If you give me a 20 birds per hundred spot with a .410, I'll play for real money. Handicaps need some basis. How hard is the course? I shoot almost all my Sporting Clays with a .410. On a real serious setup I bump it up to 28 gauge. But understand I shoot tight chokes and rather quickly, so if I can take the bird within a decent range, in my window I want to shoot it in, I am not very handicapped at all. With my Sporting Clays .410, I broke 47X50 at 16 yard trap a month ago so a .410 works for me. I use 1/2 ounce number 8 or 8 1/2 at 1250 fps. Load has been tested and patterns really well in a couple 42's I like to shoot which are tight full choked .410s. Most shooters I see would do better with an ounce number 8's, 1150-1200fps with a improved cylinder choke with a 12. But people fall in love with either speed or heavy loads out of tighter chokes. The smoke looks good, when they hit the bird,s but I'll take a few chips as a bonus. I see so many people shoot over top of dropping or sinking birds, which a few they would hit with a slightly more open choke. Over the top and behind are 90% of the misses I see.
Most Sporting Clays setups are simple, close range setups, with decent windows to kill targets. If you make targets too hard, people wont come back to shoot. Reading the flight line and figuring your windows is the real challenge as you know. But for some, a five bird per 25 spot will not be enough and with some you might be giving them too much. On a hard setup most decent shooters struggle to get into the low 80's. I shot the Blue course at Elk Creek a couple months ago that had been setup for a registered shoot, with some difficult to very difficult targets. Same setup, just a few days later. There were some challenging targets but they all had a window which they could be broken in. It was often a narrow window, a fairly long shot or a bird which was doing three things at once, like canted to slide right to left slightly and curl, falling flight path and moving in and out of small windows for good shots in the trees. I scored 39 out of 50. If you want to give me 10 targets handicap I'll play for real money. Now if those same birds were just 10 more yards away I would struggle to break 25-30 out of 50. So easy courses maybe 1 for 20, 2 for 28 and 3 for .410 handicap but for real monster courses it wont matter that much to most.
