[Kevin Leonard]

It was interesting sitting at home and watching different alliance compositions compete.
Dallas was the battle of the superpowers, with 148-987 and 118-624. These two alliances mostly competed as individuals, with each robot doing their own thing. However, sometimes in eliminations, 987 would grab a stack from Robin while Batman was out to get a quick score toward the end. 3rd picks only really came in to play when they needed to come in clutch and keep up average scores.
These two alliances also showed that a less crowded field can be better, often putting up high scores despite having only 1 or 2 robots on the field.

At Hatboro-Horsham, you also had the top two robots working alone, but their third picks were tremendously important, with the third robots of the finalist alliances working to grab containers from the step during teleop. The winning alliance had major help from 5407, who had an interesting mechanism for grabbing containers.

At Waterbury, the number one seed and eventual champion alliance worked as separate systems for the most part, but the other finalist alliance was much more interesting. The alliance of 237-558-4557 worked as an amazing team. The alliance hinged on having all the recycling containers due to 237's auto. 237 and 4557 would make short stacks of 2-3, and 558 would work to add noodles to cans and cap the stacks. Most of their successful matches would end with 4-6 stacks of 1-3 that were capped with RC's. They took the winners to 3 with this fascinating strategy.

The first seed and finalists at Indianapolis had similar teamwork, with 5188 and 1024 working to make stacks, and then 1024 would cap all of them.

Most successful robots and high seeds took primarily from the feeder station, but a few of the competitive machines, like 987, 118, and 230 all took to the landfill, and a few alliances making short stacks also took from the landfill.

Stacks of 5 and 6 seemed interchangeable at most events, but the shorter the stacks being made, the more important litter became to success.

Matches in eliminations at most events were sometimes decided by which alliance more effectively threw litter.

Lastly, most people's crazy score predictions were way off, and a very competitive machine is one that can make one full stack per match.
High scores at most regionals were around 100.