I played a local 3-man tournament at the request of my old team captain in 1993.  That was back when the team was first starting out and we needed to play every tournament we could get into.  We entered 3, 3-man teams in a tourney held at a small speedball field in Springfield, MO.  There were about 12 teams participating all totalled.  My team consisted of myself and two people I had never even met, new recruits.  One of whom had never even played before.  Looked like bad odds for me.

    During the first game of the day, we played the team that ended up taking last place at the tournament.  They were just a bunch of kids about half my age.   I was really broke, I'D just bought a new marker, (My first Autococker!)  I was using old paint, some that had been left over from a month before.  It was visibly separated. I knew the paint was not good but I figured it didn't really matter.  Because my team was inexperienced I chose the side of the field that gave us the best opportunity to bunker down and defend the flag.  Because my guys were too nervous to move, I got the job of trying to maneuver into positions from which I could eliminate the other players.  Maddening as this sounds, the field layout allowed a lot of movement as long as you had someone in a certain bunker to keep the other team from getting into better positions.  Throughout the entire day I sent on of my guys into that bunker at the start of every game.  He provided cover while I used a ridge line to outflank members of the other team.  First stop on this routine that I practiced all day long was a player in the sandbag bunker.  It was a fairly easy shot.  I could maneuver to a position from which I could fire on this bunker without being targeted by the rest of his team from this position anyone in the sandbag bunker had very little cover remaining.  Distance was about 50 feet.  During this first game it proved impossible to hit him.  After firing 70+ shots at a player's exposed head, I failed to even put a paintball teasingly close to him.  So far off were my shots that he didn't even duck!  (How else would you manage 70 shots at someone?)  Every single shot corkscrewed even though my barrel was dry.  I could not touch the guy.  In the end, he shot out the guy in our critical upper bunker and time ran out with them in the lead by an elimination.  Knowing we had just lost the first game to the least experienced team on the field told me that we were in for a long day.   Amazingly however, after I got some good paint we began to turn things around, besting everyone we played.  In the end, we took second place by a margin of only five points.  Had I scored a single elimination that first game, we would have won.  Had I not been using bad paint, I would have scored the elimination easily.  During the course of that tournament I shot numerous players out of that same bunker, usually with only a couple of shots at each one.  Many times, by picking a loader or barrel as my target.   Choosing to shoot bad paint cost me several hundred dollars in prize money that day.  Not to mention having to endure the mutterings of the team who had 'beaten those guys'  Those guys, being us.

  P.S.  I wonder sometimes though, if losing to the least experienced team there hadn't been a good move for us.  For two reasons.  First we were running under the names DDT, Gold, Green, and Black.  My team being black.  But the teams we were competing against really didn't know which of us were which, name wise.  What they may have thought though, was that when they saw my team and myself entering the field that we were not worth watching.  After all, we had lost against a known team of Novices.  We used the same strategy all day long and it worked against everyone we played.  So when we started winning, and our ranking started to climb up the scoreboard, did the teams we were against mistakenly believe that one of the other DDT teams was holding the number two spot?  I think maybe so, otherwise they surely would not have let us pull the same old strategy all day long.  The second reason is a little more on the humanistic side.  Giving those novice players the right to brag that they were the only one's there who could beat us must have made them feel pretty good.  That's not such a bad thing.