Always Be Aiming
Paintball markers are fairly accurate, even a low end marker will put paint within a few inches of where you aim. If you bother to aim. I see so many players jump out from behind cover, hip shooting like Rambo, only to head off to the dead box covered in hits!! Sorry to break this to you; but you are not Rambo! Unless of course you are Rambo, in which case sorry John!! Unlike Rambo most of us need to aim to hit anything smaller than a truck.
Aiming Your Marker
Aiming should be as comfortable and natural as possible, you pretty much follow all the rules you ever heard about firing a real gun.
Put the tank against your shoulder like the stock of a rifle, if you can. Some smaller player may have problems as the rental tanks can be a little bulky, try to get the tank under your arm if it’s just too big for your shoulder.
Bring the barrel up to your eye, try not to cock or bend your neck. In Full Metal Jacket the drill instructors tell the recruits to “bring the gun up to their head, not their head down to the gun.” You want to be comfortable and balanced so you can always be aiming, that is to always have your gun up and ready to fire! If you are not comfortable your arms will get tiered faster, you will lower your marker and miss that bad guy as he comes out of nowhere. If he has his marker up you will be watching the rest of the game from the dead box!
Look down the barrel with BOTH EYES OPEN.
It’s hard at first but it’s important to keep both eyes open for two reasons.....
The first is peripheral vision, that is how far off to the side you can see things, like enemy snipers! When you play paintball you have a whole team of folks looking to shoot you, chances are a few of them are just off to your left. If you have your left eye closed to aim what are the chances you will see them before they shoot you?
The second reason is depth perception, you need both eyes to judge distance, with only one eye open you can’t tell how far away things are from you. If you have ever tried to pick up something small with one eye closed you know just how hard it is! With both eyes open you will get a sort double image of your marker. To help sort out the double image you can close your left eye for a quick second to find which is the right barrel to aim down, but just for a second, do not keep that left eye closed rookie! After a while you will learn to focus on the correct image of your marker without closing one eye.
Most markers have a hopper full of paint on top so you can’t really aim down the top of the barrel like a gun, look down the side of the barrel instead. To recap real quick, if you are shooting from your right side, the tank is on your right shoulder, the marker barrel by your right eye, and you are looking down the left side of the marker barrel. Your right hand is on the trigger, the left on the fore grip. If that sounds complicated, get out your old red rider BB gun, or a chunk of broom stick and do a dry run! About half the time you will have to shoot out the left side of the bunker, so practice shooting from both sides. Just like most people are either right handed or left handed most are either ”right eye dominant” or “left eye dominant”, right eye dominant is just a fancy way of saying their brain relies on the right eye more than the left. Most of us are right eye dominant, so we have a harder time shooting leftie, only one solution, practice! When you switch to the left side you should switch your grip, left hand on the trigger frame, right on the fore-grip and your tank moves to your left shoulder. While you are playing you should ALWAYS have your gun up, ready to fire, ready to be a hero!
Aim Small, Miss Small
In "American Sniper" the shooting instructor says; "Aim small, miss small. You aim for a shirt button you might miss by two inches, aim for a shirt you might miss by two feet.” Now that we have our marker at the ready, we are looking down the barrel and we spot an opposing player. Be cool, if you are not behind cover get there, quietly! Find a small spot on your opponent to aim at, say the size of a coin and focus on hitting that spot. The spot should be as close to the center of the target as possible, so if you do miss your aim point by a little you still hit your opponent! Squeeze the trigger, don’t jerk it, fire a couple of shots real quick, then duck! If you missed and he didn't see you may get another chance at him without getting into a fire fight! We want to avoid fire fights as much as possible, way to easy to get hit! When firing a real gun you hold your breath just as you pull the trigger, not so in paintball, you would turn blue and pass out because we are always aiming, always ready to fire, so go ahead and breath.
Speed Kills!
That sounds easy enough right? Do you think you can do it in a half second? There may well be some folks on the other team who can! Why are they so quick? You guessed it, practice!! During a game you don’t have time to think about how to aim, which eye to use, where the tank is, yada, yada, yadda. You need to rely on “muscle memory”. A good example of muscle memory is the “wax on, wax off” training in the Karate kid. Swinging a bat or golf club, throwing a pitch, going for a lay-up, all rely on muscle memory. Forcing your body to do the same thing over and over trains the muscles to perform the same way every time, after you do something a few hundred times it feels natural, the more natural it feels the faster you can do it. We want to use muscle memory to teach your body hold the marker right, to be able to switch hands quickly or pop it up to your shoulder and “into the pocket” just right every time. After I got my first marker I practiced bringing it up to my shoulder for weeks while I watched TV. I had a bunch of spots like the door knob and light switch I would randomly aim at while switching shoulders. (Do I need to say the hopper was empty, tank was empty and the air was off and I had a barrel sock on?) After a few days the gun started to feel comfortable, after a few weeks “drawing” became second nature, now I doubt I could do it wrong if I tried!
There are the basics of aiming, that and a little practice will take you a long way! Don’t waste a lot of expensive paint on the target range, practice on the field during a game, with your friends, having fun!
That is about half of what you need to shoot your marker, we'll discuss the other half in Shooting Skills.