Matteo Campagna
ITEN
Menu
Menu

Shooting first or second in a set does not change the score

2 studies · 3 archers measured

ForContextAgainst202420262025, context, n = 32024, for2024, context
Each circle is a study: its position gives the year, its row whether it is for, against or context, its size how many participants it measured. Light circles are studies on other populations or without archers.

Only one study has put the question to the test, and it did so on competition data: 6,374 three-arrow sets from elite recurve individual matches, taken from three Olympic Games, the 2021 World Championships and a European Grand Prix, with the shooting order perfectly balanced (3,187 sets shot first and 3,187 shot second). On the score of the last arrow of the set the order carries no weight at all (t = 0.017, p = 0.986), even after accounting for the two previous arrows and the state of the match. That is also where the limit lies: the study looks only at the third arrow, and it does not separate the order from the information that comes with it, namely the opponent's score already on the target. It also helps to remember that nearly two sets out of three, 64.5 per cent, do not decide the match, so the sets in which order might matter most are a minority. For the team event, where the order of the three archers is a technical choice that coaches of the Korean national team say they make on the basis of statistics, no count has been published.

Also phrased as: "shooting second is an advantage"; "shooting first puts pressure on the opponent"; "shooting order in the set system"; "is it better to shoot first or second"

In practice

It is often said that shooting second is an advantage, because you already know your opponent's score, or the reverse, that whoever shoots first puts pressure on the archer who follows.

Evidence

Status history

  1. 2024 Reported The first count arrives, on World Archery's arrow-by-arrow data: 6,374 sets from elite recurve individual matches, with the shooting order perfectly balanced, and no difference in the score of the last arrow of the set between archers shooting first and second (p = 0.986). The same paper shows that nearly two sets out of three do not decide the match. It is a single study and it looks only at the third arrow: it points the way the claim does, but the evidence is limited.
  2. 2025 Reported Three coaches of the Korean national team, interviewed at length, describe collecting statistics after every competition for more than twenty years and using them, among other things, to decide the order of the archers in the team event. It is an account, not a measurement, and it concerns the team event rather than the individual one: it remains context, and the status does not move.

Related

Related articles

Research lines

Cite
APA

Campagna, M. (2026). Shooting first or second in a set does not change the score (Version 2). In Evidence Registry. Retrieved 16 October 2026, from https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/competition/shooting-order-in-the-set

BibTeX
@misc{campagna2026_ordineditironelset,
  author = {Campagna, Matteo},
  title = {Shooting first or second in a set does not change the score},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Evidence Registry, matteocampagna.com},
  url = {https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/competition/shooting-order-in-the-set},
  note = {Version 2; accessed 2026-10-16}
}

Other claims in this domain

See all claims on competition and scoring