Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

No district champs in this

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

I would say Waterloo. 148, 610, 1114, and 2056 among other good teams.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Per Ed Law Database
Last year the 3 highest scoring average qualification points were Waterloo, NE Hartford, MI West Michigan.
Expect these to be strong again.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

I agree with Waterloo.

Here are some other regionals I think are stacked:

Los Angeles Regional- 330, 399, 696, 987, 3476

Central Valley Regional -254, 701, 973, 1671, 1678

Greater Toronto East Regional - 610, 1114, 1241, 1310, 1325, 2056

Alamo Regional- 148, 624, 1477, 2468

Iowa Regional- 525, 967, 1730, 2175, 2502, 3130, 3284

Minnesota North Star Regional- 967, 2169, 2175, 2826, 3130

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Michigan, as I see it... I don't have the time to worry about anywhere else... :)

I have a powerlist based on where a team has ranked in previous years, with diminishing contributions as the ranking ages...

Killer Bees, is my number 1 power rank team in the state, and so far they only have one district selected, so where ever they go for number two will be impacted..

Based on this calculated power rank...

Waterford Week 1 is Michigan's most competitive district, just slightly lower in competitiveness than last years 100 team state finals.

Howell is number two.
St. Joseph is third.
Livonia is forth.
Southfield is fifth, also week 1.

Michigan still needs to add two districts... so there will be some shifting, as things are not set in stone.

But based on today's registration, that is how I see it....

YMMV, power rank is not a science...

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

I think the toughest/strongest events are those that are deep enough where the 6-8 alliances can put three strongs teams together that can at least be competitive with the top alliances.

When looking at this factor, Waterloo was one of the weakest events last year with 5 elimination scores below 50, the most out of all 19 events during week 4 last year.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

my top 5 districts for Michigan are the following for 2016
Waterford
Livonia
west Michigan
Howell
troy

this is just by team list and/or last year

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Well, the events are LSSU Sault Ste. Marie and Ann Arbor Skyline. LSSU will get a number of northern teams and whoever is willing to travel.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

is that official

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Does this count? Also, main and alternate contacts got emails about them if we wanted to switch events (at least those close to them).

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

yes it dose and i wish they add some districts in earlier weeks

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Don't forget 3309, 294, 4201, and 3512!

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Just because no one has said anything about New England yet...
Pine tree looks like it has a lot of competition:
58
125
319
1519
2648
4564
5122
5687

All of those teams have either won or been finalists at an official event in recent years.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Thanks, you know more than me since you are more familiar with the local powerhouses.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Thanks for bringing up NE!
You forgot team 133..
Finalists and winners in recent years.
[/shameless plug]

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

My bad. Didn't do enough research on the rest of the teams.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

For the PNW, Auburn Mountainview has been a competitive event in its existence, but Philomath this year seems to be the strongest for 2016.

Usual Contenders:
CV Robotics [955]
Wildcats [1510]
Spartan Robotics [997]
Hotwire [2990]
Skynet [2550]

Joining this year: (This is where it gets really scary)
Shockwave [4488]
Skunkworks [1983]
IRS [1318]
Bear Metal [2046]
Lion Robotics [2907]

And still only 28 spots filled :ahh:

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

I would agree regarding Philomath in the PNW. This is going to be interesting. I would expect a lot of people will be watching this event as a pre-cursor to District Championships :yikes:

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

GTR-E has to be one of the, if not the most competitive regional this year.

You have THREE Einstein teams from just last year in 1114, 2056, and 1325.

There are three World Champions from past years in 610, 1114, and 1241.

You've got the teams on the alliance that upset the Sim/Dave alliance in 2014, teams 1285, 2198, and 4476, eliminating them in the Semi-Finals.

1310 is a local powerhouse that gets invited to IRI year after year. Not to mention 2056 who are yet to loose a regional.

