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paintballimpact.com / Success / Psychological Edge
Winning with a Psychological Edge
Sometimes you can have your enemy beat without firing a single shot. Sometimes, the key to winning is to gain a psychological over your opponent, to intimidate them and force them out of their game plan. Winning teams in the NPPL and the PSP come to their games looking good, looking confident, and looking like they are ready to send you to the dead box early. Winning with a psychological edge and great game planning will take you and your team a long way in competitive tournament games.
Using head games can change the course of a game and tournament, head games can help you to take player out of his game, and force him to make mistakes. If you think of a paintball game as a chess match and about moves, one of the goals of a game is to plan 10 steps ahead. By planning 10 steps ahead, you will set the tone of the game and dictate bunker moves. By controlling the tone of the game, you will gain a psychological edge over your opponent and keep them on their heels. One way to winning the head games battle is to move around like you know you are going to win the battle, and to take away the confidence of your opponents.
Rob Rubin, in his article "Get Ahead with Head Games", talked about how to dominate a player using only your body language. In this article, he said that he showed up for the game acting like a pro and acting like he own the superior equipment. Here is one excerpt from the article.
I cock the gun once to load a ball, and with my off hand I reach back to grab another tube. I hear his friends scream in Spanish, "He's reloading! He's reloading!" My opponent breaks to bunker me. I lean out and shoot him in the ass, then proceed to tell him never to listen to the audience. The rest of the day, they never charged. They sat in the back and just long-balled. Even when they saw me reloading."
The player on this field put fear into his opponents by outthinking them and with his unpredictable play. Even when the dominant player really was reloading, the opposing players were not confident enough to come close to him. By convincing the other players that they would never get close enough to him to safely bunker him, they decided to stay far enough away to be safe. Sometimes, just the persona of being unpredictable can keep an opponent on their heels and on the defensive. It is helpful to pull off a few stunts early in the game, so that you keep your opponents wondering what you are going to do next. Are you reloading or are you just playing possum? If you boxing the equivalent of this would be rope-a-dope, where Muhammad Ali would play like he was worn out until he would surprise his opponent with some knockout punches. In poker, players bluff, convincing their opponent that they have a winning hand even when they hae nothing.
Paintball Impact publishes as many articles as they can on upcoming professional tournaments, paintball fields, and the latest products from illustrious manufacturers like Atomic Ordnance .
The referenced article, "Get Ahead with Head Games" was authored by Rob Rubin, in the February/March edition of Splat! Magazine, Splat is an industry leading paintball resource with information about products like the Angel 1.
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