(Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I was looking at alliance selection results from this season and reflected on how things played out at a few events. I noticed that there are quite a few selection decisions that I couldn't figure out the reasoning behind. I understand that teams don't always make the best decision. With a problem anywhere near as challenging as alliance selection, that's to be expected. However, occasionally teams just make strange picks. I'm sure you've all seen such selections.

In a similar vein, I've seen quite a few teams who've been declined and then advanced further than the team who declined them, especially in scorched-earth scenarios (i.e. high alliance captain picks other alliance captains who decline in order to keep them from partnering up). In those cases, it often seems like the declining team would have been better off accepting.

My questions for everyone:

• Why do teams behave (seemingly, to an outsider) irrationally during alliance selection?
• Has anyone noticed any patterns or common fallacies*?
• How frequently do teams make the "right pick" or something close to it? Is there a way to quantify/measure this?

*Aside from a lack of scouting data. I know from first-hand experience that it can cause problems for an alliance captain.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I'll address your second point first. I've seen teams decline for many different reasons. Some teams want the experience of being an alliance captain, some teams want to feel like they're being "strategic" and they overthink what they should do, and I've even seen a team decline what should have been an obvious accept because their representitive saw the 1 seed's last match where they tried high goal shooting for the first time. Most teams decline seeing who's left at that moment, not who will be left to pick when it gets to them.

As for why teams make bad selections, the usual suspect I've found is teams not having scouting or having misleading data. I've seen teams pick based on the fact that a team was consistently average through an event, and not pick teams who started off poor but got better throughout the event.

There's also the simple fact that many teams don't base their picks off of watching matches. I know many teams who pick based off of who they worked well with in a Quals match, or someone who they are friends with. It's also not uncommon for teams who don't know any better to pick the next team down in the rankings, despite them not actually being that good (trust me, I've been the not very good bot picked for that reason before).

Overall scouting is difficult for most teams to pull off effectively due to a lack of students, or just a lack of care by anyone to take data and use it effectively. The best teams have students who genuinely enjoy scouting and the alliance selection process. Personally being a picking team in alliance selections is my favorite part of a robotics competition.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

This is always an interesting scenario especially for the team declining. Sometimes I have heard from teams who declined that they felt the field wasn't deep enough for a strong third pick and therefore wanted to be a lower captain to hopefully secure a better third pick than what would be available for the higher alliance.

For every decline that we see on the field there are times when teams get together with the intent to discuss a possible alliance, but the discussion ends with the conclusion that they won't be better off pairing together. Sometimes teams decide to pick lower than what is expected so as to save the other team from having to decline and make things awkward for everyone else (and save some time).

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

As Jay pointed out, scouting is tough, plain and simple.

A few additional things that I have noticed which play into your three questions...

While teams may have scouting data, even good scouting data, they don't always analyze it well. What I have seen time and time again is that 3 good robots don't always equal a good alliance. Many of these games require the alliance to divide and conquer. For instance this past year, having 3 robots that all score 10 boulders in the high goal consistently then climb looks like a great alliance on paper. But if they all require using the low bar to cycle, and then need the center spot to climb... well thats just a traffic jam. A good alliance needs to be 3 robots that can work well TOGETHER, and bring out the best in one another. I have seen on many occasions an alliance of 3 good/ok robots work together very well and take down seemingly unbeatable alliances made up of awesome teams that just trip over each other the entire match.

One of my favorite alliances to be on from this past year was at the Boston regional. 1768 was with the alliance captain 1058, as well as 5563 (they actually came in as a backup robot early in the eliminations, and were an absolute jackpot). I have never felt so comfortable on an alliance. 1058 did what the were doing best and made sure to get boulders in the low goal for the guaranteed tower strength, this simultaneously gave the rest of the alliance a huge sense of relief. All of a sudden there was so much less stress to score X number of boulders, 1058 has that covered. This meant less stress for the other drivers. 5563 was absolutely awesome, and knocked down the defenses while being simultaneously invisible most of the time, they were cautious in when they crossed as to not disrupt any shots that were being taken, and they always stayed close to the defenses to allow for easy driving around for the rest of the alliance. 5563 also allowed for 1058 and 1768 to climb on the outside positions of the tower, and would then drive up the batter at the last second to avoid bumping either robot during the critical "get the hooks on" phase. It was fantastic. Each robot on the alliance allowed the others to play to their strengths.

