How to Play Tight in a Paintball Bunker

Video Transcript

"Hello! This is Rob Rubin and you're watching Expert Village. I want to introduce you to a concept called playing tight or playing your bunker tight. What that means is that you're trying to scrunch in and get as small as possible because there's a lot of incoming fire that's going right over head. What this represents right here is this is usually an imaginary line. Imaginary lines don't videotape very well so we're using this tape here. This imaginary line goes from the barrel of the marker of the guide directly in front of you, over the top of this bunker, and then over my head. Now, if I were to put my head over this line, I can get shot in the melon, which is not pleasant, trust me. When you're playing tight, you're basically trying to avoid all of these imaginary lines. Start by playing tight by positioning your elbows. This is not a rifle. It might look like a rifle, but it's not a rifle. You don't have to position yourself to absorb recoil. With that in mind, you can bring your elbows in. The simple act to bringing your elbows in, it brings your sight profile way, way down and it's harder to hit you. What you're also going to do is you're going to tilt the hopper into yourself so that it's basically covering part of your face. Now, remember how I said during the shooting stuff that you had to have the hopper over the barrel so that the balls will feed into the marker. This still does that. You can tilt the marker about 20 degrees and it'll still feed paint into the marker. Then when I come out of position, I'm just going to slowly eek out and only give them maybe the barrel tip and maybe the side of my eye to hit. When you're wearing goggles, that's a very small profile. Now, let me tell you about the concept of playing a loose bunker. This line is the original line from that same shooter, but let's say he's a little further away or he's in a different position or I have something fairly big in front of me. This is the other angle that he can shoot at me from. What I have in the middle is this large envelope, this large safe area that I can play with. In this area, both of these line pretty much go back all the way to the back end of the fields. From this guy, I'm protected as long as I stay within this envelope. I can come out a little bit this way and shoot him or come out a little bit this way and shoot him. Plus, from this I don't have to play as praying mantis, as like playing tight. I can actually loosen up just a little bit, get into a position that I'm comfortable, and then just pop out when I'm ready. If he can't see in this envelope, I can go 20 feet back to another position and technically, cover myself so that if he tries to come on top of me, he's going to think I'm here when I'm actually back there. So, when do you play a tight bunker and when do you play a loose bunker? Generally speaking, you play a tight bunker when you're closer to the action; you play loose bunker when you're further away from the action."