Quote:
Originally Posted by Koko Ed
I attended GTR often the past few years and many of the teams are funded through a grant similar to what JC Pennys does in the states. These team are lucky if they build something functional much less competitive. There's not much depth there and with American teams not going to Canada much anymore is it really any surprise that 1114 and 2056 dominate so easily? There's only a handful of teams that can even hope to challenge them.
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I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the depth in Canada, especially at the non-mississauga events:
188, 610, 781, 1241, 1503, 2852, and 907 are all excellent teams that consistently put up very competitive robots, and those are just the ones that competed this week. GTR-east was the 2nd-highest scoring regional this week. The thing with Canada is that we are blessed with exactly two 99.9th percentile teams in our midst, which consistently and rationally wallop the many 95th percentile teams that have grown here. We had a ton of teams in CMP divisional eliminations last year, and 1503 and 781 made it to einstein. Interesting theory I just thought of, that would be hard to test: if there were one elite team or three elite teams, I don't think things would be so predictable year after year.
Here's a chart that should give you an idea for a small Canadian regional vs a small American regional. Notice that GTR actually has a larger 2nd tier of teams in the 15-25 area of OPR (which are, in order, 610, 2852, 907, 188, 4334, and 1241). This chart appears to somewhat contradict my assertions of 1114/2056's unbeatability as compared to the folks that lead Waterford in OPR (the 2 'best' robots at Waterford were more better than their competition than 1114/2056 were at GTR), but la la la I can't hear me.