This is also important to notice while scouting. I saw several instances this past season where a robot would cross several defenses, and get the check marks on the scouting sheets, but in doing so that robot cut off an alliance member, then crashed into the other alliance member causing them to miss a shot. Performing well while causing your alliance partners to perform poorly isn't an easy thing to quantify on a scouting sheet, and often dent make its way into the notes section.

~Zac

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

In my experience the bulk of "irrational" alliance selection decisions occur when teams don't really talk to their potential picks before alliance selections. I think one of the clearest examples I've seen of this was this year's New York City regional.

First of all, I believe that my team (694) was the strongest robot at the New York City regional, but we only managed to seed 8th given the fact that we spend almost two entire matches not moving. It's not irrational to not want to pick a team that had these kinds of issues, however, I was surprised by how few teams asked us what actually happened.

The second strongest robot at the regional almost definitely team 3419, who seeded third. Going into alliance selections, I personally think that the most rational picks for the first seed (team 375) would be first team 3419, knowing they would most likely reject, then to pick us, who would almost be forced to accept given our low seed.

The reason I think that this would be optimal is that that I predicted that team 375 would be either eliminated by us, or by team 3419 (I admit that some of this prediction was due to my own conceit).

The key is that all of this is only optimal given the fact that our dead matches were not for repeatable reasons, and even then, it's still very much arguable that this wouldn't be optimal, as we could have more issues in eliminations.

As it turns out, our two consecutive matches of non-action were due to

1. Forgetting to revert to competition code after pit testing
2. leaving our breaker switch loose

Both issues were fixed completely, and I think if team 375 had known this, they might have picked us. Instead, however, we were picked by the fourth alliance and went on to win the regional without a single loss in eliminations.

Disclaimer: I don't know that 375 didn't have this information, only that they didn't ask me for it, or ask anyone in the pit while I was there. In fact, we may have talked to members of their team about it, but it is sometimes difficult to find the right person to talk to when negotiating about alliance selections.

Basically, I think that a lot of teams fail to make "rational" decisions are acting perfectly rational based off of the information they had at the time.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

This is something Brendan and I have talked about before, the difference between quantitative and qualitative scouting. Quantitative data is useful for comparing teams that are far apart in ability, or when you are looking for specific skill sets. However it's important for scouts to be able to watch matches and see how each team is doing beyond the numbers and how well they'll work with an alliance. I often combine what the scouts see in terms of smart driving with how the drive team feels with each team that they got to play with.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

After experiencing many different alliance drafts I have found why the picks are often strange and/or out of order. For many teams their picks are all precalculated and when it comes to actually selection a team the predicted scenarios do not always pan out. This is very difficult to change on the fly and most teams just go with who they were going to select anyways. Another crucial part of teams picking either deep of out of order is compatibility. This aspect might not be seen easily from the stands but when interacting with other teams it is everything. When these scenarios occur teams will pick strange picks in order to make there alliance strong as a team instead of three separate units. Yes, teams will make incorrect choices but being behind that mic is very intimidating and puts a lot of pressure on high school students. But in most cases I always assume there is a greater plan and that no alliance is to be taken easily.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I agree with most of the responses to the OP's question.

Most of the irrational/illogical decisions I've seen come from a team that probably didn't scout as well or pick based on bias/experience working with the team.

Scouting and Strategy is a hard system to run for teams during competition and it's harder to manage than imagined. Many teams have different systems, organization, different amounts of manpower, resources, and etc. that probably affect how well their picking is.

I'm not sure if I've seen any declining based on this reason, but I declined the 2nd seeded alliance's invite (as 2052's alliance selection representative) at the 2015 10,000 lakes regional because I wanted our team to captain the alliance to get to the finals to guarantee ourselves a wildcard. I had a few other reasons to decline because I knew I had 1/2 better options to pick after declining them, but getting the wildcard was the pushing factor since the first wildcard is awarded starting with the opposing alliance captain to the wildcard team on the winning alliance.

