By Iain Harrison, Top Shot Season 1 Champion

During Season 1 of Top Shot, I'd head to a local watering hole to watch the show on Sunday evenings with a few friends. Our weekly viewing parties eventually grew to around 150 people, all jammed into a local bar, hooting and hollering as characters on the screen gave it their best shot. This time around, the crowds are a lot smaller, but we're still meeting to discuss the action, pick our own personal favorites and analyze the shots as they happen, so I hope you'll join us online to add your voice to the throng.

Last night saw the 16 contestants meet officially for the first time. Some of them know each other from the competition circuit already and if they're anything like the Season 1 guys, most of them snuck out of the hotel when they were supposed to be sequestered during the casting process and headed to the nearest bar (yeah, there's a theme here). For the most part though, after they first encounter the entire field, the competitors have their guards up and are feeling each other out, trying to figure out each others' weaknesses while adapting to the this new and very foreign environment.

While certain aspects of Season 2 were instantly familiar to fans, right off the bat the producers threw the audience a curve ball, pitting the competitors against each other with a Sharps falling block rifle and a 6 moa target at 200 yards. A note on the first challenge; in an ideal scenario, the competitors would have had a sighter and then a shot for record, rather than just one round to count. You could see that variations in sight picture really played a huge part in the bullets' point of impact, with the majority of them printing low right—great to see that big chunk of lead arcing downrange though.

Nonetheless, having the competitors select their own teams was a smart move. Despite an exhaustive selection process, the competitors probably know more about each others' shooting skills than the guys behind the cameras. It will be interesting to see whether Jay's exhaustive interviews work in the long run. Seems like he strongly favored the competitive shooters while Chris Reed's laid back approach meant his team was packed with military guys.

The team challenge begged the observation that you shoot best what you shoot the most. Having World class USPSA shooters compete with a real 1911 pattern pistol, complete with thumbnail front sight, tiny fixed notch rear, stock trigger and awful grip safety was a real leveler and gave the guys with everyday guns in their safe a leg up. It also was a learning experience for the guys behind the scenes—shooting smooth spheroids with a hardball is a lot harder than it sounds in the production meeting, huh?

It should have come as a surprise to no one that Chris T. prevailed in the elimination challenge. The guy is one of the strongest IPSC shooter out there (he's on the US squad for the World Shoot in Greece this summer), so he's no stranger to coming up with a plan and sticking to it. Looked like he shot the entire challenge in single action mode despite it being slower and forcing him to break his grip on every shot, which kind of reinforces the point about shooting best what you shoot the most. Travis got to find out that an offhand comment can come back to haunt you—digital is forever.

In next week's show it looks like the pace is stepped up a notch. Thompsons, drum mags and paintball guns—can't wait!