[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

I'm not asserting that these are mutually exclusive skills.

Quite the contrary, they tend to go hand-in-hand. I can tell you from personal experience that poker is pervasive through a large portion of the chess community; I doubt this is purely coincidence.

Poker is nice because, in addition to valuing computational ability (expected values of hands given the situation), it traditionally emphasizes the ability to interpret your opponents' behaviour and incorporates a high degree of uncertainty in individual hands (which can be won or lost independently of your ability to master the game).

Interestingly, winning poker players complain about variance, probably more than anything else. Probably falsely so; it's the variance that keeps the fish playing and allows them to make money, but it is simultaneously the single most frustrating part of the game. It no longer contributes to "fun" once you reach a certain skill level - at best, it's a necessary evil.

It's that uncertainty that allows a novice to have fun playing against an expert, because there's a plausible chance that they'll win any given hand, even when the odds are against them.

This is certainly true, and is the likely the sole reason poker is such a profitable game.

I could discuss this at length, but I fear this is going off-topic. At any rate, I do not think the introduction of randomness into FRC championships is the proper motivation for allowing teams with less-than-impressive robots to attend nationals; at most, it's a secondary effect. What is important is the experience afforded to those teams, the and the very real beneficial effects they see as a result of it. This must be weighed against the logistics of the competition itself, and the result is, as others have mentioned, essentially an optimization problem. I am of the opinion that the balance ought to be in favor of including more teams rather than optimal competitiveness; this seems to best match both my experience at championships and my conception of what the entire purpose of FIRST is.