This will be a really great regional to watch, and take part in, with an elevated level of play.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

I know it's a new Regional, but Rocket City in Huntsville, AL looks pretty strong.
These are the registered teams who have either won or been runner up at an event within the last 3 years:

16, 79, 118, 343, 364, 456, 624, 801, 1251, 1539, 1706, 1902, 2783, 3490, 3959, 4188,

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

I'll have to put that one on my list of livestreams to watch. I was a little worried about 2056's streak once I saw the list for Waterloo... especially with 148 making an appearance.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

It is great to see that Philomath is going to have a deep set of teams to draw from.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Well, they were fine when 254 decided to visit in 2014, so, barring things I'm unaware of (of which there are many), I don't see 148 being in the mix shaking up 2056's chances of keeping their streak alive significantly.

There are a lot of ways to quantify "competitive". To me, it boils down to two questions: How difficult is it to win an event and how difficult is it to play Saturday (or Sunday) afternoon at an event. I'm not sure what the best way to quantify each of those is (and I'm pretty sure better minds than mine have tried), but it seems to me that one could come up with a number of statistics that might correlate to "competitiveness" at a regional.

I'm also not sure many of the previous posts in this thread are what I would say are most competitive overall. Perhaps in a given region, yes, but I wouldn't be likely to put one of our MN regionals on the same level as many Michigan District events, or even Wisconsin Regional, which always seems to be very deep, even if the ceiling isn't as high as places like Waterloo. It's quite difficult to make a judgement on the whole however, when I, like many people, only really have a strong knowledge of regionals in my area.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

No, 148 will definitely shake up OP's chances. In 2014 there was a little bit of luck that went their way to keep 2056 on the winning streak. Namely, the fact that 4039 seeded first and picked Simbotics allowed 254 and 2056 to pair up. In many other situations, 254 and 1114 could have paired up and ended 2056's streak. Not to mention, if 148 had come to Waterloo this past year and 1114's canburglars were better, then the two probably would have paired up.

I'm sure 2056 is up to the challenge and excited to fight for another regional win this year at Waterloo.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

This is one of those questions I've been trying to figure out for a while. So, I've actually built out a system to provide what I'm calling a Dynasty rating for teams. It's effectively based on the team's ability to play in the afternoon. I've assigned winning an event as 100 points. From there, each level is divided by the number of alliances reaching it. (Finalist 50, SF 25, QF 12.5) I also reverted towards the mean by 5% each year to help offset teams that had a great year in like 2006 and haven't been consistent.[1] I've also added a minimum threshold of 5 events, teams are derated accordingly prior to that because they are unknown. So, my theory is that this shows an overall ability to play in eliminations.[2] These were averaged over a year.

After that I started asking myself how I could quantify competitiveness of an event. Frankly, I enjoy watching an event where the winner isn't a known thing[3]. So I did a bit of research, for those of you unfamiliar with the Gini Coefficient, it's a measure of income disparity in nations. But, at it's core, it's a measure of equality of distribution. So, I got to wondering if I could leverage the math behind it to find events with lots of close teams.


Ok, this post is dragging on a lot longer than I wanted it to, so the TLDR - you can, it's actually fairly simple math given a sorted array. So, by week, the most "exciting"[4]:

(If they were real close (within a hundredth) I included the top 2

Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6 [5]

This was all based on every official event from 2006 to present. [6]


I'm tired, but if folks want the other order I can do that tomorrow.

[1] Number felt right, not really based on much than the that.
[2] Spot checking teams felt right. In theory there's prolly a way of using this for Fantasy FIRST type stuff.
[3] Almost known thing... whatevs
[4] Read as, events with the lowest Gini coefficient since 0 would be perfectly equal distribution.
[5] Actually, NCCMP was flagging as the most even this week, but since it's a qualify only event I assume it's a TBA bug?
[6] Which surprises absolutely nobody that I have...

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Andrew, would that be possible to do for Regionals?