At the 2015 10,000 lakes regional, the 2 best teams joined together to form the no.1 seed (525 and 2502) and since 525 had won the Northern Light's regional previously, they had a wildcard. Strategically I chose to decline the 2nd seeds invite because I felt like I could built an alliance strong enough and go to the finals to meet the 1st seed and guarantee my team a spot at champs via wildcard. (which at that point it was pretty evident the 1st seed with 525 and 2502 was the powerhouse alliance that had the best shot at winning the regional)

Reason I decided to mention this is because after I declined on stage I'm pretty sure half of the people in the stands (including most of my own team members) were pretty confused as to what the heck I as doing and probably thought I was being irrational.. :o but I do think this is more of a unique reason that a team chose to decline another team's invite.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I think it's really hard to define what the "best" picks are. Especially since the goals for every team that picks is pretty different. One team might pick overall solid robots and just try to get as far as they can in eliminations whereas others might pick robots that are flaky but have the potential to take down whoever the strongest alliance is. Both of these approaches can backfire with either not having enough firepower or having bad matches early and getting knocked out in the quarters. Especially in games like Stronghold too, it may not be wise to pick the best scoring robot if there isn't enough synergy between the robots. For example, having 3 offensive robots scoring in the center of the outerworks is not ideal and are likely to get in the way. Conversely, the coordination might be good enough that this isn't even a problem. Overall, I think it's hard to really judge how strong picks actually are until the matches are actually played.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Everyone thought it was irrational at Central Valley 2014 when 254 picked 973, two places away from last place in qualifications. It really depends on what strategy you think is best.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

#SandBagFirstPick

Just glad we finally got to #SandBagFirstSeed this year for once...

(Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

One of the more irrational picks this year was when 973 picked 610 in the Carson Division. Don't get me wrong here. Scorpion is one of my favorite robots of all time, but when teams like 2590, 225, 1024, 1619, 5895, and 2122 are available picking 610 is seemingly irrational. Scorpion was pretty much shut down by 3538's killer defense, and in turn knocked 973, one of the best teams of 2016, out of the competition in the semifinals.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

All solid teams you listed, for sure.

However, 610 had the highest scoring average in our division by 7 points per our scouting data(greater than us, and all the teams in our division).

They were a great group to play with, and we'd definitely pick them again given the information available to us at the time.

in SF 2, all 3 teams missed in auto and performed on the lower end of our averages. This combined with a great performance from 2122, 3538 and 2052 cost us the bracket.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I also took a whack at reviewing alliance selection results from this year. The way I did it was to say that a pick made sense if there was some way in which to rank teams in which the one that they chose was in the top five of those still available. I found a ton of picks that I just could not account for.

I thought I'd see a couple alliances per event that was just doing pure OPR based picking or pure rank, but it turned out that for the events that I was looking at those weren't the case at all. And a lot of them didn't make any more sense after looking at scouting data. But I did find that there was a positive correlation between alliances that made picks that I could figure out and advancing further in the tournament.

It seemed that many captains picked so badly that they would have increased their odds of winning the tournament if they had just been picking based on rank. I can only conclude that are large number of picks are often made for reasons other than maximizing the odds of winning the tournament.

And I think there are sometimes good reasons for trying to do something other maximize odds of winning, like the one that jajabinx124 cited with the wildcard system. And similarly to the wildcard system, in the district system how far you advance in the tournament matters, not just winning or losing the event.

I'm not sure how common this sort of strategy is however. For example, during the PNW championship I knew exactly how many points my team had to get to give us a 100% chance of making worlds, but talking with some other teams in attendance it seemed like a lot of folks didn't really grasp the point system well enough to figure out how well they had to do to get invited to worlds, let alone what that would imply strategically.

One extra note I will give is that it was easier to predict selections as the level of play increased. For example, while some in the audience and even the MC found the alliance selection on Hopper surprising it really shouldn't have been a surprise to any of those involved.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

It all depends on your goals. Some teams want to make semis, some finals, some win. Some just want to make the playoffs and have a good time.

Additionally, although it may seem to us (especially in hindsight) that a team's picks didn't make sense, they may have a completely valid reason. Some teams have untapped potential (I've worked with a few of those cases), others have (or at least think they have) good chemistry, others still have complimentary strategies. It may be an incorrect assumption or decision, but it's what that team believed at the time.

How often do teams make the right pick? There are enough variables to consider that really teams should be just looking to make their best possible pick. At the end of the day, doesn't the "right" pick depend on the result? :)

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I'm not really a fan of the word "irrational" to describe picking behavior. There is too much subjectivity in picking and information for all participants for this to be the term I'd prefer. Most every alliance selection pick is maximizing the value of their pick as best they can, which is by definition rational. Many examples brought up in this thread are easily defendable picks (like 973 picking the strongest scorer in their division, or a team declining for a better chance at a wildcard).

