One last note of 2010 potential interest...
Here are the percentages of teams who attended an extra event each week.
Week 1 of course no one had ever played before so that's 0% (pre-ship scrimmages excluded).
Most Michigan teams appeared to play their first event in the beginning two weekends.
Prior-experienced teams were not evenly distribution across competitions, so Minnesota's double blockbusters for the whole state in week 5 didn't see as high a percentage of pre-tempered robots and drive teams as other regional rich areas. Also, in week 5 a large block of teams were at the Michigan State Championship where everyone had played before - that skews the results a bit.
Code:
Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5
Teams playing 548 468 396 556 493
Regionals 0% 6.7% 17.8% 35.5% 42.1%
Districts 0% 31.3% 96.3% 100% 100%
Combined 0% 10.9% 33.8% 40.1% 49.7%
At the Championship the overall team average was 1.69 prior events under each team's belt. Only 144 of the 344 teams had only played at one Regional before meeting in Atlanta.
Of course, one of the Einstein Champions (177) was one of those single Regional teams.
The winning alliance had an average of 2.0 prior events.
The runners-up had a 2.67 event average.
So, you don't have to go to a lot of events, but at least two seems to make a difference.