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Additionally, 2056 lost 2/3rds of their non IRI off seasons. While there's a huge difference between on season and off season, they're human and have the ability to lose just like everyone else.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Note not only close competition at Hartford,
But Hartford has 10 of 38 competitors that were in eliminations at championships last year, and second to top on average qualification score of all regionals or districts - so competitive and at a high level. None of the super-star teams maybe (is 195?), but solid to the core.

Interesting analysis Andrew.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

My lists for a couple regionals were definitely a bit biased since I know the local teams/powerhouses better.

I agree. The presence of 148 will shake 2056's chances of continuing their win streak. We definitely can't make accurate predictions now since we don't know what the game is and what their robots are on a competitive level, but we can guess. Regardless Waterloo will be a fun regional to watch!

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

What I'm saying is that pretty much every regional 2056 is at has a whole bunch of competitive teams at it. Ontario isn't lacking in the high-quality teams department-- a decent amount of those teams that 2056 regularly beats would be dominant at other regionals.

Throwing another excellent team in the mix like 148 doesn't (in my opinion) shake things up much further. OP is already fighting a losing battle with probability-- eventually something is going to come along to break their streak, whether 148, 254, or any other powerhouse is there or not.

Andrew-- That's a very interesting approach to the problem, and definitely reinforced what I was thinking about "competitiveness" not necessarily being in conjunction with the number of big-name teams present.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

If it is easy to do, could you try this method on just the top 24 teams at each event?

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

https://gist.github.com/schreiaj/e87...file-top24-tsv

It does change things up, makes a lot of events look more balanced. For reading the Gini column - 0 is balanced, 1 is unbalanced.

https://gist.github.com/schreiaj/e87...b#file-all-tsv That actually included regionals, but districts seem to be more balanced.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

You're forgetting that the Skunks were there last year too. I think they won it or something... ;)

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Wouldn't an event with 50 box bots struggling to move score better than an event with 30 elite teams (254, 1114, 148...) and 20 box bots struggling to move? I'd agree that is a good measure of 'competitiveness', but it is a little misleading in a 'strongest event' thread.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Yes. I can see about generating box and whisker plots for each event based on dynasty scores. That would give you a more visual way of comparing and seeing events like you describe.

You see why I explained the concept in detail rather than just giving numbers. :P

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

^ Yes, your Kettering event for Michigan....

of the 40 team field, 9 teams have more than two years experience.
Of the 9 teams that have more than 2 years experience, only two teams have finished in the top 20 (2011-2015) of the state...

70 More Martians (2011, 2012, 2015)
3656 Deadbots (2013)

Meanwhile down the street at Waterford has nine top 20 finishers... with 32 total top 20 finishes between them...

33 Killer Bees
51 Wings of Fire
67 The HOT Team
245 Adambots
1023 Bedford Express
1189 The Gearheads
1718 The Fighting Pi
2137 TORC
3098 The Captains

And still seven open spots...

I know where I will be watching week 1...

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Thanks, this is really interesting. I'm surprised by how much more balanced the top 24 are when compared to all teams. I suppose that every 40+ team event has at least 10 teams that almost never make playoffs, which really increases the disparity.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

The two metrics I like to look at when gauging the top end teams at a regional during the preseason are the number of previous year Championship elimination round teams and Einstein teams. I've only counted for the events we're attending, but I'm sure someone could run the numbers across all events.

GTR East:
Champs Elim Teams: 6/52
Einstein Teams: 4/52

Waterloo:
Champs Elim Teams: 8/32
Einstein Teams: 3/32

I'm guessing no other regional is going to match the 25% number that Waterloo has, but that's probably artificially inflated by the size (or lack thereof) of the event. That being said, that 25% number also means you're not going to run into many matches without a high level team. So the event becomes that much more webcast/spectator friendly.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

I'd also assume that 25% is partially due to the abnormally high percentage of teams from Canada making the championship due to the smaller regionals.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Team quality is one reason for this. Field volunteers are another. :)

Wish I were going ...