The truly terrible picks are from teams that are unprepared, don't care enough, or don't have the ability to get the data they need to make a good pick. Usually a combination of factors here, as even teams without formal data can make decent picks sometimes, and even teams who don't care enough might pick a first pick with good information to work with.

The odd, suboptimal but workable picks happen for a variety of reasons. Different seeds have completely different incentives for their alliance picks. The number 1 seed at regionals / districts generally wants to eliminate variance as much as possible, picking a consistently strong first pick and a consistently functional second pick. The 2-4 seeds want teams that may be less consistent but have a high enough ceiling that with some luck they can outscore the top alliance. The bottom half of the draft either wants to go for a strategy where 3 decent scorers beats 2 great scorers, or they want to pick super high variance teams with high point ceilings and hope for some luck and preparation to help them through the eliminations.

I'll add more thoughts later if I get the time.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Some are at district champs and want to help certain teams get to CMP. :rolleyes:

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I wouldn't say any alliance selection decisions are irrational. Some are unprepared, some are based on faulty data, and some are based on different value propositions.

Perhaps the biggest thing to remember during alliance selection is that no one has perfect information. Every team representative down there is dealing with a state of asymmetrical information, in which every team is basing their decisions on different information. Sure, you can say that they all have access to the same information - match results, for example - but the process of collecting data and processing it into a usable pick list causes the data itself to undergo a different transformation for every team, and end up being viewed differently by every alliance representative. As a result, we end up with picks that may or may not agree with any given set of data or viewpoint.

Honestly, I find the uncertainty going into alliance selection rather exciting.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Another seemingly irrational alliance selection this year was when 1425 selected 1538 on Hopper. Don't get me wrong, 1538 is a good team, but they could have gone with a team like 971, 1323, 4334, or 4587. Anyone from 1425 want to chime in and tell me why you made the choice to go with the Cows? I'm not saying it's the wrong choice, I'm just curious.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

The craziest situation I ever witnessed for alliance selection was at the 2009 FLR where 610 was a 13th seed and turned down an invitation from 1765 who had their best weekend in their history that weekend. 610 was taking a huge gamble that the other alliances were going to pick one another and they'd settle in as an 8th seed but for that to happen they would have to hope that 340 would pick their little sister team 424 which they didn't and thus 610's day was done.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Hey did anyone watch Curie division picks? 100% upset brackets this year in 2016. Every alliance selection made me cringe until the 7th or 8th seed. (which hilariously enough were division finals)

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Yikes. That's crazy.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Curie was an anomaly this year. Some of the better-known teams like 3310, 1983, and 2848 weren't as strong at Curie as I thought they would be. However, they were good enough to be selected for eliminations, and the captains thought they could win with them. I didn't cringe, I was curious to hear the strategy behind making those selections.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

The only pick I have personally seen that would come anywhere near "irrational" for me was when one alliance picked the lowest seeded team, then the alliance immediately after that picked a much higher seeded team, where the two teams were the same 4 numbers mixed around. It may have been confusion, it may have been a valid pick, I don't know, but it seemed off to me.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the glass from this, we were the backup team for 5422 with 125 and 238. After making it into the finals (marking a District event where both finalist alliances had 4 teams, no less), we were told before one of the matches that scouting teams had had their eye on us, and the reason no one was told to pick us in the first place was because they forgot. No disrespect to the alliance captain or the team we ended up replacing, but not a fun position to be in.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

1425 selected 971 initially and 971 declined.

This sounds like an all too familiar situation.... It's a shame when all your auto's decide to miss.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I was unaware of that. Thanks.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Disclaimer: My team was the 4th pick for Curie alliance 4, which included 5803, 3310, 2168, and us (5940)

I don't think that 3310 was a irrational pick for our alliance. Yes, they hadn't performed great in quals, but if they were able to put in 8-9 high goals as they did at the regional level it would have been huge for us and would have, in my opinion, changed the outcome of eliminations in Curie. 3310's prowess in the high goal + 2168's ball-hoarding strategy from NE DCMP + 5803 breaching would have been an incredible combination. 3310 had everything working great going into the quarterfinal matches. Unfortunately, they suffered some unpredictable failures (such as a busted VRM in QF2-2) that decreased how many shots the could get in.

