1st Seeds Win

[JABot67]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

*polite cough* I hate to break it to you, but 2007 GLR is a better example of luck playing into the finals than anything else. 57 got bitten by the banebot curse Thursday and Friday and didn't have working ramps till Saturday morning. At which point the worked flawlessly for the rest of the regional. 1114 took notice and we were a stellar darkhorse 3rd pick for defnese and ramps. Ask 118 if we could play defense at Lone Star. Anyways, we were flustered at having such a huge chance at a win and a bit disorganized. We ended up playing semi 1 with a nearly dead battery, which left us a twitching mess. Diagnosing that took me a lot longer than it should have, cause who would figure that? So we finally figured it out and by then they wanted us on the field. We put on a battery strap and sent the robot out without a rear bumper because we didn't want to "waste" a timeout. Turned out the bumper was doing most of the battery securing, and when someone rammed us, physics sent the battery flying out the back of the robot and we were dead a second match. I count that as one the single most embarrassing moment of my FIRST career, because we honestly would have owned that regional if I'd just asked for that timeout or monitored battery charging a little more closely.

On the other hand, man is that an instructive story to tell at workshops.

Okay, you are right. 57 was a beast at defense that year, and we might have been able to win GLR had your robot been working correctly in the semis. However, this just proves how important defense was that year (we couldn't win without you), and how lucky we were to get a great defense and ramp bot as the 16th pick, although it didn't work out in the end.

[martin417]

From the events I have watched, the rankings at the end of the quals this year more closely represent the actual ability of the teams to play the game. In the past, this has not been the case. I remember in 2009 at palmetto, late in the quals, there was one team that had not yet placed a robot on the field (or even been inspected) and were ranked as the #1 seed. They later fell a few places in the rankings, but were still highly ranked at the end of quals. This year, better robots and teams tended to be highly ranked, and teams that were not as effective were ranked lower.

That might partially be due to the rule change that will not allow teams that are not inspected to get the points for a win by the alliance.

[nikeairmancurry]

No ranking system is perfect... Espeically while first plays 3 vs 3... There will always be robots riding coat tails of other robots... If the game was 1 v 1, you'd have a better rankings are the end of a event, but this would a very bad idea to do...

[Alan Anderson]

The title of this thread is 1st Seeds Win. That's very nearly a tautology. The underlying fact is that the team fielding the winningest robot tends to be the #1 seed.

[Racer26]

Its happened at both Canadian regionals since at least 2006.

Some combination of 1503, 1114, 2056, and 2609 have been #1 seed, and #1 seed's first pick at every Waterloo and GTR since 2006. *Except 2006 GTR

2006 WAT: 1114 seeds #1, picks 1503, champions
2006 GTR: I cant quite tell exactly because I can't find the Elimination results on usfirst.org, according to Karthik, 1114 seeded #1, picked 1503 It doesn't make sense that 229 and 703 could have seeded higher and not broken up an 1114/1503 alliance. I'm assuming the missing results is due to the odd way eliminations was handled at this SUPER regional. There were 12 alliance captains. - 1114/1503 champions.
2007 WAT: 1114 seeds #1, picks 2056, champions
2007 GTR: 2056 seeds #1 (highest rookie seed), picks 1114, champions
2008 WAT: 2056 seeds #1, picks 1114, champions
2008 GTR: 1114 seeds #1, picks 2056, champions
2009 WAT: 2609 seeds #1, picks 2056, champions
2009 GTR: 2056 seeds #1, picks 1114, champions
2010 WAT: 1114 seeds #1, picks 2056, champions
2010 GTR: 1114 seeds #1, picks 2056, champions
2011 WAT: 1114 seeds #1, picks 2056, champions

[Jim Zondag]

It is pretty hard to win if you are not in the top 2. The past 4 years of combined results are in the attached chart. More than 80% of the time, the winners are one of the top 2 alliances.
As Al said above, this is because the best teams seed highest. This means that the seeding system works properly.

[TRWSHSHLX]

There are a few components to upsets in regionals. Since the qualifying rounds schedule is totally random sometimes a good team might be put against another good team but with better alliance partner and lose those matches. That'd cause a good team to be ranked lower than they really should.
Secondly there are always the problems of debugging. Like some posts mentioned, some teams do not have all the bugs worked out until the elimination rounds. Those teams are usually overlooked but if picked, it can be a huge factor.
And lastly, the ranking system that FIRST uses to rank the teams are purely based on offense. The GDC encourages offense and an offensive robot or a team that's always with an offensive robot (not likely) will get really high ranked. However, there's no mention of defense in the ranking system what so ever. If a robot is a mostly defensive robot, it will most likely rank relatively low and sometimes they're overlooked but can be another major game changer because in elimination rounds, it's the point difference between alliances that matters, not as much as you can score, like in qualifying rounds.
All in all, a successful alliance will have both offense and defense. And the alliance that can execute always wins.

