Der P8ntballer Classroom hat eine neue Lektion online: Der Titel ist schon verheissungsvoll, "Won In 60 Seconds", versucht euch zu erklären wie man ein Paintballspiel so dominiert das es in kürzester Zeit zu Ende ist.
Won In 60 Seconds
Who wants to spend hours sparring on a paintball field when you can blast the hell of your opponents in 60 simple seconds. pgi unveils the tricks of the trade…
Back in the day, when there were actually 20 players on the field at once and dinosaurs walked the earth, if I told you that games would be over in 60 seconds or less, you probably would have laughed at me. Nowadays, you see it happen at almost any X-Ball game and even some 7-Man games. It's definitely a powerful sight and it really makes a Screw You statement to the other team when you just roll them over in such a short space of time. I have actually seen many games below 30 seconds and even seen a five-on-five end in less than 15 seconds. So how does a team beat another team so quickly? How can you prevent your own team from getting flattened faster than yesterday's road kill? Is it luck? Is it how you set out your game plan? In truth, it's many different things working together that make it possible, so read on and I’ll show you how you can do it…
There are many different factors that help to create those really great fast scoring matches. Start off by walking the field and get to know the shooting lanes and make sure you scout the other team. What do I mean? In both 7-Man and X-Ball, you should watch the other team play so you can see where they go on the field. In 7-Man it can be crucial, as you will often see teams follow a certain pattern. Remember, they will be scouting you too and it's always possible that they'll change their game plan based on how you play the same field.
Either way, even with a team that changes their breakouts a lot, you can usually find some sort of a pattern. For example, the other team might always send four of their seven players or three of their five to different places on the field. Don’t get caught up trying to second-guess those moves, because they'll usually have the remaining guys going to the same bunkers consistently. So if you know that a player almost always goes to a specific corner then you might want to stack a couple guns on that spot to get a good percentage kill and ignore the rest. When I say good percentage kill, I mean that if they go to that spot say, 90% of the time, and you stack that bunker with two or more shooters, the chances are good that they will go there and you will shoot them – at least if you shoot straight and have been practicing your sweet spotting drills.
So you shoot one off the break – so what? That doesn’t mean we win the game in under a minute, right? Well, remember I said there are a lot of factors involved? Well, shooting someone off the break is one of them.
Decisions, Decisions
A big factor that plays a part in a fast scoring game is where you go off the break. Remember what I said about scouting the other team? If they like to sit in the middle and shoot lots of lanes off the go, taking very little ground, then you don’t want to send a lot of your players running out right into their guns. You've got a decision to make. You could mirror what they are doing with the same amount of shooters and try to outplay them (although this probably won’t get you too many kills off the break or a fast scoring game). A better option would be to push very hard up the middle, trapping them in their primary positions. If they don’t take a lot of ground and like to shoot, this will mean that their primary bunkers are not too far from their starting point.
When you push up the middle of a field (especially in X-Ball) there is a huge X that blocks their sweet spotters from landing one on you, but even in 7-Man you can usually fish your way up the center using other bunkers to block off the sweet spotters. Normally the other team is shooting out at the tapes anyway. If they stay more towards the center of the field (not breaking out to far bunkers) and you make it up the middle, they can't fill out, which traps them in the middle and allows you to dominate. Once they figure out that you have one or two guys right up the center, they usually look to find out where they are. This allows your other players to make quick bumps out to the further spots as the guns are taken off the tapes. These wide moves really trap them and open up an opportunity for you to finish them quickly.
Alternatively, there are times when the other team runs more and you might be confident to keep more shooters in the center, try to pick off a couple and then move quickly. Remember though, the same situation I posed a few moments ago can happen to you. If they change their plan and decide to come up the middle, it might be you that ends up with the 30-second loss.
You'll sometimes come across a bunker that, if you can take it off the break, allows you to make a fast move to a secondary bunker even further up the field. Then, due to the way the bunkers are set up, another bunker will block this secondary move off from the other team. A player going for the far spot increases the chances of him getting hit dramatically, but sometimes you have to take risks to get the big reward.
