[dtengineering]

Well, the first question would be what, exactly is FAIR?

It is a pretty nebulous concept. If what you are asking is "does competing at multiple regionals give teams a competitive advantage?" then the answer is clearly yes.

Statistically it has been shown (thank you to those who clarified the stats on the previous page) that "all else being equal" you have a greater chance of winning a regional (or an award of any kind, for that matter) the more regionals you attend. But "all else" is not equal.

At Seattle this year we had a huge competitive advantage over teams that had not played the game before, simply because our drive team had three days to practice in Portland, our programmers had three days to refine code, and our build team had a chance to analyze the game video, identify a problem with our "ball knocking" mechanism, and replace it with a more effective mechanism for Seattle.

My advice to teams doing only one regional is to try and find a first or second weekend event if they are concerned about competing on an "equal" footing.

As for fair... well, we all compete under the same set of rules. So that part is fair. Some teams... for whatever reasons... have access to more resources than others. If we are going to start asking if it is fair for different groups of people to have access to different resources, then that is a question much, much larger than FRC!

Jason