[nobrakes8]

In qualifing I'd say anything goes depending on who your alliance is. For us, our alliances just kept screwing up and haveing bad matches and getting penalties so to be honest after 2 or 3 losses in a row if we weren't matched with who our scouts considered one of the 5 best teams, we were out for ourselves because we had to look impressive for the top seeds to notice us. If we were paired with one of those 5 teams we worked out a plan because we felt with any other of those 5 teams on our list combined with our team would win a match against almost anybody and we'd tell the other team on our alliance not to get penalties. At UTC the 5 or 6 best teams all week were teams 20, 69, 126, 173, 1071, and 230 . Teams 1071 and 230 had bad luck with alliances and were ranked down in the 20-30 range, but going out and playing their own game got them both in the top 2 seeds.

When we got to elimination our alliance was awsome to work with. Team 69 didn't boss team 126 or us around telling us what to do. They let us decide what our robot was capible of doing. The first 2 rounds of elimination all three teams went out to score because if we didn't get defended against we could score 60-70pts easily (best out of 3 matches with consistent 60-70 points will beat a #7 seed). If one of our teams got defended we felt any two teams on our alliance could beat any 2 teams on the other alliance.

When we got to the finals we knew team 69 would at least match or outscore team 20, we felt team 126 would out score team 173 (nothing against those teams just teams 69 and 126 our team had confidence in), but we felt team 230 would tie or beat our team, and we knew we could keep them scoreless and make sure it was a tie and make the match 2 vs 2, which is what we did.