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

That would explain a larger number of teams who attended Championship in the previous year, but it wouldn't explain why the teams were so successful at Championship.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Unless we had data backing a causative (or at least correlative) relationship between attending championships and future success on the field, which I don't think is a link anyone has shown, but is something I think many assume.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

The ratio is effective at determining the competitiveness of the average qualification match but everything playoff related including seeding is better represented by the actual number of Championship playoff teams.

The more teams that get sent to champs, the less there is a chance of a good team getting snubbed which happens quite frequently in areas without districts or fewer/bigger events.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Hartford District -
Champs Elims 10/38 (26%)
Einstein - 0/38

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

EDIT: With 2 (195, 2170) being captains on their divisions.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Actually BETA: 2836 was captain - not 2067 in the Gallileo division. Beta ranked 1, 2067 ranked 4th.

And 230 is not at Hartford (at least yet) nor are other CT standouts of 228 and 2836. Wish they were also..

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

I mixed up my 2015 and 2016 team lists :ahh:

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

230 is on the waiting list...

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Agreed, but when over 40% of teams make eliminations at the championship, the more teams you send, the more will make eliminations.


As an aside, I think it would be intersting to compare the percent of teams making championship eliminations based on region. I'm not sure that's been done before.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Looks like another Texas team is bringing the rodeo up to Canada - 118 is now registered for Greater Toronto East.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

MAR Events, # in champs elims, # at event:

• Hatboro-Horsham: 6 / 36 (203, 1218, 1640, 2016, 2590, 2607)
• Mount Olive: 6 / 38 (11, 193, 303, 1403, 1676, 1923*)
• Seneca: 5 / 33 (1089*, 1640, 2016, 2590, 4954)
• Springside-Chestnut Hill: 6 / 27 (103, 203, 225, 365, 1218, 3974)
• Bridgewater-Raritan: 4 / 39 (11, 193, 1403, 1676)
• Westtown: 8 / 33 (103, 225, 365, 1218, 1640, 2607, 3974, 4954)
• Montgomery: 5 / 36 (103, 303, 1089*, 1923*, 3974)

*Played on Einstein

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Actually.... we didn't win it... our ALLIANCE won it.
We could not have done it without 955 and 847. They were great partners and we look forward to working with them again this year!!!

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Waterford is definitely FiM's strongest district this year. Per Karthik's metric:

1/34 einstein appearance, 12/34 champ elims, 11/34 MSC elims.

With open spots in Ann Arbor, it will be interesting to see which teams shift. However, I don't think many will want to trade a week 1 spot for a week 6 spot.

Most other FiM districts have many new faces with the surge of new teams. It's hard to tell which ones will pull out from the crowd.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

With 118 joining GTRE it may well be the most "competitive" regional.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

We briefly discussed traveling to Corvallis for this (it's the same distance as Las Vegas) as we're looking for a third regional, but the PNW Districts don't have a provision (yet) for outside teams.:(

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

We would have loved to see you there!!! That would be loads of fun.
FIRST actually is the issue. You can only play in a District event if you come from a different District.

Last year 190 came all the way out from WPI and New Hampshire to compete at Philomath. They were from a District though...

Hope to see you guys in St. Louis!!
Same field again would be nice...... it seems to work out that way for some reason..... In the last 5 years we have been in the same division 4 out of 5 years.....last three in a row.... Only missed you guys in 2012 when we were on Newton and you were on Curie.

It is interesting that our two teams have been on either Curie or Newton for all of that time.

Now if we could just figure out how to be on the same Alliance for elims it would be even nicer

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Now there's a great example of the basic concept of FIRST right there!!

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

All three of these teams are competing at the Waterbury Event this year!

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Unfortunately 2067 is not going to be there. Also missing 175, 195, and 2168 (all four of which made champs elims this year).

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

I didn't know about this until a few days ago, but I would have to say GTR-E and Waterloo are going to be pretty neck and neck with the addition of the Texas powerhouses paying them a visit.