Quote:
Originally Posted by Rhelik
2. Now for the strategic advantage of declaring a dead ball. At the New York Tech Valley Regional I watched a number of games where dead balls were declared. On two occasions a few of us noted that a team declared their ball dead once a defense had them cornered (not pinned). They could not escape, so they quickly declared the ball dead. This allowed their team to reintroduce a new ball and thus a chance of continued scoring. Obviously this is a strategic advantage. Allowing this to happen more than once would essentially just shut down the defensive side of the game. Any team could declare their ball dead, let a new one come onto the field and then toss their ball from the field to free up their robot to receive the new live ball.
I didn't notice anything in the rules that doesn't allow this action either.
-Bernie
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You should check and see how it was actually scored. The rules do state that if a ball is declared dead and later becomes loose on the field (as would happen in your scenario), the dead ball MUST be put through a goal (for no points) before the new ball can be scored. This should make it strategically disadvantageous in almost every scenario to declare a dead ball like that.
But it does bring up a good point...does the referee have to recognized the dead ball card WHENEVER it is presented, regardless of if a ball is actually stuck or not?
Furthermore, a situation I have seen a lot is when an alliance gets the opponents ball stuck in their robot accidentally. If the red robot had a blue ball land in their robot, and red robot doesn't have a working mechanism and cannot get the ball out, which alliance is supposed to declare the dead ball? Blue's ball is "dead", but it's in the red robot.
Now if red's robot DOES work, but they're confused and don't know if they should eject it or not, and the ball is declared dead, it is a strategic advantage for red to the eject blue's ball. Blue has a new ball on the field already, but now they're forced to go score the dead ball that just got put back into play by the red robot. Oops.
I've seen this happen at least 3 times so far in matches that I've watched. The result is generally absolute chaos and pandemonium, and usually results in a replay because nobody has clear direction on what to do.
Red already got the tech foul for accidental posession, so they have no incentive to eject it until the ball is either declared dead, or they think they'll be assessed a 2nd tech foul for prolonged violation. If you've already got the tech foul, might as well delay your opponents a bit. If the ball was declared dead immediately, you get to play havoc with their strategy, and maybe even prevent them from getting to score the new ball!
Disclaimer: The above strategy is not what I would consider GP, but it is a valid play that is not addressed by the current rules.
Note that this situation (at least the intentional part) is remedied by making it a regular foul (or no foul) for incidental posession of an opponent's ball if you get rid of it immediately (eg within 5 seconds or so). That encourages teams to get rid of the ball ASAP, because they haven't gotten the tech foul yet but it is imminent.