How to Move

Whether its woodsball or speedball, the key to victory in almost any paintball situation is to out maneuver your opponent. The best equipment in the world won't win you a game if you're out played with better timed movement and superior strategies.

Just like real estate, the trick to maneuvering in paintball is location, location, location. As heroic as it sounds to dash madly into the unknown, a mad dash typically ends with a face full of paint. On the other hand, an aggressive rush against an opponents hiding place is key to many paintball victories. If you know where your opponent is, try to make it so he doesn't know where you are. If you don't know where your opponent is, find him as fast as you can.

A natural reaction that everyone has when paint is flying at them is to duck their head. This is a good thing. The bad habit many players get into is that once their head is down they are only willing to slowly peek and fire from their hiding place, never advancing up the field. Rather than hiding, a good paintball player trains himself to evade oncoming fire and then move to a better location as soon as he can.

If your opponent hides and then pops out and tries to snap shoot you, it always helps if you're no longer where he thinks you are. What your opponent doesn't know will definitely hurt him as you then advance to a new location, ready to hit him with a barrage of paintballs from an unexpected direction. Not only will he not have a bead on you, but you'll still know where he is and you'll get a few shots on him before he even knows where to look. Knowing when to move is not an exact science - it's a skill that's learned through dozens of games and dozens of failures, so be sure to practice and learn.

After you train your body to think "move" rather than "hide", you can then work on training yourself to not only move but to keep track of your opponent at all times. Equipment can make a difference, but I've taken out plenty of players that had guns that were much nicer than mine simply because I had position on them. I'll never forget the time an aggressive tournament player thought he could march into the woods and simply eliminate everyone in his path. Sure, he eliminated half my team but when I came up straight behind him at 30 feet it wasn't to hard to remind him that he got out played with three paintballs to the back.