In short, if 3310 was working at full capacity I believe Curie might have been a different story.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Why do teams behave irrationally?
Like others have stated, there might be a rational reason that doesn't align with your pick preferences. Scouting data alone or OPR results won't necessarily build a good alliance. Alliance "chemistry" and relationships are important as well.

Has anyone noticed any patterns or common fallacies (other than scouting)?
I have no data to support this, but I assume the average FRC team does not have an elimination alliance plan going into the regional. It's difficult to scout if you don't know what you want. Even if you do have an elimination strategy, it is not easy to form a balanced alliance to fit your desired strategy or adjust to evolving game play.

This gets more complicated when you suspect a team would be better off as a role player, but continue to pursue their original game plan. Objective scouting data doesn't help you make a decision if they would be a good fit. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

How frequently do teams make the "right pick" or something close to it? Is there a way to quantify/measure this?
I don't know of a statistical way to measure it, nor do I believe it would have meaning. To improve our scouting, we usually compare our pick list to actual alliances to see if we missed something in our scouting results. There have been several surprise "right picks." We usually rely on a few objective data points plus subjective comments to make a pick list. Sometimes the more subjective elements were key but not understood at the time.

David

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I think there is a significant difference that needs to be clarified between irrational picks and bad picks. Team's make bad picks all of the time, but There was always at least some rationale behind any pick. That selection had to arrive on a picklist for some reason, whether or not it was a good reason. If a pick seems irrational, there might be a good reason behind it. If you have outstanding scouting you can find value in teams they themselves might not even know they had, let alone the general public.

I think the more important thing to look at was the result the pick achieved you and if they yielded the result you expected them to yield. Essentially was the pick a bad pick. If you select a high variance team with high scoring potential and it doesn't come through, but you were aware of that risk beforehand, the pick is not particularly bad despite possibly yielding a bad result. If you select one team for some reason while leaving another more valuable team on the table, and this selection ends up hurting your performance, it can be argued that you have made a bad pick.

Defining whether or not you think your pick was bad or not is important. Once you do, you can then look at the reasoning you had to pick that team and then find what flaws you may have had in that reasoning to yield the wrong result. Hopefully, you will be less likely to make that mistake in the future.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I believe the story goes that they thought they were ranked slightly higher than they actually were?

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

They may have been 12th.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I think there is a significant difference that needs to be clarified between irrational picks and bad picks. Team's make bad picks all of the time, but There was always at least some rationale behind any pick. That selection had to arrive on a picklist for some reason, whether or not it was a good reason. If a pick seems irrational, there might be a good reason behind it. If you have outstanding scouting you can find value in teams they themselves might not even know they had, let alone the general public.

I think the most important thing to look at is if they yielded a result you expected them to yield and this option was better than the other available teams. Essentially was the pick a bad pick. If you select a high variance team with high scoring potential and it doesn't come through, but you were aware of that risk beforehand, the pick is not particularly bad despite possibly ending with a bad result. If you select one team for some reason while leaving another more valuable team on the table, and this selection ends up hurting your potential performance, you have most likely made a bad pick.

Defining whether or not you think your pick was bad or not is important. Once you do, you can then look at the reasoning you had to pick that team and then find what flaws you may have had in that reasoning to yield the wrong result. If you find that you made a mistake, you will be less likely to make that same mistake in the future.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

As mentioned, 1425 was declined by 971. 1538 had shown flashes of brilliance, so to have a good chance at advancing 1425 need 1538 to become consistent at that level. Unfortunately for them, it didn't happen. This year the rest of the draft pretty much went to form in our division with no real surprises.

We were the beneficiaries in 2013, 2014 and 2015 of seemingly irrational picking at champs. We had gamed out the scenarios in 2013, and even anticipated the declinations. In the end, the other teams should have looked at where us and 1983 (#2 seed), and then a rookie in #3 and realized that the field was going to get scorched no matter what. In 2014, we had a heated debate about whether to pick 1114 or 971, and then no one picked 971. We were shocked. In both years we were very fortunate to have 872 and 1641 available for 2nd picks.

In 2015, it looked like we got 1671 due to oversight, but in fact the other alliances were making selections to match their overall alliance. Maybe they should have rethought their strategies, but what they did was rational.

In general our 2nd pick comes from between 10th and 16th on our pick list of 24, but we've gotten as high at 6th a couple of times and that's when we go "huh"?

