The local tournament scene is under way here in Colorado, and we have played 2 events up to this point. We have played the series at Blitz Paintball and so far have played a 3 man and a 5 man RaceTo event. The 3 man event was held on April 11th and it was the first time I had played since the Phoenix PSP event. I was felt out of practice and just plain slow on the field, I did not feel like I played that well all day long. Fortunately, my teammates picked up my slack and as a team we were able to squeeze into the finals as the last seed. The finals saw us lose to the first seeded team right off the bat, but that was the last game we lost in the finals. This performance netted us a 2nd place finish that we were pretty happy about!
The 5 man RaceTo 2 event was held just recently on May 2nd. This event was played in the PSP RaceTo format which makes for interesting games when you only have 6 players total on the team, in other words, you get tired fast. It was a really fun day and I felt like I was playing pretty well. As a team our practicing was paying off and even when losing the initial point in a match, we were able to bounce back and win the following 2 points to win the match. We went into the finals playing well, although very tired, and changing our break-outs turned out to be detrimental. But, despite this we were able to place a solid 2nd place, right on the heels of our “main” team, Colorado Blitz.
Check out the below video courtesy of “95Maxima” on pbnation.com. Our team is the scenes with the guy in the blue jersey
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!
Looks like the tournament event series PSP (otherwise known as Xball format) has increased their rate of fire limit from 10.5 balls per second up to 12.5bps. A widely desired change to the RoF and I am looking forward to getting away from 10.5bps myself, that’s for sure! Also a big change is the tournament event weekends have been cut down a day to allow for less travel/vacation time needed to attend an event for the players. Theoretically a player could now just take 1 day off of work/school to attend a whole event, good news! Check out the PSP website for all the details.
Today was the final 5 man paintball tournament at Blitz Paintball in Erie, CO. I was not able to play so I went out to watch a few games for fun and captured some video on my camera (should have brought the digi-camcorder!). Nothing too special but here they are non the less.
Recently I decided to get back into paintball. After not playing for 5-6 years or so I got the itch again. At one point I travelled for tournament play for amateur and professional paintball teams playing in the NPPL series (now defunct). Anyways, here is a couple pictures, blast from the past and also my new marker setup. An 07 Evil Minion, Pure Energy 45ci/4500 tank, and DXS Pulse loader…I have a few more things coming but this it for now.
