[Andy Grady]

A few key points about the competition from someone who witnessed it first hand....

1. Penalties are KILLERS. In the craziness of everything you have to pay close attention to what you are doing on the field. Teams were losing 10 points at a time on a match by match basis.

2. I'm thinking I will be shocked if I see a single robot pick up and score a vision tetra this year during autonomous mode. Teams were having a hard time scoring vision tetras in manual mode, let lone autonomously.

3. I dont know how much the webcast showed of the finals, but one of the big reasons why the alliance of 38, 177, and 88 won was because their opponent did not spread the field. What happened in the final match was that a bunch of robots became so involved in a defensive struggle on one side of the field, that no one was paying attention to the silently scoring team 88. The focus was on the two teams who could do damage fast (230 and 177) and the simple but effective pick and place robot 88, did the damage in the end.

4. I think I underestimated the 3 robots in the home zone bonus. As it turns out it helped out quite a bit to the winning alliance.

5. Careful about getting tangled in the auto loader. I saw it get ripped off the ground multiple times, which caused teams problems.

6. Teams were not paying attention in many of the matches. So many matches could have been won had teams just realized that if they capped over a certain team instead of going to an empty goal, it could cause a huuuuge point swing.

7. It is VERY easy to descore points accidentally. In other words...if you aren't sure if you can cap over a stack...it might not be worth the risk.

8. Scrimmage Standouts...

230 - Absolutely amazing robot. They could drop a stack of 3 tetras on a goal at one time. In one round, they made 4 deliveries...3 of which had 3 tetras.

177 - Could hold multiple tetras on a conveyor like arm and they scored extremely fast.

1124 - Very simple, but probably the fastest and highest single tetra pick and place robot at the competition. I dont know if they missed a goal they were aiming at all day.

88 - Very underestimated pick and place robot. If you lost sight of them and left them alone for a couple of moments, next thing you would know is that they were closing out a "triple play".