I was able to spend some time at the range today testing what ammo my 617 likes for Steel Challenge shooting. Reliability was the most important area I was concerned with.
I shot CCI Mini Mags, Blazer, CCI- SV, Eley Match, Federal Premium HV and Wolf MT.
The Mini Mags gave me 3 failures to fire out of 50 rounds. Blazer had only 1 FTF and had excellent groups. SV had 2 FTSs. The Eley Match had good groups and O FTF's.
The stand outs were the Federal Premium HV and the Wolf MT. Definitely on the extremes as far as power was concerned. Neither one had any failures and both shoot great groups. The MT proved to be best.
During all this shooting I didn't have to clean my cylinder once and had no sticky brass. It took 300 rounds of testing totally but at least I found two example of what will be my match ammo.