger comes to Tony, looks at him shooting doubles, looks at the target, at Tony shooting doubles. Says “Huh” and moves to the next shooter. No feedback given.

Draw

• Tony always sees a streak, not a perfect dot
• optimize for consistency, not time
• 1.2 match draw ::actually I disagree with this now in fact, instant jumping-into-action draw and fast first splits might dictate speed mindset for the whole stage, but we’ll cover this later in Blog’s and Book’s “Focused. Fearless. Fast” chapter.::

Tony’s First Time Shooting

• loaded 5 rounds per mag
• took long time between the shots
• avoided bad reps from the start – tried shooting through the same hole with perfect technique

Making cops & Timmies shoot competition

• 2nd match is the hardest
• team of buddies – squad them all together, without anyone experienced, use dedicated RO to enforce safety and rules