Saturday, June 2, 2012

Countering AC in Bitburg 2012

I hesitated briefly before deciding to follow-up the last post with our game plan to counter the AC game. In part because the score didn't favor us in the end and in part because I'm not talking paintball specifics at Bitburg so I can't offer any explanation. Even so, make of this what you will. I remain convinced it was the right call and an effective plan. We won the first two points in less than a minute combined and forced AC to make changes to counter us.

Part 1 of the plan was to mirror AC's breakout in ways that avoided early risk and recognized what their OTB objectives were. The blue circles reflect our core primaries. (Although once established on the snake side we were able to safely reach the other primary options as well, like the corner CK.) As you can see a lot of similarities in the breakout primaries.
Part 2 was aimed at blunting their primary attack and forcing them to do something different. In order to achieve this goal we wanted to do two things; beat them to the center of the field and deny their secondary rotations. Consequently we pushed a player upfield OTB every point and used our widest snake side and D-side players to focus early in the point on the inside angles relying on our Home shooter and upfield presence to control wide movement initially. (Also in the early points expecting AC to be taken by surprise at least for a point or two.)
Part 3 was to attack "weak" points with the purpose of denying AC the opportunity to bring their power to bear. One of the strengths of their inside/out game is that it progresses in very natural, easy and for the most part safe steps that keep their guns rolling and build momentum that finally allows them to sweep down the field irresistibly. The danger of playing a consistent inside/out game is that you get beat wide and give up dominant edges or you lose key bodies early before the momentum builds. For AC the momentum began building as they were able to shift their Home players into their secondaries, or follow-up the wire leads with support guns. We felt that two players in a Home CK was subject to attack along with the D-side Can.
Objective: counter AC early with a more aggressive version of their basic game plan and force them to change. Since they were attacking the center consistently we wanted them to have to force bodies wide OTB or soon thereafter. We also wanted our first eliminations to come from the D-side Can and/or back center. If we were consistently getting an elimination there the result would naturally blunt the force of any AC offensive push.

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