We've seen some real problems at regionals, so I watch for inexperienced teams that might end up at alliance captains and help them with their draft lists if they need it. As SVR this year, I told 5700 that they were going to be an alliance captain--they had no clue. We found them another another more experienced team to develop their draft list. I don't want to see a team looking at the ranking board trying to figure out their next pick.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

One factor which has not yet been discussed but played a major role in our decision making at the 10000 Lakes regional this year is the role of seeding and the bracket.

We were pretty sure going into the regional that we didn't have much of a chance of winning against the great palindrome of 2052, 525, and 2502, so, as usual, our goal was to make it to the finals and get a wildcard, like we had done the 2 previous years,

We ended up ranking 5th. Another captain was selected ahead of us, so we moved up to the 4th spot, and then 2846, who moved up to third, selected us. Had our goal been to win the regional, we probably would have declined them and picked 2502 or 2823, who were better high goal shooters. However, we knew that if we declined them, we would end up as the captains of the 4th alliance, and we would have to play the dominant 1st alliance with 2052 and 525 before we reached the finals.

So we accepted and ended up making it to the finals and getting a wildcard.
2502 and 2823 paired up to form an alliance which had a much better chance of beating 2052 and 525 than ours did, but they had to play them in the semifinals because of their seed in the bracket, so I would still rather have been in our position.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Do you typically have a second list for 2nd pick? IE are you looking for different attributes that might elevate tem XYZ from say 20th as a first round to say 10-16th as a second round?

Als, are you talking Worlds or regionals.

Ususally the highest off my pick list that does not get picked up is around #20 or so.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Yes, we have two different sets of criteria, and they are actually more distinct at Regionals than at Champs. Typically we assume that our 2nd pick will add little on offense in teleop to the other two bots, so we focus on auto, the end game and defense. In 2014, we added inbounding and dropped the end game. 2015 was entirely about the auto routine (except we totally lucked out with 1671).

So for comparison purposes, we often have a half dozen robots who might be offensive robots that don't make our first pick cut list and we have another set of 2nd pick bots that we prefer instead. We don't want to confuse our team captain by sending her (well, him this coming year) out with 2 lists if possible.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

In games like Aim High, Overdrive, and Logomotion, I'd imagine that one would have even more diverse 2nd pick criteria, as those games required/strongly encouraged a 2+1 strategy (backbots, lap runners, and non-minibots respectively).

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I'd argue that games like this year have more diverse pick criteria for the third robot, because you may want that robot to fill different roles.

Maybe you'd pick a third scoring robot so long as that robot is capable of scoring x balls, but after that point, you'd prefer a defensive robot.

Maybe you need to shut down a certain threat at the regional you know you're going to face at some point (a full court shooter or low release OW shooter).

Whereas in '06, '08, and '11, the criteria for third robots was very specific- auto, defense, and endgame, and rarely did teams select a third scoring robot for the third robot on a higher alliance.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Yep seeding and the bracket can affect decisions as well. For a second I wondered why you guys accepted during alliance selections knowing 2502 and 2823 coulda been picked by you guys when I was on the field, but it was evident you guys didn't want to face us in the semis because of the seeding bracket.

Thank god 2015 didn't have a seeding bracket.. otherwise 2052, 4536, and 4198 would have had to play 525, 2502, and 3184 in the semi-finals.. :yikes:

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Needless to say scouting at champs was a little crazy for us with our <24 hour notice that we were needed there as a backup. We had two people in the stands for every match. Take everything a I say with a sleep deprivation fueled triple scouted grain of salt.

Our data showed that 610 just ahead of you at 3rd offense wise. Our Tator overlords 2122, and 225 we're 1 and 2. Let's ignore that though and look at numbers you didn't mention. Output and accuracy

Our data also showed that 225 scored an average of 4.2 high goals per match vs 610's 3.6. Both those teams hit about 75% The best high goaler on the field by my findings was 5895 though. 4,4 goals per match at 90% accuracy? yes please!

Sorry for the bad luck in auto. You guys had insane accuracy! On the other hand 610 missed 50% of their auto shots in quals according to our data, 2474 missed every single auto shot in quals, as did 319. The most accurate auto shooters in the field were 5895, you guys,525,225,3824, and somehow us, 1625(what did they put in our batteries man? Champs went way too well!)

