[Brandon Holley]

Definitely a very level game, and I think a lot of it has to do with its similarity to 2007. Many teams improved upon the 2007 versions of themselves, while intelligent younger teams looked to 2007 videos and information (behind the design) to develop a robot based on some knowledge.

The way I see it playing out is the early weeks will come down to minibots. Alliances which have 2 very quick and effective minibots will be VERY difficult to take down. As the weeks go on and teams emulate succesful minibots and also figure out how to make their deployments faster/more reliable, we will see a slight shift in focus to tube scoring.

The key difference for me between 2007 and now is not scoring tubes as quickly as you can (I mean it is, but it's not just a grab and place fest). It's ensuring each tube you score is in a position to score the maximum amount of points. We saw instances in the scrimmage (small sample size warning) where teams scored a significant amount more tubes than their opponents, but did it on a different row (ie: middle and bottom as opposed to top). The scores would be close, but teams who concentrated on the top row only and took the extra time to ensure the scores were solid, tended to come out on top.

I imagine week 1 will be similar in strategy to this. Quality tubes winning out over quantity of tubes, and minibots ruling all.

-Brando