While nothing besides in-game experience can quite prepare you for the raw organized chaos you will experience while playing, we can still try and mentally prepare ourselves for it. Namely, these will be Field Awareness & Communication, Breakout Shooting, Snap Shooting, Ambidextrous Shooting & Playing a Bunker. There are definitely more skills to have but these will set the framework for being a good player.

Before the start of the game, you will want to decide on what bunkers you plan to go to and where you will be shooting with your teammates. Once the buzzer goes, keep your gun trained on key "lanes" (choke-points that people must use to move) to try and shoot out an opponent before they can make it to a bunker while trying to avoid being shot yourself. Paintball's travel a lot slower than a bullet so you will have to lead the target much more.

It is important to be mindful of a teammate advancing and where you place your lane accordingly if they come close, or intersect. Once you are at your bunker, unless you are a back player, you will generally want to hold and focus on the lane for just another few seconds before switching your attention to going back and forth between looking at and communicating with your teammates and shooting on either side of the bunker to prevent your respective side from moving while waiting and looking for opportunities to advance.

Snap shooting is the quintessential skill of being able to quickly and accurately point-shoot a target when coming out of cover. Hence the games title.

To keep things simple, imagine yourself behind cover standing up, and you know an opponent is in the open in front of you. How would we snap shoot this person? With our likely much neglected core muscles of course!

The simplest way is to mentally visualize the target as you have your gun shouldered with your arms and elbows tucked in to your body, using your core muscles to lean your upper body to the left or right. You will be firing as you come out just enough to where your barrel can clear the bunker to shoot, and immediately come back to standing or crouching straight.

Being able to switch and shoot accurately from both hands is important because it allows us to put ourselves at better angles and also be seen less when we play a bunker and snap shoot. You basically just want to shoot with whatever side is facing the person you are trying to get out.

So say if you are on the right side of the field and shooting inwards, you will want to be shooting left handed and tucking the gun in towards the bunker. By doing this, we can use much less effort and leave less mass exposed when coming out of a bunker to snap shoot.

It is vital being able to effectively take in & use information from your teammates about opponents while simultaneously giving out your own information. This is made even more difficult though by the fact you will have to keep focus on those two things while being shot at and hearing four other people talking and shooting as well.

Perhaps the biggest part of this will be bunker call outs. There are many different shapes of bunkers as well as fields that don't always follow a standard format so it can be confusing at first to know what to call something to be effectively understood.

Listed below will be pictures of the twelve most common bunkers for current NXL[www.nxlpaintball.com] fields, and what their corresponding name is. We will usually combine these with what yard line it would be if it was a football field as well as the side. So a call out is most often just going to be one or two words. On a standard field, there will be the “dorito” side, and the “snake” side. These take their names from their real life look-alike counterparts. You will also hear people saying “the tape” in reference to the very edge on either side. So from here, we may have call outs like “D3 (dorito, 30)”, “snake temple”, “center w”, “snake corner”, “30 aztec”, etc.

Aztec


Temple


Can


Dorito


Small Dorito


Stand-Up Wing


Wing


W, Mini-W


Brick


Giant Brick


Small Cake/Wedge


Tall Cake




In addition, there are usually call outs for specific bunkers like “home” or “god”. Home is the bunker directly in front of, and usually closest to, the starting box. It varies from field to field based on what is considered the key-most bunker, but “god” will usually refer to the snake insert which is the bunker closest to the snake that lets people move into it and/or shoot to prevent the opponent from doing the same. When someone says mirror, they are referring to the bunker exactly opposite of them on the other side.

Once we have established where an enemy is and shooting, we can use this to our advantage by letting our teammates know and ideally at least one is able to shoot them from their angle or at least draw off some heat for you to snap shoot them out. Keep aware of how many bodies you and the other team have.

Don't get stale in your call outs though. In addition to brief bunker call outs and body count, don't be afraid to have short conversations on the field. Things like asking a teammate who is keeping them in, letting them know you are about to bump and need cover, etc. Remembering your teammates names is vital as well because it it allows you to grab their attention easier and quicker when calling out to them individually.

Field awareness to me is being able to “read” & “feel” a game. This is based on who is looking & shooting where, where a teammate or opponent has moved, what the body count on both sides is, when the windows for moving or bunkering are, etc. And above all else, getting in the habit of not developing tunnel vision. This gets hard when there are ten people all shooting at each other and your four team mates are all frantically talking.

After the initial breakout and lane, you now need to keep your head on a swivel and ears wide open. If you see a teammate has got shot out that was holding down a side that you or any other teammates were not also shooting, it is up to you to communicate this and fill in the gap. If you see an opponent has moved, make sure you can still play the bunker so that you are not open to being shot at by them or any other opponent. Keep a tally of what the count is on both sides. If it comes down to a 5 v 3 to your benefit then work the field to pinch them out. If you find yourself on the opposite end then work with your teammates to keep key lanes held and switched between. Knowing when to move at first is tough because really at the end of the day, It comes down to learned instinct and reflex through much trial and error.

But having said that, you will want to look for opportunities when you are not being focused on or seen, and move to a more advantageous bunker to get a better angle on your opponents. Going to bunker someone will usually come down to either having the numbers advantage & being able to quickly end the game or because you need to most likely “trade” (get shot out also) to take out a key player on the opposite side.

With more players you should be playing more aggressively and pinching out players. If you find yourself at the disadvantage, play more defensively, try to get wide on the field, and keep switching lanes between either side. But if it comes down to just yourself, I personally opt to get as wide and play aggressively as possible.

Generally for most bunkers, you will be able to shoot from either of the two sides. If it is one you would need to crouch or kneel then you can use the top as well. Try to shoot an arc “inside” which would be you shooting from either side towards the center since it gives a wider shooting field. Players on the far corners though will need to make sure they are holding down their respective side mirroring them as well.

- Try not to get into the habit of crouching on both knee's, it slows you down when you try and get back up as well as using additional energy.

- Chicken winging. TUCK THOSE ELBOWS AND ARMS IN PEOPLE!

- Be more careful about coming out the top of a bunker, you are open completely on any side that has a shot. Also do not get into the habit of coming out of the same side repetitively from a bunker. It makes you a much easier target if you are predictable.

- Tunnel vision & call-outs. Treat you playing the bunker as if you were driving, glancing at the rear view mirror (your teammates) every ~5 seconds or so. Don't keep calling out the same player over and over. Two times doesn't hurt to make sure you are heard sometimes but otherwise, keep an eye on the rest of the field for new call outs or relay info from your teammates.

- Not doing at least one (and optimally two or even all) of these three things at any given moment; Moving. Shooting. Communicating. Practice shooting the same spot while looking over and communicating with a teammate. On a related note, the ability to reload while shooting (and optimally, you guessed it, communicating as well) is also a very good one to have.