The last thing to report from my findings, on the remark that you guys scored on the low end of your average. From my data, the sum of your quals averages was 135, low would be about 100, high would be about 210. Obviously your alliance had great synergy, and you did great in Quarters! 3538 played monster defense on 610, and it held your score down. Other teams had robots with faster lineups and better shooting position that may have eliminated this issue.

Listen, I'm not trying to rip apart your decisions or say anything bad about teams here. I'm trying to demonstrate how different analysis of this data could have shed light on these issues before they cost you the bracket. We all have 20/20 hindsight now, and It's time to look back as objectively as possible to see how we can all improve.

-All the best

P.S. Again, I completely understand how harsh this may come off, it's not my aim. I'm sorry.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I would like to build upon this with the NYC Regional.
By the end of the first day we won all but 2 matches, the first being us and another robot having technical problem.(which we found out was caused by a bad controller) The second match was something silly, besides the point. We went back to the hotel and examined out scouting data, and we looked over all the bots. The ones that were very similar we put in a maybe pile, while our biggest concerns were people who complimented us. We did lowbar and A defenses in under a second so we needed someone to take care of B and D.

Our top picks included 3419, 694 and 5016. We went up to 3419 with the intentions of creating one of the strongest alliances in our opinions, and they informed us they were watching us. Something that hurt our chances, was up until that point we were still trying to do vision tracking and not succeeding( 694 and 1796 were in the same boat). So we wanted to prove we could shoot high and relied on our vision, instead of mounting our flashlight like 694 had. So the scouting report shows we weren't very successful with high goals.

Once we saw 694 we had to pick them, and we were initially planning on grabbing a defense bot since we assumed 5016 would get grabbed. When we they were avaliable we changed our plan to full offensive attack. I know during alliance selections 694 was hesitant about this, but in the end it helped prevail.

That and that our scouting report had a feature that told us the most optimal defense to put against the opposing alliance based a grading of success.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

If you come again next year, you'll likely see the same kind of irrational picking. Apart from a few (emphasis on few) teams, NYC historically has one of the worst scouting collectives of any regional. It's really fun to observe year after year. I don't know if it's just me but there seems to be a huge disconnect between many (of course not all) NYC teams and the rest of FIRST. I sometimes wonder about how many of our teams even know of the concept of districts?

I don't mean to sidetrack the thread, I just enjoy a little quip on the NYC regional every once in a while.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

This is a very difficult thing to quantify and even notice, but it is something that 343 started to take note of on our scouting sheet this year. We made a row on our scouting sheet that rated the "quality of driving" from "professional" to "very drunk and lost" as much as this is subject to objectivity, making it a row on the sheet drew some attention to it and if a robot was marked "very drunk and lost" they were lowered in our rankings, if they were marked above about halfway on the scale (which was a 1-10 iirc) we didn't pay much attention to that row. I think that even though the an actual number may not really be that helpful, just having a place to give the driving quality a grade makes scouters notice it more. Kind of on the same note I plan to suggest a table to replace this row for the 2017 season that has speed on the x axis and accuracy on the y so we can get a better, more complete, though still objective, answer to what we wanted to know, which was, "how good are this team's drivers?"

As far as seemingly irrational decisions, most of them are due to poor scouting, certainly sometimes a team ranks high on luck and thus are picked or, I have been in this situation, where a team is picked because they have an old team number, so they must be good, right, but I have seen a few (very few) that were the result of very good scouting and those alliances, though they seem to be a very rag-tag bunch manage to do very well because they work well together and complement each other.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Oh I know, I've been to the NYC regional for 12,13,and now 16
2013, we were sure we wouldn't get picked and somehow we went to the semis, losing the first match due to field error and the second by a point with a weird alliance to say the least.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

My fault, I should've better paid attention to your signature. Out of curiosity, how did y'all do a 180 after rank 50 in NYC to rank 1 in LI so quickly? (I didn't watch SBPLI that year :P)

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I think a combination of things helped.
Modified the shooter a bit, but more being confident in our own strategy.
When we went into eliminations for NYC we used our strategies which worked well in our favor. We continued on the trend through SBPLI.
The last couple years, the teams I have been on haven't had the best robots for sure. But it's not always about having the best bot as it is playing your alliance effectively.

It helped true the next year as rookies we used our alliance to the most of its potential and finished second, while being a new team with no experience and being a defensive bot.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I'll be a bit blunt here- 5030 did not "finish second" at TVR 2014, you seeded second. And while it's true that playing defense was probably one of the things your robot did better, that was only because it completely lacked scoring capabilities.

