Hello everyone!

So I want to start blogging about a sport that I played for many years. This sport is competition paintball. It's a bit of an odd sport, and not a lot of people know that there is in-fact a competitive side to paintball.

Paintball

Typically people think of paintball as a day out with your friends in either a bush or urban type scenarios, rocking one of these bad boys.

Don't get me wrong this is a world of fun and I would recommend anyone who wants to play for the first time to jump into this kind of game at your local paintball field.

In comp we have what is called electro markers, These are a bit of an upgrade from your standard paintball marker. Instead of firing one ball a second roughly, These markers can fire as fast as you can pull the trigger, Typically a trigger is big enough to get two fingers on it. So you can fire quite fast, as an example on a good day I could put out 18 balls per second. Here is a picture of some of the markers I have owned.

The game

Competition,, is a bit more full on then your typical game of paintball. In comp we play on inflatable bunkers that look like this.

A team can be as big as you want, But only 5 players on a field at a time, Giving you a 5 on 5 game type. The objective of the game is pretty simple. On either side of the field, you have these things called start gates. Every player on your team must be touching the start gate with their gun before the whistle blows. Once it blows there is generally a buzzer that needs to be pushed, which is attached to each start gate, and your goal is to push the other team's buzzer before they push yours. As you can imagine that will lead to conflict.

Each game has a time limit of about 5 mins, although a game is typically over by 3 minutes. This means that paintball is an extremely fast-paced sport.

In comp anytime a paintball breaks on you or your equipment, you're out. If a ball is to bounce of off you then you can keep playing on. The field is full of refs and they are watching everything. If you get shot and it breaks and you continue to play on, The ref will through a coloured towel which will give a penalty to your team

• Yellow flag: If a yellow flag is thrown it is a minor penalty, This happens when you are shot in an unobvious spot, like the back of your pod pack. The penalty will remove you and one of your teammates.
• Red flag: If a red flag is thrown it is a major penalty, A major happens when you have been hit in an obvious spot and decide to keep playing, This will take out you and two of your teammates.

Here is a quick video of me playing, I get smashed but I got him too!

I have recently given up paintball as a player, and I now want to blog my team as they go to tournaments and compete.

Outbreak

Outbreak is my team!

We are an Australia, Victoria team, Outbreak has been around for 6 years now, and we have always placed in the top 3 for every tournament we have ever played. Not too bad :P

This was us at Melbourne show grounds, playing for the ultimate cup. We came second in this tournament.

I would not want to be on the receiving end of that!

Over the coming months, I will be filming and interviewing Outbreak and their journey in paintball.
I want to share this awesome sport with all of you steem guys! I think it is a really epic sport that not a lot of people know about, and I want to help build awareness for it.

Thanks for reading and follow me to see more upcoming posts about paintball!