There's no I in team
To achieve the quick game you have to really get to know your teammates, work together, learn to move quickly and keep moving until someone stops you. If the guy in front of you goes up the field, you better be right on his ass because if you stay too far away and he gets shot, you will lose all of the ground that he just worked so hard to get. When one of your guys makes a great dive into a bunker, you can bet that there will be loads of players on the other team shooting at him. If you are there close to your friend, you’ll get all of the loaders and barrels and sides of goggles sticking out trying to shoot the guy who is so far up their ass that they forget to tuck it in from the other players moving behind him. This is why it's also important to learn to improve your running and shooting – and especially your reloading while shooting – drills.
If you get to be on point and you've put your closest threat on the defensive, you must keep shooting while reloading at the same time, or he will wait for the pause and try to battle you back into hiding. Then you have to fight to get the advantage back again. If you keep shooting and reloading, then the other player is forced to keep tucked in while one of your teammates leapfrogs right past you even farther up the field. They can then go on the offensive, or you might be able to wax the opposing player as he tries to shoot your buddy who just dived into an even deadlier spot.
Perfect Planning
So, you have to do many different things simultaneously and efficiently to get a shot at a very fast game. Your game plan has to be well thought out (based on the scouting) and everyone has to do what is expected of them, no matter what they come up against. You have to shoot people off the break, keep all the guns up and don’t stop shooting, and all of the players have to keep forging up the field until the other team are all eliminated – it’s pressure, pressure, pressure. Everyone has to work together.
Speed amongst the chaos is crucial. If you shoot one player off the go, the other team has to look to fill the void. If you can make quick moves and shoot another player, or maybe you shoot two off the break, the other team will be trying to fill the empty bunker as well as trying to eliminate the oncoming players. You can't give them a second to adjust or breathe because even with all of the things going correctly like I explained, you still might not have a fast point and you could even end up losing it. How could that be possible, with all of the things going well and all of the things I just said happening the way you planned it to?
To answer that I’ll change pace and explain how not to be the victim of the 60-second phenomenon. After all, like I said many times before, there are so many things that have to go right in order to get those quick games. Even when they do all go right, sometimes all it takes is one little thing to derail the train.
Be Cool
So, you've lost a player off the go…What do you do about it? You stay calm. If you think about what you would do if you were on the other team, you can usually catch someone trying to be sneaky. If my player is running out to the corner and he gets shot, I as the inside man have to keep looking to the side where we lost him, because the opposing team will probably try to flood that side. If I can get a quick kill, then I just evened up the score. Another option is to fill the spot quickly. Sometimes when a team shoots a player off one side, they look for another kill and miss the second man filling out. That falls back on the subject I covered about pushing up the center. If you shoot a player off a corner spot or if no player takes an outside spot on one side of the field, for God’s sake don’t take your eyes off that tape! You or one of your teammates up the center can’t let them fill to out their spot. If you look the other way, they always fill that side. It’s Murphy’s Law!
Now, back to how you can stop the onslaught. Even if you lose two players off the get-go, stay calm and try to make sure that you have your remaining players in solid spots. Even if they're not, you have to make sure everyone is looking the right way to cover all the angles. It is very hard to push through a few players who are in good spots, play super tight and lock down all of the lanes. I have played in the Pros for many years against some of the best players in the world and there are games I can remember where it was two of us against five and we shot all of them. They were probably in the ‘60 second point mode’ and they made a lot of mistakes while we stayed calm and kept our guns crossed. This enabled us to pick them off as they charged at us individually, instead of as a unit.
If at first you don't succeed
There are obviously some things that I just can’t write down on paper to give you all that's required to win a game in 60 seconds, or prevent you from losing one equally quickly. The main thing you need is experience, so practice your ass off, put yourself in these situations and learn from them. The reason some people are great at two on five is that they've been in those situations so many times that they don’t freak out. On the flip side, there are teams that have played together for so long that they know that when they start rolling as a team, the players will be right behind one another, rolling their guns and moving together in order to make that 60 second statement.
Read over the different aspects I described in this article and feed them into your practices. Do five on three or five on two drills to practice digging yourselves out of holes and work on closing out the last remaining players quickly. Practice drills based on running and shooting and then reloading while firing. All of these aspects fused together will make your team function like a machine. If you do it right, the only machine needed will be the vacuum to clean up the remains of your victims.
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