How to Play Paintball Like a Pro: 10 Tips for Beginners

Paintball is a thrilling and exciting sport that can be enjoyed by anyone. Whether you are playing for fun or for competition, you need to know some basic tips and tricks to make the most of your experience. Here are 10 tips that will help you have a blast and beat your opponents on the paintball field.

How to Play Paintball Like a Pro: 10 Tips for Beginners

1. Don't be afraid to move forward.

One of the biggest mistakes that beginners make is staying in one spot and hiding behind cover. This makes you an easy target and prevents you from helping your team. Instead, you should always look for opportunities to move forward and get closer to the enemy. This will distract them and allow your teammates to advance and flank them. Try to move along the sides of the field, where there is more cover and less fire, and aim for the enemy's side or back.

2. Keep your barrel clean.

Your paintball gun is your best friend on the field, but it can also betray you if you don't take care of it. Sometimes, a paintball can break inside your barrel, causing your shots to be inaccurate or jammed. To avoid this, you should always carry a barrel cleaner with you, such as a swab or a squeegee. You can use it to quickly clean your barrel and gun during the game, so you can keep shooting without any problems. You can buy a barrel cleaner from Paintballshop.com or any other paintball store.

3. Aim high and adjust your angle.

When you see an enemy player, you might be tempted to shoot right away and hope for the best. However, this can often result in missing or hitting low, which will alert them to your presence and give them a chance to shoot back. A better way to shoot is to aim high and bring your stream of paintballs down gradually. This way, you can account for the gravity and distance that affect your paintballs' trajectory, and ensure that you hit your target. You can also practice holding your gun at different angles to learn how much you need to adjust for different ranges.

4. Prevent your goggles from fogging up.

Your vision is crucial on the paintball field, as it allows you to spot enemies, communicate with teammates, and plan your moves. However, your vision can be impaired if your goggles fog up due to humidity, sweat, or breath. To prevent this, you should choose a mask that fits well and has good ventilation, such as the BASE Operator mask that is available at most paintball fields in Australia. You should also breathe downwards or sideways, away from your goggles' lens, and carry a microfibre towel in your pocket to wipe them if they get foggy. You can also get your own thermal goggles from Paintballshop.com that have anti-fog technology.

5. Have a strategy before the game starts.

Before the game begins, you should have a clear idea of what your objective is and how you are going to achieve it. You should also assign roles to each member of your team, such as shooter, runner, support, or leader. A shooter is someone who covers fire for the team and keeps the enemy's heads down. A runner is someone who moves fast and aggressively towards the objective or the enemy's position. A support is someone who follows and protects the runner by eliminating threats or taking over their role if they get shot. A leader is someone who coordinates the team's actions and communicates with them throughout the game. By having a plan and working together as a team, you will have a better chance of winning the game.

6. Keep your extra paintballs quiet

When you get your paintballs in the 100 round tubes, they might be loose and make noise when you shake them. This can cause two problems. 1. The paintballs might crack inside the tube and ruin your ammo. 2. The enemy might hear you coming and ambush you. To avoid this, you should open the tubes and add a few more paintballs until they fit snugly. When you close the lid, you should not be squashing the paintballs, just preventing them from rattling.

7. Keep your paintballs cool

Your paintballs can be affected by the temperature and the sun. If they get too hot, they might swell up and become bouncy and sticky. They will then break in your gun or bounce off the enemy. To avoid this, you should keep your ammo belt and your paintball gun in the shade as much as possible.

8. Fill your paintball gun with the right amount of paintballs

The 200-round hopper on top of your paintball gun can hold 200 balls, but it doesn't have to. You want to give the paintballs some space to move around in the hopper so they can feed smoothly. Ideally, you want to have a 1cm gap between the lid and the paintballs in the hopper, any more than that and you might have feeding issues. When you fill your gun with paintballs from your ammo belt on the field, make sure to not overfill your hopper! If you have extras still in the tube from filling, I suggest you dump them on the ground rather than risk making noise (see tip #6)

9. Aim for the hard parts

When you line up your first paintball kill, make sure you aim for the hard parts of the person. The best place to hit someone is in the goggle. It will almost always break and the person receiving the paintballs will most likely call out hit and get off the field quickly! My second choice for hard targets is the gun and hopper. In tournament paintball, shooting someone in the hopper is great, it smashes all their paintballs inside! Effectively taking them out of the match for a point or two. But that's not very nice to do to your friends!

10. Communicate

Every time you can tell your team useful information by yelling positions of the enemy, you should do so. At the end of a paintball war, you should have little to no voice left. Tell your team where and how many enemies are in front of you. Also use your support players to shoot at the enemy while you move up (see tip #1). Calling out kills is also very important! If you know how many they started with and your team has 5 kills, then it's easy to work out how many are left. If you know how many are left, you can shoot at two of them and move up! Easily!