Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

The tie-breaker came into play during semi-finals at BMR. The scoring system makes the adjustment automatically before displaying the final score (it adds 1 to the alliance determined to be the winner).

Since most at the event were not fully aware of how this is implemented (this is only for eliminations, not qualifying matches), here is the exerpt from the game manual.

5.4.4 Elimination Scoring

In the Elimination Matches teams do not earn Qualification Points; they earn a win, loss or tie. Within each bracket of the Elimination Match ladder, the first Alliance to win two Matches will advance.

In the case where the Match score of each Alliance is equal, the tie will be broken by awarding an extra point to the Alliance with the highest number of Foul points granted (the Alliance that played the cleaner Match). If both Alliances have the same number of Foul points, the extra point will be awarded to the Alliance with the highest Hybrid points. If both Alliances have the same Hybrid score, the extra point will be awarded to the Alliance with the most Bridge points. If both Alliances scored the same number of Bridge points, the match is considered truly tied and will be replayed if needed.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

Don't really recall seeing this happen much until this weekend (IIRC it happened a few other places as well), and honestly, this is an incredibly fair way to break the ties.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

This came into play at Peachtree twice (including the last finals match). As thrilling as some Palmetto elimination rounds have been (who can forget the five-match quarterfinal of 2008, followed by a four-match final?), I think this is really a Good Thing. Fist-bump to whichever GDC member(s) got this in.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

There was an absolute tie at Detroit Quarterfinals 3 Match 3. Same foul points, hybrid points, bridge points, and teleop points. The match had to be replayed.

Edit: Here's a photo:

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

I have to say I'm more of a fan of replaying tied matches - as long as everything is according to schedule (which it seems it mostly has been this year), it adds to the drama and fun for spectators...

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

I will concede that the drama could be improved on--the deciding point isn't really related well on-screen since we all see the score at the buzzer. I imagine a tie-breaker screen running down the deciding criteria would improve it, though I also wouldn't bet on them making such a change to the FMS midseason.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

Agreed

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

Nice photo. :D

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

I honestly don't see any reason for a tiebreaker. No, I'm not simply saying this because the tiebreaker did not favor my alliance.

First, the favorite matches i remember in my FIRST history was at the 2010 IRI competition. I believe it was the semifinals or so. If my memory serves me correctly, 33 and 1718 (and maybe some other teams) kept hanging at the last second. There were 2 or 3 tie matches and i believe it ended up going to 5 matches (TBA doesn't have results for it). By far the best FIRST experience I've had, and it was because of the ties.

Furthermore, it's not like ties would be substantially prolonging anything. 10 minutes more max added on per match. Not a big deal in my opinion when you're determining the best alliance of 3 robots made by a multitude of students working for over 6 weeks straight.

In addition to this, adding a tiebreaker is like getting rid of Overtime in Basketball. Think of some of the best sports games you have witnessed. There's a good chance it involved one overtime, if not more. How would you feel if your high school basketball team made a game-tying basket at the buzzer, only to be told that you still lose because one of your players fouled out? If you argue FIRST isn't trying to be a sport/be basketball, you're missing the point. Even if that point was relevant, why then are we cutting down the nets?

I'd love to hear some actual reasons as to why the tiebreaker is a good thing, instead of simply saying it's good.

-Duke

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

The first time it had to be used was during quarterfinal match 1-1 where the 8th alliance toed and lost the tie breaker due to hybrid pnts. I was in that, match. Not fun losing by one point ill tell u that.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

If you knew this was a factor going into the game, would you have been more concerned about that player getting into foul trouble?

Here's what I like about it:

-It can shorten the length of the day. A five-match elimination round adds 20-30 minutes easily to the day, which gets significant in certain scenarios (such as starting Einstein on time).
-It's a tiebreaker based in clean play and excelling at the trickier parts of the game (hybrid and bridge). It's not a coin-flip.
-It can be explained in far less than a tweet. No head-scratching formulas (sup, Coopertition Award?), no insider knowledge required--if you understand the basic flow of the match, you understand the components of the tiebreaker.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

Duke461

IIRC that also happened in the finals. I remember because my team helps by setting up and tearing down the event so we were there the entire time. It definitively makes it more nerve racking and I enjoy it.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

Point understood, but would it still not detract from the game itself? Especially if the situation were similar to the situation at BMR, meaning you would have thought the game was going into OT until the refs told you about this obscure new rule, you'd go ballistic. Point there being, Overtime is what makes that game so incredibly exciting. Just like a tie match in robotics.