[nikeairmancurry]

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

It is pretty hard to win if you are not in the top 2. The past 4 years of combined results are in the attached chart. More than 80% of the time, the winners are one of the top 2 alliances.
As Al said above, this is because the best teams seed highest. This means that the seeding system works properly.

Thats why you one of the best Jim, I always love your charts... Perfect way, to show the spread the winners of events...

[Kett Captains]

An upset just happened this weekend at the Michigan State Championship. The 8th seeded alliance, (74, 548, 3098), beat the 1st seeded alliance, (217, 469, 201). Seems like teams definately overlook performance on saturdays before elimination.

[DonRotolo]

Well, the #1 seed at Virginia also didn't win this weekend.

[mwilbur]

Originally Posted by DonRotolo

Well, the #1 seed at Virginia also didn't win this weekend.

The #1 seed at Virginia didn't win this weekend, but the BEST alliance DID. Kudos to team 25 for making great selections. We knew that we were going to have to be 10 points up going into minibot deployment with your super fast minibot on the field, but we didn't manage to pull it off. A last minute pneumatics leak on our robot right before the start of the second finals match didn't help, but it still would have been too close for comfort had that not happened. The competition ranking system is good for a ballpark idea as to which teams are doing the best, but the scouting part of it is critical to put the best alliance together.

[TEE]

Originally Posted by Kett Captains

An upset just happened this weekend at the Michigan State Championship. The 8th seeded alliance, (74, 548, 3098), beat the 1st seeded alliance, (217, 469, 201). Seems like teams definately overlook performance on saturdays before elimination.

Goes to show the intensity of MSC...

For those who didn't watch, 217, 469 and 201 would have won the second match if they got a minibot up the pole for 3rd place, and in the third match, 3098 stopped 469 from deploying (that was the part of strategy 217, 469 and 201 missed, or simply didn't execute: defending against minibots), and 469 had our alliance's fastest minibot. The tube-scoring was really close in all three matches.

On a different note, I personally was really surprised that 548 wasn't chosen sooner... I expected them to be picked by one of the first 3 or 4 alliances.

[XaulZan11]

Originally Posted by TEE

The tube-scoring was really close in all three matches.

Tube scoring was close in most of the elimination matches, which is not that surprising. My biggest complaint with the game is how being an amazing tube scoring alliance is not that big of an advantage over a good tube scoring alliance. If you score 6 logos while the opponent gets 4, you only get 12 more points. The decreasing marginal returns to tube scoring makes the game a little too easy strategically; no longer are you having the tough decision to place one more tube or go to endgame, like you did in 2007 (which also had spoilers).

This was really evident in the elminations at MSC. Since both alliances could consistently and easily score 3-4 logos, most matches came down to autonomous and minibots. If you had a significant disadvantage in auto (like 3-1), you needed to get first and second place in the minibot race to make up those 24 points. 469 just picked a really bad time to miss their auto and minibot in the final 2 quarterfinal matches (I believe they were 12/13 on each before missing both in back to back matches). In my opinion, that was the deciding factor. When the top pick cannot do the two most important things, the 8 seed has a chance.

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by mwilbur

The competition ranking system is good for a ballpark idea as to which teams are doing the best, but the scouting part of it is critical to put the best alliance together.

Bingo: That's the point of the thread. Perhaps the ranking system is not a perfect indicator (and never will be), but as you said, it's not too far off.

[jckwik]

The ranking system, when a win-loss record, does not do justice to a teams actual ability, and occasionally will be very wrong. For example, take 3173.

Luck during qualification rounds does matter, and we found that out the hard way at Boston this weekend. Out of the 10 qualification matches we were the only team to score on our alliance 7 out of 10 times! Despite that fact we were still 6-4, but not high enough to be in the top eight, despite having one of the best robots at the regional (statistics-wise). The ranking system, however, doesn't do justice when a very good team gets poor alliance partners in qualification, and that's the one downside to a purely W-L system.

However, don't take this the wrong way and say that I want something like last years system, either. Last year was extremely wrong, as we somehow got the third seed at FLR with an absolutely terrible bot that could do nothing but score goals (but needed backup).

So the ranking system is not perfect, but I disagree that it's not too far off. This year, at least, the system should have been different.