The filling of the tournament sandwich: 15th June

Belgium was last weekend and from a paintball perspective it blowed! But you only learn when you're losing and I am aware of the things I need to work on. One thing I have been working on over the past year is my composure. In the Elite division of CPPS last year I was quite erratic, not really paying attention to what's going on around me, just getting tunnel vision on what I need to do. How I've found myself combating that is by getting to my primary, taking some moments to compose, rolling my gun at gaps whilst working out what's going on. Once I've taken stock that's when I then work out what I need to do. That's great, it's really helped me with my field awareness and all, but it's still not feeling right, I'm a long way from the finished article.

I headed up to Cribbs this weekend, shooting some leftover paint from Belgium with Andy, Shayne, A-man and some of the REC guys. Also up on site was a bunch of Going Postal & Bad Moji guys and girls, plus Kayleigh and some of the ladies were looking to get some practice in before the women's 3 man tournament coming up in the next few weeks.

To start off with we just worked on our snapshooting skills as we hadn't really worked on skills since.. umm.. the off-season? Damn..

I had noticed some bad habits had reformed with the lack of self-awareness you get consistently drilling e.g. that stupid foot leaving the ground when snapping. After a good pack's worth of ironing out the creases we did a few situation-games (starting in predetermined bunkers playing 3v4's / 2v3's) and we got chatting to each other on the field, business as usual. I have noticed that Andy has started to really get used to my play style - he always knows when I'm coming for him and how I'm doing it. I often leave my wide bunker to run in field to make the move so that if he comes out to battle on the tape he wont see me coming, but he caught me out a couple times - time to pick up the dictionary and add some new words to my put-down vocabulary it seems!

The good people at Cribbs had set up the Campaign Cup layout:

It seems pretty interesting, quite fun to play the bags so I'm hoping to be getting stuck in at CPPS. We did play a few scrims both as a team and split up. Going back to what I was saying in the opening paragraph; my play-style has been lacking something. Maybe being a bit too relaxed to get some composure has reduced my intensity. Instead of picking my gunfights I've just been avoiding them, instead of pushing the issue I've been letting it go. I thought about that halfway through this Sunday and so I set out to be a bit more dog. I went out to the teabag 1 shooting heads up towards their bag 1 and I hit their corner runner, I slid into the bag and came right out onto my mirror and just kept shooting until I could see they decided to switch infield - I too went infield to put in their back centre who started to shoot back at me - giving me a window to hop to bag 2, I posted on the teabag and when he heard the teabag 2 call he came out, from there it was an easy wrap up and yeah whilst I probably lost a bit of cross field awareness, I made sure I kept my comms going and had one hell of a methodical yet aggressive game. That is how I want to play in tournaments and that is what I'm hoping you're going to see at the CPPS next round.

Talking of the CPPS for those living under a rock we are back into the Elite division and so I am very excited to be playing with the big dogs again!!

Refining the way you play the game is a balancing act and something you can see from the very start of a baller's 'career' if you can call it that. Some people start too aggressive whereas others start to hesitant. I was one of those that was too hesitant, then I tried to tune up my aggression and ended up suffering too much tunnel vision, so then I started trying to compose myself more and then switch on the aggression when appropriate, however I feel that now I'm being a bit too relaxed and need to start pushing the issue a little more as default - play with some heart and start being proactive instead of reactive. If you don't already follow Paul Richard's blog - viewfromthedeadbox - I seriously recommend you follow that previous link and learn yourself some real knowledge from someone who genuinely knows what he is talking about.

Talking about other paintball media - specifically other written formats - I got my hands on a copy of the paintball magazine. The production is very high quality and unlike other magazines I have seen (including the e-mags) is actually well written. I would really recommend taking a look if you haven't already.

Anyway down to brass tax. I shot about a case of leftover paint (not counted in the figures) and bought another case on top making the total 107,500. We're at about the halfway mark so we should expect to see a 200,000 by the end of the year. That means it might take another 4 years to hit 1,000,000. Daunting right?

See you all at CPPS - come say hi and see how we're getting on / give me a back rub I'll probably need it with all that tension I'll have playing with all that intensity I'm planning on bringing!