Hi, my name is Jacob and I'm here to show you what Tournament play can do for you. I lost 15 pounds in just three weeks playing tournaments.

Okay, I'll cut the crap. I'm here to tell you about my first tournament experience.

I have been out of the woods, and onto the turf for the past six months, playing almost exclusively speedball.

The paintball field I work for sponsors the DII PSP team Part Time Ninjas. A couple PTN players work for DZ and I've received a lot of coaching from them. For fund raising, PTN hosts tournaments in their "Ninjaball" series.

I requested the day off for the first event of the season from work, and decided to try and throw a begginer team together.

After finding some guys to play with, I registered us with the APPA and signed us up for the event.

Never playing in a tournament before, I had no idea what to expect.

One of my friends, a PTN player let me borrow one of his '08 Egos for the event. I have to admit, I was just excited to be using that as to be playing.

The field opened at 7:00 AM and I ended up getting there around 6:45 AM. My team being one of the first ones there got a good table close to the fill station and set up all our gear.

I was handed the Ego by Wayne, a very nice gunmetal with black highlights one and ran back to my staging area full of glee. BTW, I'm probably going to be buying an '06 Ego soon...

Anyways, back on track...

We got the schedule and highlighted all our pre-lim games.

Walked the field, and got all of our gear set up and guns chronoed.

The first game started and we watched as the one PUMP team at the event beat a team shooting PSP ramping.

That was pretty cool to watch. They were good players, and the team they played against underestimated them so they lost.

Second game of the day was a close match between two teams.

Third game of the day, we were up. This was it, my first tournament game ever.

We rolled our opposition in under a minute. A perfect game. I broke out and shot my mirror. My teammate assigned to laning shot one off the break, and the other shot the guy they stuck in the 2.

It was awesome! A perfect game. (We were playing three man)

We won our next three games, playing the pump team and killing them. We saw what they could do and we used the PSP ramp capabilities of our markers to their fullest.

We ended losing the next three, winning two after that, and loosing our final preliminary game seeding us 5th in Semi-Finals. Five out of twelve, making the semi final cut for our first tournament... We were very happy.

After Semi Finals were over, we ended up placing 6th.

We were 6th out of 12 four our first tournament, and made the semi-final cut. Not bad. I was quite happy with how we did.

And most of all, it was the most fun I've ever had paintballing in my life.

I've played TAW games, Black Cat games, and field produced big games... But the adrenaline and utter joy I got from playing in the tournament was way more than any scenario game has offered me.

Maybe it was the fast paced games. Maybe it was shooting an Ego8 on 15.4bps PSP ramping, or maybe it was the bond I've formed with my teammates... But I ache for it again. I ache for the feeling I got while playing.

Speaking of PSP ramping... Wow... Just, wow. You feel invincible shooting with it.

I almost got a penalty for overshooting a guy while bunkering him. It was a one on one, and I bunkered him only to have him turn on me. I've been taught to not stop shooting until the player is walking off the field, and this guy turned and tried to shoot me. So, I railed into him for about four seconds until he shot me in the grill of my mask. I stopped shooting and head a collective, "ohhh....." from the crowd.

The refs conversed and the ultimate came over to me and told me to wipe off the hit on my mask, that it was obvious that I shot the player before he turned on me and it wasn't a simultaneous hit. So I hung the flag we won the game.

I felt kind of bad, I must have shot the kid 30 times from maybe 4 feet away, but it was his own damn fault for turning on me so it doesn't bother me too much.

Anywho, just thought I'd share.

I had a lot of fun.

And a surprising amount of help too. The PTN members who were all reffing (8 min. refs on the field at a time) gave me a lot of pointers, and my girlfriend became our "Pod Monkey" filling all of our pods. Darren, a regular at the indoor field and a friend of mine gave us a bunch of pointers, and got us out of our three game loosing streak. Laning, with an Ego by the way... Is fantastic. Watching someone run into a rope of paint and get obliterated is a fantastic feeling.

Ninjaball #2 is February 16th. I'm already registered. Anyone in the NW area should send me a PM if they are interested in playing. The games are won really well and they have sweet prizes for the top three teams in each division.

One last thing. Egos are loud. Like, louder than A-5's, and I love them. I love them so much.

Please check out my teams MySpace. We have pictures from the event as well as a short video.

Thanks for taking the time to read my post. I know a lot of you guys are hardcore milsim players, but give speedball, and even tournament play a shot. It's a lot of fun.

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