The fourth event of the PSP season has seen its fair share of venue changes and ups and downs in attendance. It makes sense that the event sandwiched between the very popular and well-attended Chicago and World Cup events would see some drop-off, as teams playing the divisional and less sponsored levels would opt to play those two if that’s all their budgets and time allow. This year’s event was moved away from Top Gun Paintball in south Jersey to OXCC in Maryland, just outside of the Delaware line. If you’ve never been to OXCC it’s one of the true paintball gems on the east coast, with a ton of property, plenty of parking, a pro-shop onsite and more than enough airball fields to host an event of this magnitude. Maybe that’s why this year’s fourth event drew so many teams and players. With 130 teams, 1500 players and 25 vendors, I’ll bet no one in the ranks of the PSP is disappointed with the turnout for this event.

The 2012 PSP Chicago Open took place June 21-24 at Challenge Park Xtreme (CPX) in Joliet, Illinois about thirty minutes from downtown Chicago. Last year the PSP moved the Chicago Open to CPX after years of hosting the third event of the year at various Chicago-area venues, and most recently at Badlandz and Bolingbrook Aquatic Center. Chicago has a very rich professional (and amateur) tournament paintball history that dates back almost to the start of tournament paintball. Lively Productions ran the Windy City Open tournaments in Chicago in the mid and late 1980s and the NPPL and PSP have run dozens of events there since the early 1990s. Suffice to say Chicago is a hotbed for paintball competition and it likely always will be.

You can’t even imagine what this event was like if you were not there. It’s almost impossible to describe what happened on Friday night. The rain came, the winds came—and the fields just got crushed. Weeks of work and months of planning went out the window for the PSP as they had to scramble to make something out of less than nothing. The league had to face the fact that not all the games could possibly be played this weekend. The PSP did what good businesses do when things don’t go as planned—they ditched Plan A and went to Plan B. They brought in lights to play night games, the rebuilt fields… they worked their @$$es off.

By Thomas Allegretto, Photos by Michael Mohr

The buildup leading to the PSP World Cup is nothing short of amazing every year. For the top teams in each division the PSP season is a year-long journey with the focused goal of winning events and even a season title. For most teams this journey starts in January after a break between the previous year’s World Cup and the year ending holidays—and once that journey begins the breaks are few and far between. For most it’s training during the week and team practices on weekends—and the closer you get to the world Cup, the more intense the training gets.