It takes far more skill to play and master

There are so many different ways that statement is true, one could almost write a book based on it.  We’ll just step through a few of them.

The terrain changes all the time.  On an arena field, you are pretty much guaranteed to have some corner bunkers, a snake, a big ol’ blimp in the middle and a scattering of other types of bunkers, maybe even a dorito side.  Even if the layout is different for every single game you play, you still know how to play a can, or a brick, or a carwash.

The ground will be flat, or very nearly so.  You can see from one end of the field to the other and about 80% of all of the real estate on the field.  You know the condition of the track – turf, grass, sand, whatever.

Out in the woods there isn’t a single obstacle that was designed for a person to hide behind.  There are things you can use as bunkers, but every single damned one of them is different from every other one.  And then there’s all that pesky underbrush and ground cover that fills in all the spaces between ‘bunkers’.

The ground is anything but flat.  It may be steep.  You don’t know what the track is going to be like until you hit it – rocky, sandy, muddy, 12 feet of water, covered with animal turds or poisonous plants.  That sand pile could turn out to be a fire ant mound, that hollow tree could have hornets in it.

You usually can’t see more than 30 or 40 feet in any direction.  Very often you can’t even communicate from one side of the field to the other.   You certainly can’t see the other team’s flag station and as for how they breakout – you will not have a clue because what they’re doing takes place several hundred yards away, on the other side of a thicket of trees, bushes, hills, swamp, gullies, streams and other impenetrable terrain.

Ages ago we used to refer to paintball as “chess in the woods with guns”.  The analogy still holds true today.  In fact, arena ball could be referred to as “checkers with guns”. Checkers is that much simpler game that we teach to kids before they are able to handle chess.  All the pieces move the same  and there’s only one major strategy to learn – lining up the other player so you can jump to the back row and get ‘kinged’.

Far fewer people play chess than play checkers. This is because far fewer people can handle the intellectual demands of a game that has lots of pieces that move differently, multiple winning strategies and requires planning in advance.

I could go on and on about how intellectually stimulating woods ball play is – about how timing is key, about how being able to suss out how the other team is going to play a piece of terrain is important, of how one tree can be played like every single kind of inflatable bunker ever blown up, about the fun of psychologically mastering the other team, about games that draw on Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Alexander, on Patton and Rommel, but most of you would be bored by such high-brow crap.  Suffice to say that so far as intelligence is concerned, arena ball is woodsball after it has been given a lobotomy.  No higher functions required to participate – just sit there and drool from behind your nice, safe, made to hide behind, bunker.

Luck.

Another intellectually demanding aspect of woodsball play is the knowledge of and use of statistics.  Like – on average, how many hits does each of your players get when lobbing paint into the woods at a 45 degree angle?  (See, if you know that the average is 20%, then you can post five guys in the same spot and have each of them lob paint, your chances of getting that hit approach 100%.)

Not luck – skill and the proper application of mathematical tools you probably ignored in high school.

But lets look at luck for a few moments.  If you were given a choice between competing in two different games for a million dollar prize, one of which was up to random chance (say the roll of a die or the drawing of a card) and the other which tested your own skills (say shooting at a target) – which would you pick?

Well duh – the one where you control the most odds.   Anything else is just gambling where the house always has the odds in its favor.

So why then would anyone choose to play a version of paintball in which the influence of luck approaches that of gambling?

What do I mean by that?  Here’s what.  No matter what form of arena style ball you play and regardless of the rules, the smaller the team size, the greater the influence that random chance has on the outcome of a game.

It is pretty simple and straightforward math.  If you play a five player format and one of your players gets eliminated because of a -

bad ref call/bouncer that breaks/cheating move that works/kneeling on a ball/acts of god

then you’ve lost 20% of your team to random chance or, as most of us refer to it – bad luck.

If you play three player and the same thing happens, you’ve taken a 33% hit from luck.

If you play seven player the impact of luck is almost 15%.

If you are playing ten player in the woods, random acts of bad luck drop down to 10%.

(If anyone were playing ten player on an arena ball field the odds would be the same, but since that will just about never happen, we can safely write about the comparison as if it were woodsball vs arenaball.)

What that means is that on a player by player basis, luck has twice as much influence over a five-player game as it does over a ten player game, and one and a half times as much influence over a seven player game as over a ten player game.

To be a bit more blunt about it:  Ever since the sport abandoned the ten player woodsball standard (not to mention the 15 player team standard), our so-called “national champions” are twice as likely to have been lucky as they are to have been skilled.

I don’t know about anyone else but me and my team mates, but we’d much rather LOSE a game of skill than get some bogus title due entirely to luck – and we certainly have no respect for anyone who takes the luck title.

Skills.

Many years ago I wrote an article about paintball guns that compared the various technologies to sex.  It went something like this:

Pumps are masculine.  If you want something to happen, you have to work that pump vigorously.

Semi-autos are feminine.  Shooting requires little more than diddling with one finger.

Electronic semi-autos are the vibrators of the paintball world. Turn em on, lay back and let the tool do all of the work.

I don’t know about the rest of you – but I like to earn my ‘rewards’.  I’ve never been afraid of a little sweat or hard work.

So many skills are going lost or never even considered these days, it is important to remember that the legacy (indeed, the owners, coaches, key players) of most, if not all, of the top arena ball teams of today were all originally woodsball players.

Arena players in the woods are, as the expression goes ‘babes in the woods’.  They’ve got not a clue about crawling from one location to another, or watching the other team for that split/split second when no one has their eyes on them, or of how to time out the move across a swamp and around a hill, or of gaging where the best angle is, or of how to hide in plain site, or how to fake the other team into thinking there are more of you than there really are, or of how to find a shooting hole through yards and yards of brush, or -

there are so many things that woodsballers know about this game that are being lost – skills and knowledge that are assets on the arena ball field – but ones you can NEVER learn on an arena field – the lack is making for less interesting and duller games.

I’d love to see one of the top arena ball teams take on a top woodsball pump gun team from back in the day – with one caveat:  the arena ball team can’t field anyone who used to play in the woods – balloon-bunker-babies only.

I promise you, the woodsball team would just eat those guys up: heck, after five minutes the arenaball players would be thinking the game was already over – if they weren’t hiding in a gully somewhere hoping that the bears or rattlesnakes wouldn’t get them.  The crying and whining would be pitiful.  “Ewww, it’s muddy. OMG!, there’s insects out there!  Shhh, I think I heard something from behind us.  I can’t see anything!  Is that moss or poison ivy on that tree I was leaning on?”

Truly Pit E Full.

Woodsball taught us things like timing, psychological evaluation, gaging terrain in 3D, stealth, deception, long range shooting:  we learned how to evaluate terrain as a whole – not how to play one of six different shapes.  Woodsball play required far more versatility, adaptability and flexibility.  In short – far more skill than today’s game.

Tomorrow – Less Cheating Goes on in Pump Woodsball Play