PSP Phoenix Open 2010, paintball tournament come and gone.
Well, it’s been almost 10 years since I played a national level tournament, but this year I stepped back onto the field to play in the 2010 PSP Phoenix Open paintball tournament. My normal team was not ready in time to play the event, so a friend and I played as “free agents” on a (more or less throw together) team out of Chicago called 665 Almost Evil III. They placed the team in Division 4 Race-to 2, or 5 man (best 2 out of 3 game matches). The event setting was incredibly nice, perfectly setup netting to house the 6 Xball formatted fields, 1 of which was a Pro field with bleachers, and a 2nd Semi-Pro field with bleachers. Overall all 6 fields combined made up the size of oh, about one whole 10 man field from back in the old days when I used to play tournament paintball 
Our team played Friday afternoon against 4 different teams, each team we would play to the best 2 out of 3 matches. Our team started off slow with some mistakes and lack of communication, not surprising seeing that nobody had really played together before. Some bad luck in the form of a couple major penalties didn’t help us either, and cost us a couple games. Our slow start put us in must win situations as we dropped all but one of our first games against each team. Later in the afternoon we found some rhythm and put together 3 wins in a row but faltered on our last game, knocking us out of any semi-finals contention. At the end of the day we won 5 games and lost 6, but that only netted us 1 actual best 2 of 3 match win, not good enough.
All in all the event was great, even though we ended up leaving a day early. I will say, that for future events I plan to have my normal team as prepared as possible and ready to compete before dropping a load of money on an event. One thing that hasn’t changed in 10 years is that national level tournament paintball is not cheap, and this will be the last time I play on a free agent team, that is for sure.
On a side note, I did get to put a good amount of paint and games through my new Planet Eclipse Ego 10. The marker shot fantastic and it was well worth the money. It should last me a few seasons and them some!