Again, I point out 20-30 minutes relative to the time and effort put into every single robot. At the very least, don't have tiebreakers until World.
Why is roughly 1 minute and 30 seconds of time not relevant? I would think that if a team gets beat in autonomous, yet comes back and ties it, then their robots are probably a lot better, and deserve to move on. Tie-breaking choice aside, i refer back to the basketball analogy in two ways: One, fouls can be, in both basketball and Rebound Rumble, very demonstrative of one's grasp of strategy, which can't exactly be measured in ways besides the final outcome. If the final outcome is even, test their strategy in another match. Two, it's not fair to apply one facet of the game as a decisive measure of which alliance performed better. They don't tiebreak basketball games through three pointers made (eq. to auton), free throws made (eq. to bridge), etc. Why here?
I think a tie itself is much easier to comprehend then a tiebreaker. If the score is the same, no one won. Simple.

-Duke

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

During qualifications, a tie means 1 point...better than losing but less than winning. I think i'd prefer it like that for elims.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

As Billfred mentioned above, this happened twice at Peachtree, and both times it involved the 2nd seed. One time it lost us a match, the other time, it won us the regional.

I do not truly know if I am for it or against it. On one hand, our robot was running down to its limits that Saturday. I can say that removing extraneous matches tends to help keep the flow going, drivers engaged, and the robot fresh.

However, there's that settling feeling during a tie. That feeling where you know that there's one more match to battle it all out.

So once again, I don't know if I like it, but I have no complaints.

- Sunny G.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

It was 33, 1718, 70, and 51. We went against 1114 and 2056 - I can't remember who the 3rd and 4th teams were. If I remember correctly, we lost the 1st, tied 16-16 (or something like that) in the 2nd, then won to even it up, then had a 20-20 tie, before losing in the 5th match. Those were very fun matches - too bad we didn't come out on top. We also did that in Atlanta on Newton field in the semis - we advanced in 4 games, the 2 victories were split by 2 ties.

I don't know that I feel strongly on the subject of ties or tie-breakers in the elims. I can see the arguments from both sides. I do understand the desire from the event coordination standpoint of being able to time the length of the finals better...but triple overtime can be a lot of fun too!

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

I was extremely disappointed by the boos at Boilermaker when the results were first announced.

Teams should know the tournament rules.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

Even if they do know the rules, it doesn't mean the teams should be happy with them.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

Would they have booed if the tiebreaker went in their favor?

The right time to be in disagreement is before it matters, not when it is convenient.

edit: I do not know if said people had voiced their disapproval in the tiebreaker process before the regional :)

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

I'm sure not all of the booing was from the losing teams (although I did not see the match in question). Personally I would hate to win a match via this tiebreaker. We won a few matches last year because of red-cards, and I can't even say I'm proud of those matches.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

A win is a win is a win.
If you did nothing to lose it then you should have nothing to hang your head over.
I witnessed a tiebreaker coming into play twice this year and once last year at FLR.
In the 2011 FLR finals I thought 2056 and 217 were eating 1126 and 340 alive and then 1126 and 340 got first and second place in the minibot race to tie the score. When it was revealed that the winner of the minibot race gets the tiebreaker to win the match the audience was quite surprised. But the more i Thought about it and th teams involved I bet 1126 and 340 knew they couldn't compete with those two juggernauts placing tube but if they could keep them in range they could get them with the minibots and snatch away victory. And that just made me shake my head at how clever and brilliant that was.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

The tiebreaker was a great addition to the rules in the game. However, I wish more teams were more knowledgeable about how the tiebreaker clause worked during the Peachtree eliminations; it was not fun being a referee after the semis, with something that looked like a FMS mistake initially to everyone except the field crew (scorekeepers & referees). The drive teams were NOT happy after the score came up on the screen.......

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

The Rebound Rumble rule is neither obscure nor new. It is openly displayed in the Elimination Scoring section of the Tournament manual, right after the part that says that an alliance must win two matches in order to advance to the next rung of the ladder, and it has been there since Kickoff.

When the tiebroken score caused a commotion at Boilermaker, it took me all of fifteen seconds to bring the relevant paragraph up on my iPod and show it to nearby confused spectators. It would have taken only ten seconds if I had known exactly where to find it, instead of merely knowing that it existed.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

Why?