I'd argue that your seeding second was more due to consistently being paired with teams like 1126, 3015, 2228, 1511, 3003, 870, 3044, 20, 4203, and 174 more than it was due to your tremendous strategic chops. Being unable to possess a ball in 2014 made most strategies other than defense difficult, and put elimination alliances at a major disadvantage - being unable to complete three assist cycles.

5030 the next two years was far better, and while your robots failed to look like beautiful powdercoated creations, they did have tremendous value when playing to your strengths.

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On the topic of irrational alliance selections, I'd argue that alliance selections are far more complicated than most people think, and that some teams might be looking at risk/reward, different strategies, and perhaps pick irrationally without thinking about how to actually win the event sometimes.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

On Newton at Worlds in 2015, I was leading my team's (2877) scouting. Everything went well, and we had a fairly comprehensive list for both landfill and feeder station robots for our driver to pick in alliance selection if we wound up an alliance captain. Sure enough, we did captain alliance, and while our first pick went smoothly (3467, a feeder station robot), our driver got mixed up on the second pick and chose 175, also a feeder station robot when the pick list should have had us picking 3539, a landfill robot. We also had a feeder station robot, so our final alliance wound up being three feeder station robots scrambling for two feeder stations, which quickly ended any chances for us to make it out of quarter finals.

Ever since, our scouting captain has been the one to make alliance selections.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

This situation is what whiteboards were made for. Been using one since the beginning of 2013 and never looked back. That way your entire scouting team can discuss and determine each pick, not just one person.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Sadly whiteboards don't always work as intended.

Looking at you 67 & 1310 at IRI in 2013 when a "3467" whiteboard turned into "3476" on the field. We still love you guys! :)

I agree that to prevent bad picks the best solution is to have a competent scout on the field who knows the capabilities of the robots attending, knows the strengths/weaknesses of your machine, and knows what robot types you need to pick to execute your elimination strategy(s). Like Chris said a good second option is to have a good representative on the field with some information and a "decision team" which includes a group of people who've been going over the data and watching the teams.

This year we always sent our captain out with a list of 24-26 robots ranked in the order we'd pick them as well as using a whiteboard with cellphones as a backup. To have a full list prepared for our captain meant scouting ended at the close of day one qualifications. This gave us plenty of time to make our picklists without staying up late the night before and we used the final qualification rounds to observe the machines we had in our top 24 to determine final rank. Sometimes machines were taken off the list or others added on seeing them improve on the second day.

It also helps not to overthink your second pick by coming up with one or two must have items for your third pick and consider "bonus" items that would be nice to have but not necessary especially if they haven't been consistent. This year we saw that most alliances we would end up on or first round selections we would make left us needing a third robot to cross a more specialized defense if we wanted to get a full 30 point autonomous. This meant our first sort of third picks was only machines who had demonstrated they could cross the Ramparts in autonomous with moderate consistency as our data also included attempts. With that list in mind we added in if they could cross the CDF or Portcullis in teleop as it wasn't our strongest defenses to cross and typically wouldn't be the same for most of our potential partners. Then we added in balls scored in teleop in the low goals as another item to add to our list.

That was typically how we picked a third robot we felt would mesh well with our alliance and received three amazing robots: 6161, 6153, 6969, as well as our Boston backup 5563 who was high up on our third pick choices.

This is a little long but just some simple advice on how teams can make better choices while sharing some methods that I've found that help take some work out of making picklists.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Close numbered teams make for confusion sometimes. I remember on Galileo last year when our team, 1619, was selected the guy from 1690 got up as well, thinking that was the number they had said.

One another note, I'd imagine at Minnesota Regionals that teams are very careful during alliance selection when they announce they're picking 2502 or 2052.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

We're pretty sure we won the team spirit award one year because the judges mixed us up.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I've heard that 973 looks like 175.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Something I've been considering is a large print scoreboard (something akin to this but cheaper) to remove ambiguity and to make the print large and consistently readable.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Yeah alliance selection reps at the 10,000 lakes regional have to say it slowly when saying either 2502 or 2052. It's quite funny sometimes because you can notice the rep saying it slower than inviting any other team because they want to make it clear which team they are picking.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Yeah, it's a bit tricky.
https://youtu.be/st90uThWrlM?t=9100