Losing on Purpose to Gain Advantage

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

The fact of the matter is that the only reason to throw a game is to gain advantage at the expense of someone else. While one tries to win games for the same reason, trying to win games doesn't bring up issues of pride, honor, and integrity.

Once again, I turn to my previous comments. I'll even define it further to include my own team.

In our second qualification match of Philadelphia, we were with two teams who hoped to be able to play offense and against some capable scoring machines. My team had struggled through practice day on Thursday and didn't exactly come out swinging in our first qualification match, only scoring one tube. Our alliance was probably best off if we dedicated our match to trying to stop 56.
Instead, we played offense. We wanted to see if our robot could execute the functions it was designed for. We wanted to build driver confidence and hope to build off of that match for later in the competition. We were hoping to get to work out some more kinks in our machine by seeing the functions executed on the real field.
1712 only scored one tube and our alliance lost the match 81-15.

By not executing the function that gave us the best chance to win, you could say that we "threw" the match. We didn't do it in order to gain advantage at the expense of another team.

Were we wrong?