If you win a match via a tiebreaker, it means your alliance played cleaner, scored more in autonomous, or scored more bridge points.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

It also means that even though your alliance received bonus points worth more than regular scoring, the opposing alliance played well enough (and basketed more balls) to meet your score. The potential issue is that in some cases, an alliance lost simply because someone decided they liked seeing alliances use the bridge or score hybrid points more than scoring during teleop.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

All it means is that in the overall scheme of things

a foul is effectively worth (3 + 1 * x)
a hybrid score is effectively worth ((6 or 5 or 4) + 1 * y)
a bridge balance is effectively worth ((40 or 20 or 10) + 1 * z)

Where:
x is the percentage of matches that are tied divided by the number of fouls awarded to the alliance in that match
y is the percentage of matches that are still tied after fouls divided by the number of hybrid hoops scored by the alliance in that match
z is the percentage of matches that are still tied after hybrid

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

This is not a valid argument. We knew from the very beginning that this was how it would be judges so when you built your robot, you should have put a tiny bit of extra weight towards the tie-breaker categories. It's no different than someone's judgement about how many points to award for a balance.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

i am not much in favor of this but it is what it is.
I think this actually double counts the foul points. Foul points are ALREADY counted in to get to the tie point... so saying that one team played a cleaner match would mean that you are rewarding a team first by giving them the foul points (thus tying the match) and then by virtue of the tie breaker giving them additional advantage (even though without the foul points they wouldn't have tied in the first place) In a game where a simple brushing of a bridge or a robot can cost a team between 3 and 9 foul points this seems extreme...

I would have preferred the tie to be broken by the same formula used for ranking points.... hybrid and then bridge...

Fouling in this year's game does not mean a team is playing more cleanly.. it is often a simple miscalculation of momentum .... deliberate fouling... I am ok with that causing a tie break...

GDC has, in essence, taken playing defense out of the game this year.
I guess that is ok... but adding it to the tiebreaker is abit much..

Imagine this final...blue and red are 1 win a piece
REDBOT is behind by 49 points...
BLUEBOT is too close to the red bridge and a red robot (in the act of trying to balance), pushes the bluebot into the bridge... bingo 49 point penalty..
Now the final score is tied... game over
except the BLUE team loses because they had more penalty points..

Agreed... blue is not thinking correctly by being by the red bridge at all... but who is playing cleaner?

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

I meant obscure to the general public and other fellow robotics members. I know this because nearly everybody (but not everyone) out on the field had no idea about it. And even if we knew of the rule beforehand, i refer back to my strategy point and my basketball game analogy.

-Duke

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

Say all you want about "knowing the rules", but no one at the scoring table knew for sure why the score changed from 25 to 26, and it took several minutes for it to be determined and explained.

The "boo's" weren't because of who won, it was because everyone thought there was an error.

The reason i made the original post was to make sure more teams knew.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

That's not the point I'm referring to.

I'm aware of what the rules say and I'm just speaking my opinion on the spirit of competition in general. I'm not a part of a team and the team I have previously been affiliated with has not been negatively affected by this system. I'm speaking from a spectator's standpoint. If the scores are the same the two alliances have demonstrated in some way that they are equal in skill for that round.

I'm not sure if it's the point of this thread or not, but in a lot of sports there is overtime, while in robotics there is not. The system adding a single point to the scores of an apparently random alliance (to a spectator) isn't spectator-friendly.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

No one booed at FLR or Montreal when it happened (no one booed anything at Montreal they were just running in high gear all weekend just excited to see FIRST for the first time). Some people came up curious about what happened but that was about it.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

I didn't hear booing myself, but i suppose it's harder to hear the crowd with all the noise down on the field. I do not condone the booing in any way.

-Duke

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

The only criticism I have of the tiebreaker is that there is no indication on the "Big Screen" why one team's score apparently doesn't add up correctly.

We had one in QF 3-2 at Gull Lake Week 1. It was immediately apparent that it was going to be a tie. Basket points were 10-20, then balance points were 20-10. 20+10=30, but 10+20=31?

I knew there was a tiebreaker; I believe I had mentioned it to the alliance captains. But I hadn't memorized the formula. The announcer noted there was a tiebreaker, and then as soon as we looked it up he announced the criteria.

You can argue that there should or shouldn't be a tiebreaker, or that the criteria used are wrong. Make those points in your post-season analysis to FIRST. But don't argue that a tiebreaker is unfair because not enough people knew about it. Section 5 of the manual is there for a reason. Hmm, maybe if teams read the that, we'd stop having red cards all around when a team that has not passed inspection has their Inbounder participate anyway.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

This rule was used once at Rutgers during eliminations in week 2. It was clearly explained as the score was posted.

Re: Elimination Match Tie-Breaker
 

I second that. I was working field reset (Red DS Kinect side gate) and it took me a sec to remember the rule... As for the red alliance, I was literally right there. All I could see on thier faces was disbelief... IIRC duke461 actually asked me about the rule since he (like everybody) was unsure (and the refs were busy at the scoring table).

In general, the semis at BMR were very close... the other semi (3rd vs 8th) went down to a piece of paper (to see if a fallen bot was touching a bridge). I agree that it would have made more sense to replay the match rather then tiebreak it, but the rules are the rules (until IRI, that is).