Luck Wins Out

Excelling at paintball takes a combination of practice, skill, talent and luck.  Not everybody has time to practice to develop the requisite skill and even fewer have the innate talent to really be the best.  But for one game, everybody, from the professional paintballer to the first-day novice, can have the luck they need to win.

My favorite example of luck is the run-through.  When you're down numbers and you are out of options, just run and see what happens.  I've played games of base capture where I was all that was left on my team and so I ran.  The typical result is that I end up getting hit in record time and the game is over (as you would expect), but there have been games where luck was with me.  I remember one time where I was down four players to one and I was not in a good position to run for the flag.  The opposing team, though, was more interested in shooting me than moving in on my flag so I had a second to roll the dice with lady luck.  I internally counted to three and started firing like mad from around a bunker and I got the other team to duck their heads for just a second. I dropped my gun and took off running through the trees in an indirect path to the flag.  I could hear paintballs whizzing past me, hitting trees and one bounced off of my leg as I grabbed the flag.  In my few seconds of running there were probably close to a hundred shots fired at me by four different players, but somehow, luck lead me to victory.

Luck, though, is a very fickle mistress.  For all of the stories I have where I was down big and somehow won, I have many, many more about what usually happens - I start to run and within two seconds I've been hit half a dozen times from multiple directions.  Those times where I defied the odds, though, keep me asking for luck to lend me a hand.